People use online social forums for all sorts of reasons, including political conversations, regardless of the site's main purpose. But what leads some of these people to take their online political activity into the offline world of activism?
In Expect Us, Jessica L. Beyer looks at political consciousness and action in four communities, each born out of chaotic online social spaces that millions of individuals enter, spend time in, and exit moment by moment: Anonymous (4chan), IGN, World of Warcraft, and The Pirate Bay. None of these sites began as places for political organization per se, but visitors to each have used them as places for political engagement to one degree or another. Beyer explains the puzzling emergence of political engagement in these disparate social spaces and offers reasons for their varied capacity to generate political activism. Her comparative ethnography of these four online communities demonstrates that the technological organization of space itself has a strong role in determining the possibility of political mobilization. Overall, she shows that political mobilization rises when a site provides high levels of anonymity, low levels of formal regulation, and minimal access to small-group interaction. Furthermore, her findings reveal that young people are more politically involved than much of the civic engagement literature suggests.
Expect Us offers surprising and compelling insights for anyone interested in understanding which factors and online environments lead to the greatest amount of impact offline.

The powerful potential of digital media to engage citizens in political actions has now crossed our news screens many times. But scholarly focus has tended to be on "networked," anti-institutional forms of collective action, to the neglect of advocacy and service organizations. This book investigates the changing fortunes of the citizen-civil society relationship by exploring how social changes and innovations in communication technology are transforming the information expectations and preferences of many citizens, especially young citizens. In doing so, it is the first work to bring together theories of civic identity change with research on civic organizations. Specifically, it argues that a shift in "information styles" may help to explain the disjuncture felt by many young people when it comes to institutional participation and politics. The book theorizes two paradigms of information style: a dutiful style, which was rooted in the society, communication system and citizen norms of the modern era, and an actualizing style, which constitutes the set of information practices and expectations of the young citizens of late modernity for whom interactive digital media are the norm. Hypothesizing that civil society institutions have difficulty adapting to the norms and practices of the actualizing information style, two empirical studies apply the dutiful/actualizing framework to innovative content analyses of organizations' online communications-on their websites, and through Facebook. Results demonstrate that with intriguing exceptions, most major civil society organizations use digital media more in line with dutiful information norms than actualizing ones: they tend to broadcast strategic messages to an audience of receivers, rather than encouraging participation or exchange among an active set of participants. The book concludes with a discussion of the tensions inherent in bureaucratic organizations trying to adapt to an actualizing information style, and recommendations for how they may more successfully do so.

For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this pioneering book, Jeffrey Edward Green makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one. Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say. The Eyes of the People examines democracy from the perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people most of the time. In approaching democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, Green rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten "plebiscitarian" alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers-including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others-Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control. The Eyes of the People is at once a sweeping overview of the state of democratic theory and a call to rethink the meaning of democracy within the sociological and technological conditions of the twenty-first century. In addition to political scientists and students of democracy, the book likely will be of interest to political journalists, theorists of visual culture, and anyone in search of political principles that acknowledge, rather than repress, the pathologies of political life in contemporary mass society.

Greta Thunberg. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Anita Sarkeesian. Emma Gonzalez. When women are vocal about political and social issues, too-often they are flogged with attacks via social networking sites, comment sections, discussion boards, email, and direct message. Rather than targeting their ideas, the abuse targets their identities, pummeling them with rape threats, attacks on their appearance and presumed sexual behavior, and a cacophony of misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, and homophobic stereotypes and epithets. Like street harassment and sexual harassment in the workplace, digital harassment rejects women's implicit claims to be taken seriously as interlocutors, colleagues, and peers. Sarah Sobieraj shows that this online abuse is more than interpersonal bullying-it is a visceral response to the threat of equality in digital conversations and arenas that men would prefer to control. Thus identity-based attacks are particularly severe for those women who are seen as most out of line, such as those from racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups or who work in domains dominated by men, such as gaming, technology, politics, and sports. Feminists and women who don't conform to traditional gender norms are also frequently targeted. Drawing on interviews with over fifty women who have been on the receiving end of identity-based abuse online, Credible Threat explains why all of us should be concerned about the hostile climate women navigate online. This toxicity comes with economic, professional, and psychological costs for those targeted, but it also exacts societal-level costs that are rarely recognized: it erodes our civil liberties, diminishes our public discourse, thins the knowledge available to inform policy and electoral decision-making, and teaches all women that activism and public service are unappealing, high-risk endeavors to be avoided. Sobieraj traces these underexplored effects, showing that when identity-based attacks succeed in constraining women's use of digital publics, there are democratic consequences that cannot be ignored.

The diffusion and rapid evolution of new communication technologies has reshaped media and politics. But who are the new power players? Written by a leading scholar in the field, The Hybrid Media System is a sweeping and compelling new theory of how political communication now works. Politics is increasingly defined by organizations, groups, and individuals who are best able to blend older and newer media logics, in what Andrew Chadwick terms a hybrid system. Power is wielded by those who create, tap, and steer information flows to suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, and disable the power of others, across and between a range of older and newer media. Chadwick examines news making in all of its contemporary "professional" and "amateur" forms, parties and election campaigns, activist movements, and government communication. He presents compelling illustrations of the hybrid media system in flow, from American presidential campaigns to WikiLeaks, from live prime ministerial debates to hotly-contested political scandals, from the daily practices of journalists, campaign workers, and bloggers to the struggles of new activist organizations. This wide-ranging book maps the emerging balance of power between older and newer media technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms. Political communication has entered a new era. This book reveals how the clash of older and newer media logics causes chaos and disintegration but also surprising new patterns of order and integration.

Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Rush Limbaugh Show, National Public Radio - a list of available political media sources could continue without any apparent end. This book investigates how people navigate these choices. It asks whether people are using media sources that express political views matching their own, a behavior known as partisan selective exposure. By looking at newspaper, cable news, news magazine, talk radio, and political website use, this book offers the most comprehensive look to-date at the extent to which partisanship influences our media selections. Using data from numerous surveys and experiments, the results provide broad evidence about the connection between partisanship and news choices. This book also examines who seeks out likeminded media and why they do it. Perceptions of partisan biases in the media vary - sources that seem quite biased to some don't seem so biased to others. These perceptual differences provide insight into why some people select politically likeminded media - a phenomenon that is democratically consequential. On one hand, citizens may become increasingly divided from using media that coheres with their political beliefs. In this way, partisan selective exposure may result in a more fragmented and polarized public. On the other hand, partisan selective exposure may encourage participation and understanding. Likeminded partisan information may inspire citizens to participate in politics and help them to organize their political thinking. But, ultimately, the partisan use of niche news has some troubling effects. It is vital that we think carefully about the implications both for the conduct of media research and, more broadly, for the progress of democracy.

A critical look at how Bill Gates uses his wealth and power through the Gates Foundation to advance his own agenda and erode democratic institutions in the process.

From greedy to generous, from cold to kind-hearted, from rogue to hero, Bill Gates is an extraordinarily complex public figure. Yet over the last decade, we've reduced him to a flat caricature - a sweater-wearing, avuncular, well-meaning billionaire, who is adamantly giving away all of his money through the Gates Foundation in order to improve the lives of others.

This simplistic portrait perilously ignores the political influence that Gates has acquired through his charitable work, and the controversial ways through which he utilises it. The charity internally sets a policy agenda for how to fix the world - based on one man's worldview - then imposes this vision onto the developing world by funding groups that align with it.

Combining rich storytelling and ground-breaking reporting, The Bill Gates Problem offers readers a provocative and timely counter-narrative about one of the world's most famous figures. But more than that, this book speaks to a vital political question around economic inequality and the erosion of democratic institutions - why should the super-rich be able to transform their wealth into political power, and just how far can they go?

Derived from the word "to propagate," the idea and practice of propaganda concerns nothing less than the ways in which human beings communicate, particularly with respect to the creation and widespread dissemination of attitudes, images, and beliefs. Much larger than its pejorative connotations suggest, propaganda can more neutrally be understood as a central means of organizing and shaping thought and perception, a practice that has been a pervasive feature of the twentieth century and that touches on many fields. It has been seen as both a positive and negative force, although abuses under the Third Reich and during the Cold War have caused the term to stand in, most recently, as a synonym for untruth and brazen manipulation. Propaganda analysis of the 1950s to 1989 too often took the form of empirical studies about the efficacy of specific methods, with larger questions about the purposes and patterns of mass persuasion remaining unanswered. In the present moment where globalization and transnationality are arguably as important as older nation forms, when media enjoy near ubiquity throughout the globe, when various fundamentalisms are ascendant, and when debates rage about neoliberalism, it is urgent that we have an up-to-date resource that considers propaganda as a force of culture writ large. The handbook will include twenty-two essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, divided into three sections. In addition to dealing with the thorny question of definition, the handbook will take up an expansive set of assumptions and a full range of approaches that move propaganda beyond political campaigns and warfare to examine a wide array of cultural contexts and practices.

Forgiveness Redefined is Candice Mama’s honest and healing story. It tells how she found ways to deal with the death of her father, Glenack Masilo Mama, and to forgive the notorious apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock, the man responsible for his brutal murder. We follow Candice’s journey of discovering how her father died, how this affected her and how she battled the demons of depression before the age of sixteen. But most importantly, we follow her journey towards beating the odds and rising above her heartbreaks.

Candice Mama is today still under the age of 30, but has been named as one of Vogue Paris’ most inspiring women alongside glittering names such as Michelle Obama. She has taken backstage selfies with music crooner Seal and travels all over the world to talk about her journey. This bubbly, inspiring young author tells how she shed some of the worst layers of grief and became an inspiration for others. We learn about her perplexing, unconventional childhood, her search for identity, and the beautiful bond she formed, posthumously, with a father she never had the opportunity to get to know in person. She also tells, in her own words, about the life-changing encounter between her family and her father’s killer.

Candice tenderly opens up about the result of the trauma of her father’s death on her entire family, and meeting her mother for the first time at the age of four. She tells about the confusing, yet fascinating, dynamics that later unfolded as she discovered pieces of herself, rediscovered relationships with her own family and came to forgiveness and understanding.

This book serves as inspiration for other young – and older – people to look at their own stories through different lenses. Candice’s experiences are not unique, and she offers healing thoughts to others who suffered similar trauma by sharing the details of her own story. Forgiveness Redefined is a touching, personal story by a young woman who learned too early about pain, loss and rejection – but who also learned how to overcome those burdens and live joyfully.

Protracted occupation has become a rare phenomenon in the 21st century. One notable exception is Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which began over four decades ago after the Six-Day War in 1967. While many studies have examined the effects of occupation on the occupied society, which bears most of the burdens of occupation, this book directs its attention to the occupiers. The effects of occupation on the occupying society are not always easily observed, and are therefore difficult to study. Yet through their analysis, the authors of this volume show how occupation has detrimental effects on the occupiers. The effects of occupation do not stop in the occupied territories, but penetrate deeply into the fabric of the occupying society. The Impacts of Lasting Occupation examines the effects that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories have had on Israeli society. The consequences of occupation are evident in all aspects of Israeli life, including its political, social, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological spheres. Occupation has shaped Israel's national identity as a whole, in addition to the day-to-day lives of Israeli citizens. Daniel Bar-Tal and Izhak Schnell have brought together a wide range of academic experts to show how occupation has led to the deterioration of democracy and moral codes, threatened personal security, and limited economic growth in Israel.

How pro-Israel lobbying groups influence the Middle East policies of Britain, the US and others.

In 1896, a Jewish state was a pipe dream. Today the overwhelming majority of Jews identify as Zionists. How did this happen?

Ilan Pappe unveils how over a century of aggressive lobbying changed the map of the Middle East. Pro-Israel lobbies convinced British and American policymakers to condone Israel’s flagrant breaches of international law, grant Israel unprecedented military aid and deny Palestinians rights. Anyone who questioned unconditional support for Israel, even in the mildest terms, became the target of relentless smear campaigns.

Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic shows us how an unassailable consensus was built – and how it might be dismantled.

’n Baie lang brief aan my dogter is Marita van der Vyver, een van Afrikaans se mees geliefde skrywers, se ontroerende jeugmemoir. Dit is 'n speurtog deur die skrywer se beginjare, maar dit is ook ’n liefdesbrief aan ’n dogter en ’n taal en ’n land. En bowenal is dit ’n ma se poging om sin te maak van hierdie onverskillige en wrede wêreld waarin sy haar nou begewe.

The Super-Afrikaners, originally published in 1978, scandalised a nation as it exposed the secret workings of the Broederbond. Out of print for over three decades, this edition with an introduction by Max du Preez is available for a new generation.

Formed in Johannesburg in 1918 by a group of young Afrikaners disillusioned by their role as dispossessed people in their own country, the first triumph of this remarkable organisation was the fact that it was largely responsible for welding together dissident factions within Afrikanerdom and thereby ensuring the accession of the National Party to power in 1948. This highly organised clique of Super-Afrikaners, by sophisticated political intrigue, waged a remarkable campaign to harness political, social and economic forces in South Africa to its cause … and succeeded.

Political journalists Hans Strydom and Ivor Wilkins traced, at great personal risk, its development from the earliest days to the present. The book includes the most comprehensive list of Broeders ever published.

Two Weeks in November is the thrilling, surreal, unbelievable and often very funny true story of four would-be enemies – a high-ranking politician, an exiled human rights lawyer, a dangerous spy and a low-key white businessman turned political fixer – who team up to help unseat one of the world’s longest serving dictators, Robert Mugabe.

What begins as an improbable adventure destined for failure, marked by a mixture of bravery, strategic cunning and bumbling naiveté, soon turns into the most sophisticated political-military operation in African history. By virtue of their being together, the unlikely team of misfit rivals is suddenly in position to spin what might have been seen as an illegal coup into a mass popular uprising that the world – and millions of Zimbabweans – will enthusiastically support.

Impeccably researched, deftly written, and told in the style of a political thriller, Two Weeks in November is Ocean’s 11 meets Game of Thrones: a real-world life or death chess match for the future of a country where the political endgame is never a forgone conclusion.

Online social media are changing the face of politics in the United States. Beginning with a strong theoretical foundation grounded in political, communications and psychology literature, Tweeting to Power examines the effect of online social media on how people come to learn, understand and engage in politics. Gainous and Wagner propose that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter offer the opportunity for a new information flow that is no longer being structured and limited by the popular media. Television and newspapers, which were traditionally the sole or primary gatekeeper, can no longer limit or govern what information is exchanged. By lowering the cost of both supplying the information and obtaining it, social networking applications have recreated how, when and where people are informed. To establish this premise, Gainous and Wagner analyze multiple datasets, quantitative and qualitative, exploring and measuring the use of social media by voters and citizens as well as the strategies and approaches adopted by politicians and elected officials. They illustrate how these new and growing online communities are new forums for the exchange of information that is governed by relationships formed and maintained outside traditional media. Using empirical measures, they prove both how candidates utilize Twitter to shape the information voters rely upon and how effective this effort was at garnering votes in the 2010 congressional elections. With both theory and data, Gainous and Wagner show how the social media revolution is creating a new paradigm for political communication and shifting the very foundation of the political process.

Reporting data and predicting trends through the 2008 campaign, this classroom-tested volume offers again James E. Campbell's ""theory of the predictable campaign,"" incorporating the fundamental conditions that systematically affect the presidential vote: political competition, presidential incumbency, and election-year economic conditions. Campbell's cogent thinking and clear style present students with a readable survey of presidential elections and political scientists' ways of studying them. ""The American Campaign"" also shows how and why journalists have mistakenly assigned a pattern of unpredictability and critical significance to the vagaries of individual campaigns. This excellent election-year text provides: a summary and assessment of each of the serious predictive models of presidential election outcomes; a historical summary of many of America's important presidential elections; and a significant new contribution to the understanding of presidential campaigns and how they matter.

From hashtag activism to the flood of political memes on social media, the landscape of political communication is being transformed by the grassroots circulation of opinion on digital platforms and beyond. By exploring how everyday people assist in the promotion of political media messages to persuade their peers and shape the public mind, Joel Penney offers a new framework for understanding the phenomenon of viral political communication: the citizen marketer. Like the citizen consumer, the citizen marketer is guided by the logics of marketing practice, but, rather than being passive, actively circulates persuasive media to advance political interests. Such practices include using protest symbols in social media profile pictures, strategically tweeting links to news articles to raise awareness about select issues, sharing politically-charged internet memes and viral videos, and displaying mass-produced T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers that promote a favored electoral candidate or cause. Citizens view their participation in such activities not only in terms of how it may shape or influence outcomes, but as a statement of their own identity. As the book argues, these practices signal an important shift in how political participation is conceptualized and performed in advanced capitalist democratic societies, as they casually inject political ideas into the everyday spaces and places of popular culture. While marketing is considered a dirty word in certain critical circles - particularly among segments of the left that have identified neoliberal market logics and consumer capitalist structures as a major focus of political struggle - some of these very critics have determined that the most effective way to push back against the forces of neoliberal capitalism is to co-opt its own marketing and advertising techniques to spread counter-hegemonic ideas to the public. Accordingly, this book argues that the citizen marketer approach to political action is much broader than any one ideological constituency or bloc. Rather, it is a means of promoting a wide range of political ideas, including those that are broadly critical of elite uses of marketing in consumer capitalist societies. The book includes an extensive historical treatment of citizen-level political promotion in modern democratic societies, connecting contemporary digital practices to both the 19th century tradition of mass political spectacle as well as more informal, culturally-situated forms of political expression that emerge from postwar countercultures. By investigating the logics and motivations behind the citizen marketer approach, as well as how it has developed in response to key social, cultural, and technological changes, Penney charts the evolution of activism in an age of mediatized politics, promotional culture, and viral circulation.

What do Walter Sisulu, Paul Xiniwe, Bertha Mkhize and John Tengo Jabavu have in common? They were all Black South African business people, and only a few of the names of the elite who were able to build successful enterprises against all odds in industries such as agriculture, media, financial services, retail, real estate, transport, hoteliering and more during the colonial and apartheid eras.

In many cases, they were also political activists as necessitated by the oppressive conditions of the time in order to fight for equal rights to enterprise and markets. Here their stories as entrepreneurs as well as political actors are profiled, showing the inexplicable relationship between the two.

The history of Black South African enterprise pre- and post-colonially in areas like mining is also explored, showing that this was nothing alien or unexpected and instead, that oppression curtailed the majority of enterprise that was possible and blocked out competition through dispossession.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Twenty-five years ago, after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Gerald Ford promised a return to normalcy. "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," President Ford declared.

But it was not. The Watergate scandal, and the remedies against future abuses of power, would have an enduring impact on presidents and the country. In Shadow, Bob Woodward takes us deep into the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton to describe how each discovered that the presidency was forever altered. With special emphasis on the human toll, Woodward shows the consequences of the new ethics laws, and the emboldened Congress and media. Powerful investigations increasingly stripped away the privacy and protections once expected by the nation's chief executive.

Shadow is an authoritative, unsettling narrative of the modern, beleaguered presidency.

Justice Mahomed was a philosopher of law whose insights and analysis brought about refinements in the law that enlarged the scope of freedom and dignity during apartheid. He spent his life in the service of law to establish justice, contributing to laying the foundation for human rights. As a fearless advocate he challenged immoral and repressive legislation and executive action, developing the common law, especially in the areas of administrative and public law. As a judge, he was at the forefront of a radical and visionary constitutional transformation.

Mahomed’s vision of a human rights culture pre-dated our transition to democracy. We are constantly reminded of his deep love for and understanding of the law, his unmatched oratory, his passion and his unwavering commitment to human rights.

The book comprises four sections:

• Section one consists of a commentary, preceded by a foreword by President Cyril Ramaphosa;
• Section two consists of perspectives of Mahomed by colleagues, friends and family;
• Section three is a selection of his speeches that deal with a range of issues from philosophy to a Bill of Rights;
• Section four identifies some of his illuminating judgments.

Between 1960 and 1989 in South Africa, more than 130 people were executed for crimes that had a political motive. Who were they, what did they do, and why did they do it?

While many people have heard of Solomon Mahlangu, John Harris or even Vuyisile Mini, the vast majority of executed activists remain very much unknown, even though they paid the ultimate price for their actions.

This book tells their stories, drawing on the author’s interviews with fellow activists, the families left behind, lawyers on both sides, judges who passed sentence, warders on death row, and even functionaries tasked with informing the condemned of their impending fate.

In the process, the book sheds light on forgotten aspects of South African history, such as the actions of the PAC/Poqo in the 1960s, which resulted in dozens of executions, and people who heeded the ANC’s call to make the country ungovernable in the 1980s and who were then disowned by the organisation. The book also makes startling revelations about miscarriages of justice, defence attorneys working against their clients, and, sadly, the post-apartheid state’s neglect of those who suffered as a result of political executions.

On 20 January 1973, the Bissau-Guinean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral was killed by militants from his own party. Cabral had founded the PAIGC in 1960 to fight for the liberation of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde. The insurgents were Bissau-Guineans, aiming to get rid of the Cape Verdeans who dominated the party elite.

Despite Cabral’s assassination, Portuguese Guinea became the independent Republic of Guinea-Bissau. The guerrilla war that Cabral had started and led precipitated a chain of events that would lead to the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Lisbon, toppling the forty-year-old authoritarian regime. This paved the way for the rest of Portugal’s African colonies to achieve independence.

Written by a native of Angola, this biography narrates Cabral’s revolutionary trajectory, from his early life in Portuguese Guinea to his death. It details his quest for national sovereignty, beleaguered by the ethnic-based identity conflicts the national liberation movement struggled to overcome.