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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Pressure groups & lobbying
In Donald Trump's America, protesting has roared back into fashion. The Women's March, held the day after Trump's inauguration, may have been the largest in American history, and resonated around the world. Between Trump's tweets and the march's popularity, it is clear that displays of anger dominate American politics once again. There is an extensive body of research on protest, but the focus has mostly been on the calculating brain--a byproduct of structuralism and cognitive studies--and less on the feeling brain. James M. Jasper's work changes that, as he pushes the boundaries of our present understanding of the social world. In The Emotions of Protest, Jasper lays out his argument, showing that it is impossible to separate cognition and emotion. At a minimum, he says, we cannot understand the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or pro and anti-Trump rallies without first studying the fears and anger, moral outrage, and patterns of hate and love that their members feel. This is a book centered on protest, but Jasper also points toward broader paths of inquiry that have the power to transform the way social scientists picture social life and action. Through emotions, he says, we are embedded in a variety of environmental, bodily, social, moral, and temporal contexts, as we feel our way both consciously and unconsciously toward some things and away from others. Politics and collective action have always been a kind of laboratory for working out models of human action more generally, and emotions are no exception. Both hearts and minds rely on the same feelings racing through our central nervous systems. Protestors have emotions, like everyone else, but theirs are thinking hearts, not bleeding hearts. Brains can feel, and hearts can think.
During the chaos of the eurozone crisis, few mainstream commentators have stopped to question the purpose of the European Union itself, and whose interests it serves. Corporate Europe goes beyond the divisions between nation-states, focusing instead on the division between the corporate elite and the peoples of Europe. David Cronin spent a year investigating the privileged access that big business enjoys in Brussels. In this book, he reveals how the EU's policies on health, climate change, armaments and food safety have been tailored to please an unaccountable elite. Making extensive use of previously unpublished documents, he explores how ideologically blinkered lobbyists have seized on the financial crisis of recent years to entrench the casino capitalism that caused the crisis in the first place. What emerges is a powerful expose of how vested interests in the EU have manipulated opportunities to introduce ideologically-driven reforms.
Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a type of pressure group that has been largely ignored by political analysts: networks of activists that coalesce and operate across national frontiers. Their targets may be international organizations or the policies of particular states. Historical examples of such transborder alliances include anti-slavery and woman suffrage campaigns. In the past two decades, transnational activism has had a significant impact in human rights, especially in Latin America, and advocacy networks have strongly influenced environmental politics as well. The authors also examine the emergence of an international campaign around violence against women. The conventions of the nation-state have shaped our contemporary understanding of the process and politics of social movements. Keck and Sikkink sketch for the first time the dynamics of emergence, strategies, and impact of activists from different nationalities working together on particular issues. This eagerly awaited work will alter the way scholars conceptualize the making of international society and the practice of international politics.
'A tour de force' - Dalia Gebrial Antiracist movements are more mainstream than ever before. Liberal democracies boast of their policies designed to stamp out racism in all walks of life. Why then is racism still ever-present in our society? This is not an accident, but by design. Capitalism is structured by racism and has relentlessly attacked powerful movements. Race to the Bottom traces our current crisis back decades, to the fragmentation of Britain's Black Power movements and their absorption into NGOs and the Labour Party. The authors call for recovering radical histories of antiracist struggle, championing modern activism and infusing them with the urgency of our times: replacing anxieties over 'unconscious bias' and rival claims for 'representation' with the struggle for a new, socialist, multi-racial organising from below.
American democracy was never supposed to give the nation a president like Donald Trump. We have never had a president who gave rise to such widespread alarm about his lack of commitment to the institutions of self-government, to the norms democracy requires, and to the need for basic knowledge about how government works. We have never had a president who raises profound questions about his basic competence and his psychological capacity to take on the most challenging political office in the world. Yet if Trump is both a threat to our democracy and a product of its weaknesses, the citizen activism he has inspired is the antidote. The reaction to the crisis created by Trump's presidency can provide the foundation for an era of democratic renewal and vindicate our long experiment in self-rule. The award-winning authors of One Nation After Trump explain Trump's rise and the danger his administration poses to our free institutions. They also offer encouragement to the millions of Americans now experiencing a new sense of citizenship and engagement and argue that our nation needs a unifying alternative to Trump's dark and divisive brand of politics - an alternative rooted in a New Economy, a New Patriotism, a New Civil Society, and a New Democracy. One Nation After Trump is the essential book for our era, an unsparing assessment of the perils facing the United States and an inspiring roadmap for how we can reclaim the future.
Power is the essence of politics. Whoever seeks to understand and master it must understand its logic. Drawing on two decades of international experience in political consulting, Dominik Meier and Christian Blum give profound and honest insights into the inner workings of power. Introducing their Power Leadership Approach, the authors provide a conceptual analysis of power and present the tools to successfully exercise it in the political domain. "Power and its Logic" is a guidebook for politicians, business leaders, civil society pioneers, public affairs consultants and for every citizen who wants to understand the unwritten rules of politics.
In October 1918, war-weary German sailors mutinied when the Imperial Naval Command ordered their engagement in one final, fruitless battle with the British Royal Navy. This revolt, in the dying embers of the First World War, quickly erupted into a full scale revolution that toppled the monarchy and inaugurated a period of radical popular democracy. The establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919 ended the revolution, relegating all but its most prominent leaders to a historical footnote. In A People's History of the German Revolution, William A. Pelz cuts against the grain of mainstream accounts that tend to present the revolution as more of a 'collapse', or just a chaotic interregnum that preceded the country's natural progression into a republic. Going beyond the familiar names of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg or Clara Zetkins, Pelz explores the revolution from the bottom up, focusing on the active role that women, rank-and-file activists, and ordinary workers played in its events. Rejecting the depiction of agency as exclusively in the hands of international actors like Woodrow Wilson or in those of German elites, he makes the compelling case that, for a brief period, the actions of the common people shaped a truly revolutionary society.
Injustices of the past cast a shadow on the present. They are the
root cause of much harm, the source of enmity, and increasingly in
recent times, the focus of demands for reparation. In this
groundbreaking philosophical investigation, Janna Thompson examines
the problems raised by reparative demands and puts forward a theory
of reparation for historical injustices. The book argues that the problems posed by historical injustices are best resolved by a reconciliatory view of reparative justice and an approach that explains how people acquire intergenerational responsibilities and entitlements. It ranges in its subject matter from the claims of indigenous people to land stolen from their ancestors to the growing movement for reparations for slavery. The book provides an original and convincing answer to the questions of how citizens can have reparative responsibilities for wrongs committed before they were born, and why descendants of victims may be entitled to compensation for historical injustices such as slavery. It also explains how members of nations can make recompense for injustices of the past without ignoring the inequities of the present."Taking Responsibility for the Past" is a significant contribution to philosophical and legal debates about reparative justice, and at the same time an accessible and thought-provoking book for general readers.
This book provides an accessible account of popular political, social and economic movements in the Third World. Focusing on poor and marginalized groups within developing countries, it shows how these groups have been stimulated into action by recent demands for political and economic change.
Naomi Zack's Reviving the Social Compact: Inclusive Citizenship in an Age of Extreme Politics addresses current political and social upheaval and distress with new concepts for the relationship between citizens and government. Politics has become turbo-charged as a form of agonistic contest where candidates and the public become more focused on winning than on governing or holding the government accountable for the benefit of the people. This failure of the government to fulfill its part of the social contract calls for a new social compact wherein citizens as a collective whole make long-term resolutions outside of government institutions. Analyzing present and evolving events, Zack reveals how race has exceeded intersection after formal rights have failed to correct ongoing discrimination; how class is no longer based on real life interests and has been manufactured and manipulated for political contest; how women have made spectacular progress but how the fame of elite women has left out poor, non-white women, transgender people, and sex workers; how natural disasters have not been (and perhaps cannot be) adequately prepared for or responded to by government; how environmental preservation becomes politicized; how homelessness could be fixed through capitalism; and how immigration reform has pivoted from inclusion to expulsion and why hospitality is an important civic virtue. Reviving the Social Compact is a call for good citizenship. Voting is the first step-because in a divided two-party system, a change from one party to the other is tantamount to revolution-and a new understanding of the social compact can lead to the stable civic life we need at this time.
On February 7, 2012, as students in Quebec prepared to vote to go on strike, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois gave a rousing speech: ?What you do today will be remembered. The decision you make will tell future generations who we were. And you already know what is being said today about our generation. That we are the generation of comfort and indifference, the generation of cash and iPods; that we are individualists, egotists; that we don't care about anything, except our navels and our gadgets. Aren't you tired of hearing this? Well, I am. Luckily, today we have a chance to prove that it's not true, that it has never been true.? The ?Maple Spring? saw more than 300,000 students across Quebec protest a tuition fee hike by striking from their classes. Nadeau-Dubois takes readers step-by-step through the strike, recounting the confrontations with journalists, ministers, judges, and police. Along the way he exposes the moral and intellectual poverty of the Quebec elite and celebrates the remarkable energy of the students who opposed the mercenary attitude of the austerity agenda. In Defiance is translated from the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award winner for non-fiction, Tenir t?te (Lux ?diteur)
A revised, updated and expanded edition of this classic feminist account of British labour history Critical and iconoclastic, Comrade or Brother? traces the history of the British Labour Movement from its beginnings at the onset of industrialisation through its development within a capitalist society, up to the end of the twentieth-century. Written by a leading activist in the labour movement, the book redresses the balance in much labour history writing. It examines the place of women and the influence of racism and sexism as well as providing a critical analysis of the rival ideologies which played a role in the uneven development of the labour movement.
A close associate of Chico Mendes, Gomercindo Rodrigues witnessed the struggle between Brazil's rubber tappers and local ranchers--a struggle that led to the murder of Mendes. Rodrigues's memoir of his years with Mendes has never before been translated into English from the Portuguese. Now, Walking the Forest with Chico Mendes makes this important work available to new audiences, capturing the events and trends that shaped the lives of both men and the fragile system of public security and justice within which they lived and worked. In a rare primary account of the celebrated labor organizer, Rodrigues chronicles Mendes's innovative proposals as the Amazon faced wholesale deforestation. As a labor unionist and an environmentalist, Mendes believed that rain forests could be preserved without ruining the lives of workers, and that destroying forests to make way for cattle pastures threatened humanity in the long run. Walking the Forest with Chico Mendes also brings to light the unexplained and uninvestigated events surrounding Mendes's murder. Although many historians have written about the plantation systems of nineteenth-century Brazil, few eyewitnesses have captured the rich rural history of the twentieth century with such an intricate knowledge of history and folklore as Rodrigues.
The United States boasts scores of organizations that offer crucial
representation for groups that are marginalized in national
politics, from women to racial minorities to the poor. Here, in the
first systematic study of these organizations, Dara Z. Strolovitch
explores the challenges and opportunities they face in the new
millennium, as waning legal discrimination coincides with
increasing political and economic inequalities "within" the
populations they represent.
"I wish I had Jim Shultz's The Democracy Owners' Manual when I started organizing and lobbying nearly 40 years ago. Shultz adds a distinctive voice to why citizens who take the initiative and organize will thwart and best the powerful. He engages the reader with language that is simple, wise, perceptive, and profound."-David Cohen, codirector, Advocacy Institute "A concise, thorough, and very practical book . . . Shultz equips his reader with the tools they need to understand the challenges of governance and economic growth and how to influence them effectively."--Harvard Political Review The Democracy Owners' Manual is a unique, hands-on guide for people who want to change public policy at the local, state, or national level. A combination of policy and advocacy basics, the book offers a clear presentation of the issues and debates activists are likely to encounter as well as a lucid, example-rich guide to effective strategies and actions. Newcomers and veteran activists alike will find this book an invaluable treasure chest of ideas and stimulating stories to help them tackle the issues they care about. The Democracy Owners' Manual also lends itself for university courses in political science, public administration, social work, public health, environmental studies, and other disciplines that touch on public policy and political change. Jim Shultz is the executive director of The Democracy Center. Formerly an assistant to the California Legislature and a California lobbyist with Common Cause and Consumers Union, Shultz has trained thousands of civic advocates in the United States, Latin America, and Africa.
Legislatures have one core defining function: that of giving assent to measures that, by virtue of that assent, are to be binding on society. In practice, they have usually performed other roles as well, such as debating measures or the conduct of public affairs. They have existed for centuries. They span the globe. Most countries have one; federal states have several. Commentators throughout the 20th century have bemoaned the decline of legislatures, yet the number shows no sign of declining; if anything, the reverse and their prominence has increased in the 1990s because of developments in central and eastern Europe.
Women reformers in the United States and Germany maintained a brisk dialogue between 1885 and 1933. Drawing on one another's expertise, they sought to alleviate a wide array of social injustices generated by industrial capitalism, such as child labor and the exploitation of women in the workplace. This book presents and interprets documents from that exchange, most previously unknown to historians, which show how these interactions reflected the political cultures of the two nations. On both sides of the Atlantic, women reformers pursued social justice strategies. The documents discussed here reveal the influence of German factory legislation on debates in the United States, point out the differing contexts of the suffrage movement, compare pacifist and antipacifist reactions of women to World War I, and trace shifts in the feminist movements of both countries after the war. Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany provides insight into the efforts of American and German women over half a century of profound social change. Through their dialogue, these women explicate their larger political cultures and the place they occupied in them.
Drawing on case studies of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal and Shramik Sangathana in Maharashtra, this ground-breaking new work examines Indian women's political activism. Investigating institutional change at the state level and protest at the village level, Amrita Basu traces the paths of two kinds of political activism among these women. With insights gleaned from extensive interviews with activists, government officials, and ordinary men and women, she finds that militancy has been fueled by pronounced sexual and class cleavages combined with potentially rancorous ethnic division. Thorough in its fieldwork, incisive in its political analysis, Two Faces of Protest offers a richly textured and sensitive view of women's political activism in the Third World. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.
The Soweto crisis of 1976 marked a watershed in South African political and social history. It focused the attention of the world on the injustice of South African society and started the long and tortuous process that has led to the dismantling of Apartheid. This book examines the role and increasing impotence of English-speaking intellectuals and liberals in South African politics from the 19th century until the Soweto crisis. |
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