Who controls what we eat? This book reveals how dominant corporations, from the supermarket to the seed industry, exert control over contemporary food systems. It analyzes the strategies these firms are using to reshape society in order to further increase their power, particularly in terms of their bearing upon the more vulnerable sections of society, such as recent immigrants, ethnic minorities and those of lower socioeconomic status. Yet this study also shows that these trends are not inevitable. Opposed by numerous efforts, from microbreweries to seed saving networks, it explores how opposition to this has encouraged even the most powerful firms to make small but positive changes. This revised edition has been updated to reflect recent developments in the food system, as well as the broad political economic forces that shape them. It also examines the rapidly changing technologies, such as Big Data and automation, which have the potential to reinforce, as well as to challenge, the power of the largest firms.

From the Zapatistas to Seattle and beyond, the "anti-globalization movement" has been grabbing headlines and capturing political imaginations worldwide. This book explores the interface between diverse resistances to neo-liberal globalization and a range of critical theories within international relations.
"Critical Theories, International Relations and 'the Anti-Globalization Movement' "provides a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the "anti-globalization" struggles taking place in many different parts of the world. It shows the complexity and diversity of these movements and illustrates this with a number of detailed empirical studies of local, national and transnational resistance in the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa. The authors introduce a variety of competing theoretical perspectives from international political economy, social movement theory, globalization studies feminism and postmodernism, explaining how activism has influenced theory and how theory can help activists to modify their tactics.
The global protest movement has made a huge impact on world politics and this book is essential reading for students, scholars and activists with an interest in this area.

As a young boy, Raja Shehadeh was entranced by a forbidden Israeli postage stamp in his uncle's album, intrigued by tales of a green land beyond the border.He couldn't have known then what Israel would come to mean to him, or to foresee the future occupation of his home in Palestine. Later, as a young lawyer, he worked to halt land seizures and towards peace and justice in the region. During this time, he made close friends with several young Jewish Israelis, including fellow thinker and searcher Henry. But as life became increasingly unbearable under in the Palestinian territories, it was impossible to escape politics or the past, and even the strongest friendships and hopes were put to the test.

Brave, intelligent and deeply controversial, in this book award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the devastating effect of occupation on even the most intimate aspects of life. Looking back over decades of political turmoil, he traces the impact on the fragile bonds of friendship across the Israel-Palestine border, and asks whether those considered bitter enemies can come together to forge a common future.

This book tells the fascinating story of the reemergence of the American political left over the last quarter century in the form of the new Progressive Movement. Born out of Liberalism's crushing defeats at the hands of conservative strategists of the Reagan/Bush era, this new movement has cleverly reverse engineered the conservative's institutional networking strategy to plan and finance its resurgence. Progressive strategists have constructed an elaborate network of foundations, advocacy groups, and other institutions to advance their agenda. But where the conservatives relied on affirmative corporate support to help power their movement, the Progressive Left has used an anti-corporate strategy whose purpose is three-fold: 1. To reclaim the moral high ground of politics by challenging corporate power and influence. 2. To gain effective control over "other people's money" (e.g., pension funds, mutual funds) and use it to press for changes in corporate social policies. 3. To leverage this influence over corporate decision-making to change the direction of American politics and public policy. Biz War extends the argument of Manheim's 2001 book, The Death of A Thousand Cuts, by showing how anti-corporate campaigns have evolved from economically-oriented labor actions to ideological and programmatic political struggles. It details how the strategies and tactics crafted by organized labor are being employed with increasing effect by the political left. The book will be of interest to students of contemporary American politics, strategic communication, political movements, and business management. Likewise it will help corporate executives and financial analysts understand more fully the proxy wars and other attacks against their companies.

It is sometimes assumed that fantasizing stands in contrast to activism. This book, however, argues that fantasy plays a central role in social movements. Drawing on psychoanalysis and psychosocial theories, Fantasy and Social Movements examines the relationships between fantasy, reality, action, the unconscious and the collective.

Leon and his twin Norman were born in August 1929, the youngest of four children born to Mary and Mark Levy, immigrants from Lithuania. His father died when Leon was six; to heroic degree, his mother carried the family – financially, practically and emotionally – in her widowhood. Leon was an intensely bookish boy but left school aged sixteen to help makes ends meet through a series of jobs. Deeply affected by the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust, Leon was radicalised in the Hashomer Hatza’ir, a left-wing Zionist youth movement. He was seventeen when he joined the Communist Party and became a committed young activist.

In 1953, at the age of twenty-four, Leon became a full-time trade unionist. ‘It was a defining moment in my life story,’ he writes. ‘It gave practical form to my political beliefs; it also determined the shape and scope of my life. It transpired that I would spend the next six decades and more working in trade unions, industrial relations and mediation.’

A comrade in the trade union movement nicknamed Leon, TsabaTsaba – which means “here, there and everywhere”. Anyone who reads Leon’s account of his years as a full-time unionist will agree that the soubriquet was well earned. (Alongside trade union work, Leon was also committed to the remarkable Discussion Club, which he co-founded and ran throughout the 1950s; he was also secretary of the South African Peace Council from 1951 to 1961.) In the mid-1950s, he was part of a small group of progressive trade unionists who pushed for the formation of the first non-racial trade union federation in South Africa. These aspirations were realised in March 1955 with the launch of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). Later that year Leon was elected president and remained in that position for nine years. SACTU linked day-to-day concerns of workers with support for national liberation and the abolition of apartheid and was one of the five organisations which formed the Congress Alliance. As SACTU leader, Leon served on the committee that directed the activities of the Alliance; he was present at Kliptown when the Freedom Charter was adopted – and as SACTU president was one of the five original signatories of the Freedom Charter.

Political activism of this order came at a high price. Leon Levy was served with banning orders and arrested several times; he was Accused No 4 of the 156 people arrested and charged with treason, and from November 1958 was one of the final 30 (and with Helen Joseph one of only two whites) who faced charges until the trial was finally dismissed in March 1961. He was detained for five months during the 1960 State of Emergency. In May 1963 he was the first person to be detained under the notorious General Laws Amendment Act, known as the 90-day Act. Unable to continue his work he chose to go into exile in the United Kingdom. There, he studied politics, economics and industrial relations at Oxford – and then applied what he had learned in a series of positions in industrial relations. After 1994, he was determined to make the skills and knowledge that he had acquired available to a democratic South Africa – and he and his wife Lorna returned to the country of their birth in 1997. In a remarkable final phase of his career, Leon took office shortly after his 70th birthday as a full-time commissioner for the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration – and spent the next 19 years in this capacity.

This is the most wide-ranging study ever published of political violence and the punishment of Irish political offenders from 1848 to the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. Those who chose violence to advance their Irish nationalist beliefs ranged from gentlemen revolutionaries to those who openly embraced terrorism or even full-scale guerilla war.
Seán McConville provides a comprehensive survey of Irish revolutionary struggle, matching chapters on punishment of offenders with descriptions and analysis of their campaigns. Government's response to political violence was determined by a number of factors, including not only the nature of the offences but also interest and support from the United States and Australia, as well as current objectives of Irish policy.

In Communes and Workers' Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below, Dario Azzellini offers an account of the Bolivarian Revolution from below. While authors on Venezuela commonly concentrate on former president Hugo Chavez and government politics, this book shows how workers, peasants and the poor in urban communities engage in building 21st century socialism through popular movements, communal councils, communes and fighting for workers' control. In a relationship of cooperation and conflict with the state, social transformation is approached on 'two tracks', from below and from above. Azzellini's fascinating account stands out because of the extensive empirical examples and original voices from movements, communal councils, communes and workers.

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022 A Financial Times Politics Book of the Year 2021 A fascinating account of Russia's famous dissident and the politics he embodies. Who is Alexei Navalny? Poisoned in August 2020 and transported to Germany for treatment, the politician returned to Russia in January 2021 in the full glare of the world media. His immediate detention at passport control set the stage for an explosive showdown with Vladimir Putin. But Navalny means very different things to different people. To some, he is a democratic hero. To others, he is betraying the Motherland. To others still, he is a dangerous nationalist. This book explores the many dimensions of Navalny's political life, from his pioneering anti-corruption investigations to his ideas and leadership of a political movement. It also looks at how his activities and the Kremlin's strategies have shaped one another. Navalny makes sense of this divisive character, revealing the contradictions of a man who is the second most important political figure in Russia-even when behind bars. In order to understand modern Russia, you need to understand Alexei Navalny. This updated version includes new material following Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Series Information:
Women's Source Library

First published in 1991. The volume reprints excerpts from six radical feminist journals of this crucial decade:The Lily, the Genius of Liberty, the Pioneer and Women's Advocate, the Una, The Woman's advocate and The Sybil

This volume collects together writings of Teresa Billington-Greig, suffragette, activist and political theorist. One of the first organizers for the Women's Social and Political Union, she was a founder-member of the Women's Freedom League. She was also the first suffragette to be sent to Holloway Gaol. This volume provides insights into this exceptional woman's lifelong efforts in the women's movement.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mao Tse-tung and Genghis Khan are among the 200 well-known historical figures included in this volume. Examples of other lesser-known, yet important, individuals covered in this work are: Adolphus Gustavas, Swedish empire creator; Hatshepsut, queen of ancient Egyptian dynasty; and Jean Jaures, French socialist leader and pacifist. Each synopsis provides information on each individual's enduring impact on the common understanding of fundamental themes of human existence.

This Open Access book explores the role of morality in social movements. Morality has always been central to social movements whether it be in the form of the moral foundations of movement claims, politics and ideologies, the values motivating participation, the new moral principles envisioned and practiced among movement participants, or the overall struggle over society's moral values that movements engage in. This is evident in movements emerging from recent interlinked crises: the crisis of human rights, the climate crisis, and the developing crisis of democracy. In analyzing these current events through a variety of theoretical, methodological, and empirical lenses, this book brings morality to the forefront of the discussion, allowing for a rethinking of its role. The book is divided into five parts. The first part introduces and explores the central concept of the book, outlining the dominant existing approaches to morality and ethics in the extant movement and civil society literature. The following three parts investigate morality in relation to topics and movements that are either prominent to contemporary politics or salient to the question of morality. In these empirically informed parts, the authors apply a diverse selection of methods spanning fieldwork, historiography, traditional and novel statistical analytical methods, and big data analysis to a diverse selection of data. Topics discussed include refugee solidarity movements, male privilege and anti-feminism movement, environmental and climate justice movements, and religious activism. The fifth and closing part of the book focuses on the more abstract theoretical question of the relationship between morality and ethics and activist practices and points to future research agendas. This book will be of general interest to students, scholars and academics within the disciplines of political sociology, -science and -anthropology and of particular interest to academics in the subfields of social movement and civil society studies.

Environmental movements are at a crossroads. Increasingly institutionalized almost everywhere in the industrially developed societies, established environmental organizations are confronted by new radical groups and uninstitutionalized local protesters. Despite growing evidence of the universality of environmental problems and of economic and cultural globalization, the development of a truly global environmental movement is at best tentative. The dilemmas which confront environmental organizations are no less apparent at the global than at national levels. This volume is a collection of 1990s research on environmental movements in western and southern Europe, the US and the global arena.

Environmental movements are at a crossroads. Increasingly institutionalized almost everywhere in the industrially developed societies, established environmental organizations are confronted by new radical groups and uninstitutionalized local protesters. Despite growing evidence of the universality of environmental problems and of economic and cultural globalization, the development of a truly global environmental movement is at best tentative. The dilemmas which confront environmental organizations are no less apparent at the global than at national levels. This volume is a collection of 1990s research on environmental movements in western and southern Europe, the US and the global arena.

The culmination of decades of work on hip hop culture and activism, Neva Again weaves together the many varied and rich voices of the dynamic South African hip hop scene.

The contributors present a powerful reflection of the potential of youth art, culture, music, language, and identities to shape both politics and world views.

Non-violent movements, under figures like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, led to some of the great social changes of the 20th century, and some argue it offers solutions for this century's problems. This book explores non-violence from its roots in diverse religious and philosophical traditions to its role in bringing social and political change today.

Why has the military not intervened in the post-communist political arena since the advent of democracy in Russia? Do lowered levels of professionalism actually lead to higher levels of intervention? Through a systematic exploration of professionalism within the Russian military, this study addresses these important questions. Moran suggests that by examining the notion of subjective fragmentation, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin utilized a highly effective, yet potentially troublesome, form of civil-military control. Findings that overall levels of praetorian behavior on the part of the Russian military have declined in this period, in spite of declining levels of military professionalism, challenge one of the most basic theoretical assumptions of civil-military relations. Since 1991, post-communist Russia has exhibited all of the classic indicators of a society ripe for a military takeover. Not only have institutional interests of the Russian officer corps been gravely threatened, but surveys conducted within it have found a general lack of sympathy for democratic values. Furthermore, Russia's weak civil society is accompanied by high levels of corruption, rampant crime, secessionist movements, a significant terrorist threat, and a general disrespect for the rule of law. Even further augmenting the chances of a military coup d'^D'etat, public opinion polls of civilians have found that the military is one of the most trusted institutions in the country—so trusted, in fact, that many Russian citizens have expressed support for a military takeover. Moran explains why the military has not capitalized on these factors.

Frank M. Robinson (1926-2014) accomplished a great deal in his long life, working in magazine publishing, including a stint for Playboy, and writing science fiction novels such as The Power, The Dark Beyond the Stars, and thrillers such as The Glass Inferno (filmed as The Towering Inferno). Robinson also passionately engaged in politics, fighting for gay rights, and most famously writing speeches for his good friend Harvey Milk in San Francisco. This deeply personal autobiography explains the life of one gay man over eight decades in America and contains personal photos. By turns witty, charming, and poignant, this memoir grants insights into Robinson's work not just as a journalist and writer, but as a gay man navigating the often perilous social landscape of twentieth-century life in the United States. The bedrock sincerity and painful honesty with which he describes this life makes Not So Good a Gay Man compelling reading.

Formed in 1839, the Anti-Corn Law League was one of the most important campaigns to introduce the ideas of economic liberalism into mainstream political discourse in Britain. Seeking the abolition of a tariff barrier that buttressed the economic and political power of the land-owning aristocracy, the League presented itself as the vanguard of the emerging industrial middle class in Victorian Britain. Its aspiration for free trade played a crucial role in defining the agenda of 19th-century liberalism and shaping the modern British state. The League's faith in the free market has had resonances in the debates debates over public policy in Britain during recent years, and it also set the pattern for individuals and groups which have stood outside the Establishment articulating alternative visions of society. This study of the Anti-Corn Law League makes use of recent methodological developments in social history.

Northern Ireland stands out as having enacted historical positive change in abortion law, from an almost complete ban in the 20th century to the decriminalization achieved in 2019. This book documents and analyzes how this historical change was achieved. Each chapter is written by those directly involved in the long-fought battle to change abortion law - including those with personal experience of seeking abortions, activists, academics, legal experts, political actors, NGOs, and volunteers. In this, the first of two volumes, contributions focus on the legislative landscape of the process with particular emphasis on the importance of 'feminist legal work' - law-making influenced by the women most likely to be impacted by it.