Political participation is falling and citizen alienation and cynicism is increasing. In response to evidence of this decline in democracy, a growing number of philosophers and political practitioners have advocated a more deliberative form of democracy. This volume brings together the first work of this kind by leading scholars in the US and Europe. The results of this work raise questions regarding the conception and practice of deliberative democracy. To address these questions, four of the leading philosophers of deliberative democracy contribute their commentaries on the groundbreaking empirical research.

At the close of the twentieth century, political protests have erupted throughout the world. While the collapse of communism was certainly one of the most spectacular protest- related events, smaller protests have become ubiquitous. In Los Angeles, labor activists campaign against commercial real estate owners to unionize janitors, mainly Latina immigrants. In the People's Republic of China, peasants revolt against tax collectors. Amazonian Indians protest public and economic policies that destroy their culture and rainforest habitat.

This book analyzes the reciprocal impact of cultural beliefs, sociopolitical structures, and individual behaviors on protests throughout the world. Why do individuals participate in protest activities? How do cultural beliefs, personal attitudes, and subjective perception influence the potential protester? Addressing the issue of agency in protest, the authors also examine why protestors enlist different tactics to achieve their goals. Why are some protests violent and others nonviolent? When and why do activists conclude that it is better to accommodate than confront? Finally, and crucially, what are the consequences of protest movements?

This book discusses the issues and strategies which have characterized the environmental campaigns mounted against recent controversial infrastructure projects in France. Focusing on the changing nature of policymaking in the Fifth Republic as a key factor in the organization of each protest, Graeme Hayes asks why some protests succeed where others fail, and how we should understand the relationship between states and social movements in general.

On May 25, 2000 Israeli occupation forces withdrew from South Lebanon after 22 years of occupation. The Lebanese media's role in achieving liberation over this period is significant, through campaigns conducted to unify the Lebanese people against their foreign occupier and in support of the Lebanese resistance in South Lebanon. This book investigates the culture and performance of Lebanese journalism in this setting. "Channels of Resistance in Lebanon" is a story about journalism told by a journalist who is also using tools of scholarship and research to narrate her story and the story of her fellow journalists. Zahera Harb is also presenting here an alternative interpretation of propaganda under conditions of foreign occupation and the struggle against that occupation. She identifies the characteristics of "liberation propaganda" through the coverage and experience of the two Lebanese TV stations Tele Liban and Al Manar within the historical, cultural, organizational and religious contexts in which they operated, and how these elements shaped their professional practice and their news values.

Bearing Witness While Black tells the story of this century's most powerful Black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists who documented it. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters in dozens of US cities-using little more than the device in their pockets. Their urgent dispatches from the frontlines spurred a global debate on excessive police force, which claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children at disproportionate rates. This groundbreaking book reveals how the perfect storm of smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered Black activists to create their own news outlets, which continued a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. Bearing Witness While Black is the first book of its kind to identify three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people-slavery, lynching, and police brutality-and explain how storytellers during each period documented its atrocities through journalism. What results is a stunning genealogy-of how the slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the Abolitionist movement; how the black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and Civil Rights movements; and how the smartphones of today have powered the anti-police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, Allissa V. Richardson argues, is formidable and forever evolving. Richardson's own activism, as an award-winning pioneer of smartphone journalism, informs this text. Weaving in personal accounts of her teaching in the US and Africa, and of her own brushes with police brutality, Richardson shares how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices, to speak up from the margins. It is from this vantage point, as participant-observer, that she urges us not to become numb to the tragic imagery that African Americans have documented. Instead, Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies, and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.

No American state is more antistatist than Alaska. And no state takes in more federal money per capita, which accounts for a full third of Alaska’s economy. This seeming paradox underlies the story Stephen Haycox tells in Battleground Alaska, a history of the fraught dynamic between development and environmental regulation in a state aptly dubbed “The Last Frontier.” Examining inconvenient truths, the book investigates the genesis and persistence of the oft-heard claim that Congress has trampled Alaska’s sovereignty with its management of the state’s pristine wilderness. At the same time it debunks the myth of an inviolable Alaska statehood compact at the center of this claim. Unique, isolated, and remote, Alaska’s economy depends as much on absentee corporate exploitation of its natural resources, particularly oil, as it does on federal spending. This dependency forces Alaskans to endorse any economic development in the state, putting them in conflict with restrictive environmental constraint. Battleground Alaska reveals how Alaskans’ abiding resentment of federal regulation and control has exacerbated the tensions and political sparring between these camps— and how Alaska’s leaders have exploited this antistatist sentiment to promote their ownagendas, specifically the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Haycox builds his history andcritique around four now classic environmental battles in modern Alaska: the establishment of the ANWR is the 1950s; the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s; the passage of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act in 1980; and the struggle that culminated in the Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990. What emerges is a complex tale, with no clear-cut villains and heroes, that explains why Alaskans as a collective almost always opt for development, even as they profess their genuine love for the beauty and bounty of their state’s environment. Yet even as it exposes the potential folly of this practice, Haycox’s work reminds environmentalists that all wilderness is inhabited, and that human life depends—as it always has—on the exploitation of the earth’s resources.

In 1845 Frederick Engels wrote that 'Manchester is the seat of the most powerful unions, the central point of Chartism, the place which numbers the most Socialists'. There have been many local studies of the Chartist struggle for democratic political reform, but there is no major study of the movement in the Manchester-Salford conurbation, its most important provincial centre. This book brings an innovative approach to an exploration of aspects of the Chartist experience in the 'shock city' of the industrial revolution.

The American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born played a major role in legal matters pertaining to deportation, naturalization, and immigration. This study provides the first thorough examination of its work, from the Depression decade of the 1930s, when the committee defended prominent labor activists such as Harry Bridges, through the war years and into the 1950s, when it served as a legal bulwark for the Communist Party. In 1955 the ACPFB itself became a defendant-as the pilot case before the Subversive Activities Control Board. Cautious and rational, the Board reached the correct conclusion that the organization was a Communist Party front.

Indeed, in its fidelity to American communism, the ACPFB pursued a political agenda that often violated its stated mandate. It not only failed to protect Japanese-Americans during World War II, but it actually supported their internment. During the closing years of the war, it attempted to influence ethnic communities for the benefit of the Communist Party. False agendas, undemocratic internal controls, and duplicity drove liberal sympathizers away from the ACPFB by the early 1950s, when the pressures of the second Red Scare threatened both it and its host. The story of the ACPFB ultimately sheds new light on the nature of American communism itself-demonstrating anew its nature as a political movement in pursuit of power.

British Communism and the Politics of Race explores the role that the Communist Party of Great Britain played within the anti-racism movement in Britain from the 1940s to the 1980s. As one of the first organisations to undertake serious anti-colonial and anti-racist activism within the British labour movement, the CPGB was a pioneering force that campaigned against racial discrimination, popular imperialism and fascist violence in British society. The book examines the balancing act that the Communist Party negotiated in its anti-racist work, between making appeals to the labour movement to get involved in the fight against racism and working with Britain's ethnic minority communities, who often felt let down by the trade unions and the Labour Party. Transitioning from a class-based outlook to an embrace of the new social movements of the 1960s-70s, the CPGB played an important role in the anti-racist struggle, but by the 1980s, it was eclipsed by more radical and diverse activist organisations.

This book examines the structure and ideology of all the main leftist groups in Iran. It considers their role in the Revolution, and analyses their relations with Khomeini and his colleagues. It also explains why the majority of the leftist organisations had defected from the Islamic regime by the summer of 1981. A second important theme of the book is the way in which the Soviet Union responded to the treatment of the Left by the Islamic government. Based on extensive analysis of original source material in Farsi and other languages and numerous interviews with leftist leaders and participants, the book provides a detailed portrait of the Left in contemporary Iran.

Could we ever see Vladimir Putin in the dock for his crimes? What about a Western ally like Benjamin Netanyahu? Putting a country's leader on trial once seemed unimaginable. But as Steve Crawshaw describes in Prosecuting the Powerful - a blend of powerful eyewitness reporting and gripping history - the possibilities of justice have been transformed.

Crawshaw includes recent stories from the front lines of justice in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine and at The Hague, as well as his earlier encounters with war criminals like Slobodan Milošević. He tells the stories of those who have demanded protection for civilians and accountability for war criminals - from the Swiss businessman who is the reason why we have the Geneva Conventions today and the prosecutors at Nuremberg to the Syrian police photographer who helped put one of Bashar al-Assad's torturers behind bars. He also follows the extraordinary unfolding story of two of the world's most powerful and well-connected leaders currently under indictment at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

From Gaza to Bucha and beyond, survivors seek justice for the crimes committed against them. But for that to happen, governments must finally abandon their double standards and have the courage to support prosecutions of those who commit atrocities, whether opponents or allies.

For all the current darkness, this is a historic opportunity. The scales of justice can and must be balanced. Now is the moment.

This book is concerned with the contexts, nature and quality of the participation of young people in European democratic life. The authors understand democracy broadly as both institutional politics and civic cultures, and a wide range of methods are used to analyse and assess youth participation and attitudes.

This book offers an innovative contribution to the literature on digital activism and cyberconflicts. Analysing sociopolitical and ethnoreligious conflicts within an African-centred context, the author uses Nigeria as a lens to understand the digital and organisational aspects of digital media uses in the Occupy Nigeria movement protest, the Boko Haram conflict and The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) conflict. Timely, in a period of intense conflict across the globe, the author employs an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the Cyberconflict Framework to examine conflicts emerging in computer-mediated environments. Examining the implications for socio-political and economic reform and change, the cases explored provide a snapshot of the emerging digital culture of conflict. The book contributes to existing knowledge by bridging the gap in the literature on digital activism and conflict as a field of study.

Lawrence R. Alschuler uses the ideas of Albert Memmi, Paulo Freire, and Jungian psychology to explain changes in the political consciousness of the oppressed. His analysis of the autobiographies of four Native people, from Guatemala and Canada, reveals how they attained "liberated consciousness" and healed their psychic wounds, inflicted by violence, exploitation, and discrimination. Their lessons and Alschuler's proposed public policies may be applicable to the oppressed in ethnically divided societies everywhere.

This study focuses primarily on the nature of direct action in relation to contemporary movements, and considers the role of direct action methods in past campaigns for constitutional and social rights. Boycotts, sit-ins, obstructions, civil disobedience and other unconstitutional forms of protest are examined to see whether they necessarily lead to violence. The political conditions which encourage violence and the effects of various type of violent action are also discussed. The theoretical issues raised by direct action in a parliamentary system are also discussed.

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Given the recent focus on the challenges to representative democracy, and the search for new institutions and procedures that can help to channel increasing participation, this book offers empirical insights on alternative conceptions of democracy and the actors that promote them.

With a focus on the conceptions and practices of democracy within contemporary social movements in Europe, this volume contributes to the debate on the different dimensions of democracy, especially in its participative and deliberative forms. On the basis of an in-depth analysis of European Social Forums, gathering thousands of social movement organizations and tens of thousands of activists from all Europe, the book explores the transnational dimension of democracy and addresses a relevant, and little analyzed aspect of Europeanization: the Europeanization of social movements. From a methodological point of view, the research innovates by covering a group of individuals traditionally neglected in previous studies: social movement activists. Qualitative and quantitative methods are employed to research individual motivations as well as environmental dynamics. The various chapters combine analysis of the individuals attitudes and behavior with that of the organizational characteristics, procedures and practices of democracy.

Providing a cross-national comparison on the global justice movement, the theoretical challenges of the new wave of protest and offering rich empirical data on contemporary activism, this book will appeal to students and scholars of comparative politics, sociology, political sociology, social movement studies, as well as transnational relations.

This book examines the political mobilization of 'Israeli-Arabs, ' Palestinian citizens of Israel. By examining the events, context, and effects of Land Day 1976 and Habbat October 2000, and combining them with original research and interviews, the author presents fresh insights into Palestinian political mobilization against Israeli injustices

Informal Justice in Divided Societies examines the ways in which paramilitary and vigilante activity are linked with controlling community crime in both Northern Ireland and South Africa. Drawing upon original research, Colin Knox and Rachel Monaghan analyze the agents of informal justice, its victims, and why communities endorse this form of retribution. They conclude the book with a wider debate of the abuse of human rights suffered by many victims of community crime and tentatively highlight future policy implications.

This book brings multiple sites of lusophony together, and illuminates how mobile configurations of people, technologies and hip-hop creativities are best understood as compositions of ubiquitous identities, dispersed communities and syncretic networks. Significantly, the chapters highlight identity narratives that clash with the city, yet which play an important part in its reconstruction and resignification. Occupying public space, creative expressions of young people provide critiques of the social order, mainstream media and criminalization of fringe neighbourhoods. In this way, hip-hop has become a political instrument of an `I’ that is excluded and marginalized. Its growth has led to a global movement incorporating local forms such as traditional musical arrangements and native languages. Its messages educate youths about citizenship, addressing their reality of racial discrimination and oppression. At the same time, hip-hop continues to innovate at the street level, constantly rejecting and challenging a consumer culture that seeks to co-opt it. The pillars of hip-hop – rapping, DJing, break-dancing, graffiti, and now political organization – are considered across three continents, in a collection that seeks to provide more nuanced characterizations of contemporary relationships between lusophone countries allowing dialogue about inter/intra, colonial/racial contradictions and their impact on power structures. Lusophone Hip-hop offers fascinatingly diverse perspectives on rich source material little-known to readers more familiar with hip-hop in African American contexts.

In this new edition of her accessible autoethnography of fat feminist activism in the West, Charlotte Cooper revisits and discusses her activism in the context of recent shifts in the movement. The new preface explores the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on fat people and fat activism and how Black Lives Matter is inspiring new forms of activism. Cooper issues a call to action in Fat Studies and offers alternatives to current public health approaches to Diabetes. What is fat activism and why is it important? To answer this question, Charlotte Cooper presents an expansive grassroots study that traces the forty-year history of international fat activism and grounds its actions in their proper historical and geographical contexts. She details fat activist methods, analyses existing literature in the field, challenges long-held assumptions that uphold systemic fatphobia, and makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory and anti-racism are to the lifeblood of the movement. She also considers fat activism's proxy concerns, including body image, body positivity, the obesity epidemic and fat stigma. Combining rigorous scholarship with personal, accessible writing, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is a rare insider's view of fat people speaking about their lives and politics on their own terms. This is the book you have been waiting for.