Disability rights advocates in the United Kingdom and the United States recently embraced new media technologies in unexpected and innovative ways. This book sheds light on this process of renewal and asks whether the digitalisation of disability rights advocacy can help re-configure political participation into a more inclusive experience for disabled Internet users, enhancing their stakes in democratic citizenship. Through the examination of social media content, Web link analysis, and interviews with leading figures in grassroots groups on both sides of the Atlantic, Filippo Trevisan reveals the profound impact that the Internet has had on disability advocacy in the wake of the austerity agenda that followed the 2008 global financial crisis. In Britain, a new, tech-savvy generation of young disabled self-advocates has emerged from this process. The role of social media platforms such as Facebook in helping politically inexperienced users make sense of complex policy changes through the use of personal stories is discussed also. In addition, this book explains why British disability advocates adopted more innovative and participatory strategies compared to their American counterparts when faced with similar policy crises. This book reviews the implications of this unexpected digital transformation for the structure of the disability rights movement, its leadership, and the opportunity for disabled citizens to participate fully in democratic politics vis-a-vis persisting Web access and accessibility barriers. An original perspective on the relationship between disability and the Internet, and an indispensable read for scholars wishing to contextualize and enrich their knowledge on digital disability rights campaigns vis-a-vis the broader ecology of policymaking.

This book explains when and how interest groups are influential in the European Parliament, which has become one of the most important lobbying venues in the EU. Yet we know little about the many ways in which interest groups and lobbyists influence parliamentary politics. The author offers insights on four key cases of lobbying, based on the analysis of EU documents, lobbying letters, and 150 interviews. She argues that lobbying success depends on a number of factors, most notably the degree of counter-lobbying, issue salience, and committee receptiveness. These factors are brought together in the framework of "Triple-I" - interests, issues, and institutions - to determine the success or failure of lobbying. This book will be of use to students and scholars interested in EU politics and governance, EU decision-making, and interest group politics, along with policy-makers and practitioners.

Originally published as a pamphlet in 1979 and again by Pluto in 1980, In and Against the State brought together questions of working-class struggle and state power, exploring how revolutionary socialists might reconcile working in the public sector with their radical politics. Informed by autonomist political ideas and practices that were central to the protests of 1968, the book's authors spoke to a generation of activists wrestling with the question of where to place their energies. Forty years have passed, yet the questions it posed are still to be answered. As the eclipse of Corbynism and the onslaught of the global pandemic have demonstrated with brutal clarity, a renewed socialist strategy is needed more urgently than ever. This edition includes a new introduction by Seth Wheeler and an interview with John McDonnell that reflect on the continuing relevance of In and Against the State and the questions it raises.

"They assess the effectiveness of the organizing tactics employed, casting particular scrutiny on the courts as agents of social change...The authors have presented concrete examples, all the while making clear that there are no road maps for successful organizing."
-- "New York Law Journal"

"This is an important and unusual booka].It is an academic book on an important issue
--the environmental justice movement
--that is timely and relevant."
--"Argumentation and Advocacy"

When Bill Clinton signed an Executive Order on Environmental Justice in 1994, the phenomenon of environmental racism--the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards, particularly toxic waste dumps and polluting factories, on people of color and low-income communities--gained unprecedented recognition. Behind the President's signature, however, lies a remarkable tale of grassroots activism and political mobilization. Today, thousands of activists in hundreds of locales are fighting for their children, their communities, their quality of life, and their health.

From the Ground Up critically examines one of the fastest growing social movements in the United States, the movement for environmental justice. Tracing the movement's roots, Luke Cole and Sheila Foster combine long-time activism with powerful storytelling to provide gripping case studies of communities across the U.S--towns like Kettleman City, California; Chester, Pennsylvania; and Dilkon, Arizona--and their struggles against corporate polluters. The authors effectively use social, economic and legal analysis to illustrate the historical and contemporary causes for environmental racism. Environmental justice struggles, theydemonstrate, transform individuals, communities, institutions and even the nation as a whole.

Woodstock launched this project on lobbying in 1998 for three reasons. First, lobbying has grown exponentially during the past twenty years to exercise enormous influence on American politics. It has almost become a new profession in that time, and therefore deserves a new review and evaluation. Second, lobbying has simultaneously fallen under suspicion and engendered critical resentment in some quarters. Its critics would say it supports "special" (i.e. narrow and well-funded) interests and is oblivious to the general well-being of our democratic life and process. Third, reputable lobbyists have called, therefore, for a clarification of standards and principles for use within their own ranks and as an explanation to the general public of the goals, objectives, and methods of lobbying to forestall misunderstanding and misjudgment. This clarification would provide the lobbying profession with a normative statement parallel to the codes of conduct and ethical practice of the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association.

This book provides a nuanced picture of how governmental advocates develop their lobbying strategies. Through in-depth analysis of context specific data from surveys of and interviews with California lobbyists, the author explores how context, targets, and tactics interact as lobbyists try to influence legislative decision making.

In a context of economic and budgetary crisis, this book presents a long-term analysis of the transformations of EU gender equality. It analyses the mechanisms of construction, consolidation and deconstruction of this policy and questions the effects of its current dismantling.

Through a selection of in-depth interviews, a survey of experts working with the European Union and United Nations, and Qualitative Comparative Analysis of policy debates, this text rethinks our understanding of gender expertise and the circumstances that lead to expert success in public policy.

Despite a wealth of theorizing and research about each concept, lobbying and norms still raise a number of interesting issues. Why do lobbyists and politicians engage in cooperative behavior? How does cooperative behavior in lobbying affect policy making? If democratic participation is good, why do we view lobbying as bad? Lobbying engenders debate about its effects on the political process and on policy development. Sociologists and other social scientists remain concerned about how norms emerge, the content of norms, how widely they are distributed, and how they are enforced. Political scientists study how interest groups work together and influence the political process. Based on the experience of the author, a former lobbyist, this book looks at the social norms of lobbying and how such norms work in a general framework of other norms and legal institutions in the political process. In developing this argument, John C. Scott claims that: Embedded social relationships and trust-based social norms underpin everyday interactions among policy actors. These relationships and norms have concrete impacts on the policy making process. Social relationships and norms inhibit participation in the political process by outside actors. The investigation is conducted through an innovative theoretical framework, combining existing theoretical perspectives from different disciplines, and using a variety of data and methods, including longitudinal quantitative and social network data, interviews with lobbyists, activists, and policymakers, and anecdotal and historical examples. The Social Process of Lobbying provides refreshingly new empirical evidence and theoretical analysis on how networks of trust are neither all good nor all bad but are ambivalent: they can both improve policy and fuel collusion.

Who should provide food, and through what relationships? Whose livelihoods should be protected? For over 20 years the peasant farmers of La Via Campesina have been engaged in the fight against injustice, hunger and poverty under the banner of food sovereignty, 'the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems'. They campaign for healthy, sustainable alternatives to an industrial food system controlled by agribusiness companies and the architects of unfair trade agreements. This book draws on grounded case studies of agrarian movements in the Americas and Europe as exemplars of a 'power shift,' as local opposition scales up to global action in an effort to wrest control of our food away from transnational corporations and back to communities.

"Lobbyists at Work is a must-read for anyone interested in the serious business of government. Leech's probing questions reflect her years of research tracking the real impact of money and influence on policy." -Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr. (Chairman, Patton Boggs LLP) Received wisdom has it that lobbyists run the American government on behalf of moneyed interests. But what makes lobbyists run, and how do they induce legislators and bureaucrats to do their bidding? These are questions for which even the harshest critics lack satisfying answers. Lobbyists at Work explores what lobbyists really do and why. It goes behind the scenes and brings back in-depth interviews with fifteen political advocates chosen to represent the breadth and diversity of the lobbying profession. The interviewees profiled in this book range from the top lobbyists-for-hire at the most powerful K Street firms to pro bono lobbyists for the disenfranchised and powerless. The roster spans all types of lobbyists working for all types of clients and seeking to influence all levels and branches of government. The permutations include business-lobbying-government, government-lobbying-government, government-to-business revolving door, regulatory lobbying, state and local lobbying, citizen-advocacy lobbying,single-issue lobbying, and multiple-issue lobbying. In colorful and sometimes hilarious detail, the interviewees take the reader through their arsenals of traditional and next-generation lobbying techniques, including face-to-face persuasion of elected officials and their staffs, educational campaigns and coalition-building, ghost-drafting complex legislation and regulation for government committees and agencies, contributions, and social media campaigns. In Lobbyists at Work, the normally self-effacing subjects open up about themselves and their profession: why they chose to become lobbyists, what motivates them to keep lobbying, how they cultivate their lobbying influence, how they adjust to changes in the rules affecting their lobbying methods, and what they actually do at work each day (and night). As an authority on lobbying respected in Washington for her impartiality, Professor Beth Leech elicits frank disclosures, career tips, and riveting stories about the good, the bad, and the ambivalent on both sides of the symbiotic relationship between government officials and lobbyists.

"If you think liberalism is dead, think again. In this sure-to-be-controversial book, Jeffrey M. Berry argues that modern liberalism is not only still alive, it's actually thriving. Today's new liberalism has evolved from a traditional emphasis on bread-and-butter economic issues to a form he calls ""postmaterialism""--quality-of-life concerns such as enhancing the environment, protecting consumers, or promoting civil rights. Berry credits the new liberalism's success to the rise of liberal citizen lobbying groups. By analyzing the activities of Congress during three sessions (1963, 1979, and 1991), he demonstrates the correlation between the increasing lobbying activities of citizen groups and a dramatic shift in the American political agenda from an early 1960s emphasis on economic equality to today's postmaterialist issues. Although conservative groups also began to emphasize postmaterial concerns--such as abortion and other family value issues--Berry finds that liberal citizen groups have been considerably more effective than conservative ones at getting their goals onto the congressional agenda and enacted into legislation. The book provides many examples of citizen group issues that Congress enacted into law, successes when citizen groups were in direct conflict with business interests and when demands were made on behalf of traditionally marginalized constituencies, such as the women's and civil rights movements. Berry concludes that although liberal citizen groups make up only a small portion of the thousands of lobbying organizations in Washington, they have been, and will continue to be, a major force in shaping the political landscape. "

What does post-national identity mean for the control of migration? Katherine Tonkiss engages with the post-national theory of 'constitutional patriotism' and argues in favour of both post-national identity and relaxed migration controls. She explores the implications of such liberalised migration for the dynamics of identity and belonging in local communities, drawing on qualitative research on Eastern European migration to the UK. Illustrated with rich case study material, this book offers a novel contribution to the post-nationalism literature.

Grassroots Advocacy and Health Care Reform shows how grassroots issue advocacy is conducted today by telling the story of Health Care for America Now's campaign in Pennsylvania in support of the Affordable Care Act. As both the director of the HCAN PA campaign and a former professor of political theory, Stier brings a unique perspective to the analysis of how HCAN Pennsylvania implemented a national campaign in the context of contemporary political science. Grassroots Advocacy and Health Care Reform provides valuable insights for historians, political scientists, organizers, and citizens alike about how advocates can best build campaigns to affect legislative change.

The Fourth Ordeal tells the history of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from the late 1960s until 2018. Based on over 140 first-hand interviews with leaders, rank-and-file members and dissidents, as well as a wide range of original written sources, the story traces the Brotherhood's re-emergence and rise following the collapse of Nasser's Arab nationalism, all the way to its short-lived experiment with power and the subsequent period of imprisonment, persecution and exile. Unique in terms of its source base, this book provides readers with unprecedented insight into the Brotherhood's internal politics during fifty years of its history.

The Attac organisations in France and Germany are among the largest, best coordinated and most closely aligned bodies of the anti-globalisation movement that exist today yet there are glaring differences in the manner in which the organisations operate and in how individual members identify and engage with the movement. Through insightful interviews with Attac activists in France and Germany, Daniel Stockemer seeks to understand the significant divergences between the organisations despite their clear ideological parallels as well as the geographical, social and political similarities that exist between the two countries. In doing so this book provides a strong addition to the literature on activist movements on the national and international stage generally through the author's derivation of engagement patterns for various types of activists and development of a typology of social movement organisations that undercover possible trends in membership. The result is a book that will provide an informative and engaging read for students and scholars of activist movements at both an organisational and individual level.

A photo-illustrated record of Chilean protest art, along with reflections on artistic antecedents, global protest movements, and the long shadow cast by Chile's authoritarian past. From October 2019 until the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, Chile was convulsed by protests and political upheaval, as what began as civil disobedience transformed into a vast resistance movement. Throughout, the most striking aspects of the protests were the murals, graffiti, and other political graphics that became ubiquitous in Chilean cities. Authors Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov were in Santiago to witness and document the protests from their very beginning. The book is beautifully illustrated with over 150 photographs taken throughout the protests. Additional photos will be available on the publisher's website. From the introduction: In the conclusion, we take stock of the crisis of the nation-state in the contemporary era. This chapter brings events into the present moment, noting the ways President Pinera took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to reclaim the streets of Santiago, a phenomenon echoed in countries across the globe. While most of the global protest movements were forced to go underground (or into the ether), the Black Lives Matter movement surged in the United States and drew massive amounts of support both domestically and abroad, suggesting a continued wave of grassroots protests. We close with reflections on the continued relevance of walls in a virtual world, the testimonial role that protest graphics play, and the future outlook for revolutionary movements in Chile and worldwide.

When the senatorial election of 2008 between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman stretched on for a contentious six months, people throughout the country wondered about Minnesota's offbeat politics. But Minnesota has been and is now a seedbed for cultural and political movements that have changed the country, and its history weaves a pattern of wide opposition between left and right.

In this broad and readable narrative, eminent Minnesota historian Rhoda R . Gilman covers the major protest movements of the last 150 years: the abolitionist Republican party, Grangers, antimonopolists, Populists, strikers, progressives, suffragists, Communists, Farmer-Laborites, communes and co-ops, abortion politics, and more. She profiles charismatic and quirky leaders like Ignatius Donnelly, Floyd B. Olson, and Paul Wellstone. Each movement, each personality, is part of the context for the others.

Stand Up tells a story of people repeatedly challenging the status quo. It is a narrative of people against power, of conflict and defeat, but also of change and tenacity. In a forceful and inspirational conclusion, Gilman discusses the events that she herself has helped to shape and shares her vision of the future.

Rhoda R. Gilman is the author of Henry Hastings Sibley: Divided Heart and The Story of Minnesota's Past. She is a founding member of Women Historians of the Midwest and a former candidate for lieutenant governor of Minnesota on the Green Party ticket.

This book examines the historical FeesMustFall (FMF) university student protests that took place in South Africa and shows how the enduring historical construction, representation and conceptualisation of South African youth (as typically radical and political) contributed to the (mis)interpretation of FMF protests, and led to a discourse on an African National Congress-toppling revolution. Arguing that the student protests were not the revolutionary movement they have been represented as, Ndlovu demonstrates that ideological divisions amongst the protestors, the declining economy, and reduced youth participation in the political public sphere cannot lead to a new revolution in South African politics. This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in South African politics, higher education, democracy and protest movements.

The goal of the essays included in this dissertation is to motivate Americans to think about the issues facing our nation, not from the perspective of one political party or another, but rather from a point of view as to what is best for our nation's future. We are all Americans, and most Americans want the same things. We may differ with our approach on how to best achieve the things we want for our families, our community, our nation, and ourselves but at our core, the majority of Americans agree with the goals of our nation.
Are the glory days of America behind us? It is not too late to change the growing perception that this might be the case, but it requires the resolve of the American people to be accomplished. We are at war, not only against radical Islam and the forces of terrorism, but, more importantly, we are in an economic war that reflects directly on the ability of the United States to maintain its economic superpower status in the world. If we lose our status as the #1 economic superpower, life in America will change in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.

Humans have always used denial. When we are afraid, guilty, confused, or when something interferes with our self-image, we tend to deny it. Yet denial is a delusion. When it impacts on the health of oneself, or society, or the world it becomes a pathology. Climate change denial is such a case. Paradoxically, as the climate science has become more certain, denial about the issue has increased. The paradox lies in the denial. There is a denial industry funded by the fossil fuel companies that literally denies the science, and seeks to confuse the public. There is denial within governments, where spin-doctors use 'weasel words' to pretend they are taking action. However there is also denial within most of us, the citizenry. We let denial prosper and we resist the science. Climate Change Denial explains the social science behind denial. It contains a detailed examination of the principal climate change denial arguments, from attacks on the integrity of scientists, to impossible expectations of proof and certainty to the cherry picking of data. Climate change can be solved - but only when we cease to deny that it exists. This book shows how we can break through denial, accept reality, and thus solve the climate crisis. It will engage scientists, university students, climate change activists as well as the general public seeking to roll back denial and act.