Collective Political Activity Research Articles

Unconsciousness-Raising: Considerations for Liberation Psychology, Subjectivity, and Reflexivity Theory

ABSTRACT Consciousness-raising denotes the process of using people’s experiences of oppression to inform their collective political activity. The role of psychology in the history of consciousness-raising has been double-edged. On the one hand, mainstream psychology has recuperated consciousness-raising, depoliticizing it so that it reflects little more than a therapeutic mode of self-help that adjusts subjects to – rather than challenges – oppressive social systems. On the other hand, those working within the liberation psychology paradigm have sought to harness consciousness-raising for the kinds of politically progressive purposes for which it was initially intended. Through what I call unconsciousness-raising, I consider how those working within the psychoanalytic tradition of liberation psychology can stretch the political capacities of the consciousness-raising process by using this process to recognize how the unconscious structures emancipatory political organizing. Unconsciousness-raising has the potential to shift the activist subject’s relationship to unconscious identifications in accordance with a democratically conceived political agenda, and to harness the emancipatory potential of desire to advance this agenda. I examine what the unconsciousness-raising process can mean for the collective constitution of political subjectivity, and how this process can trouble static conceptions of reflexivity theory. Following this, I offer an example of unconsciousness-raising from the community-engaged work with which I am involved. I conclude by reflecting on some future directions for unconsciousness-raising as a community-engaged and a thoroughly political psychological process.

Assessing Muslim women’s power: Islamism, political engagement, and the gender gap

AbstractWhat explains the gender gap in collective political activism in the Muslims world? Under what conditions do Muslim women actively engage in mass political activism? Utilizing the World Values Survey (2010–2012; n = 19,616) and shifting the theoretical focus on the largely ignored meso‐level of analysis of organizational effects, this study conducts a two‐level analysis to (1) chart and reassess the gender gap and (2) analyze the extent to which the gender gap shapes collective political activism in 16 Muslim‐majority states. It probes the variation of protest engagement of women at individual, institutional, and state levels. Our findings suggest that while men appear more likely, on average, to engage in collective action, women with high associational social capital appear more likely than women and men without such capital to embark on collective protests in Muslim‐majority states. Notably, active engagement in civil society social networks emerges as a robust predictor of political engagement, suggesting that associational social capital remains an important factor of motivation and vehicle for mass political activism, particularly among Muslim women.

Public contestation practices in Russia in 2000–2020

The article analyzes the influence exerted by the limitation of legal opportunities for public contestation in the 2000s on the scope of mobilization and the repertoire of public contestation practices. The term ‘public contestation’ is used to describe forms of individual and collective political activity focused on criticizing, denying and resisting the current government project, including by introducing alternative projects. The public contestation includes constructive actions of political actors not related to causing damage or disposing of political opponents. The paper is based on political and legal analysis and on some elements of event analysis. In the 2000s, the scale of public contestation on discursive and protest platforms was smaller than over the next decade, which did not create any needs for detailed regulation of such activities. At the same time, changes in political and legal opportunities in the electoral and party field were quite intense throughout 2000–2020. The most popular forms of public contestation were public events (in 2011–2018), as well as discursive activity on the Internet and in mass media (after 2018). During the above mentioned period, we see the biggest changes in legal opportunities in this field and increasing penalties for respective violations. The electoral field shows the pendulum dynamics: decreasing and increasing opportunities in 2000–2011 and 2012–2019, respectively. A meaningful factor of narrowing legal opportunities for public contestation is the potential financial, organizational and information support of public contestation practices by foreign entities.

Family remittances and vigilantism in Mexico

ABSTRACT We explore the role of workers’ remittances in supporting vigilante organisations in Mexico. Research on remittances posits both a positive and a negative effect on collective action from the reception of remittances. On one hand, remittances sent by relatives abroad provide extra resources for political action at home. On the other hand, the reception of remittances makes recipients less prone to protesting, through a reduction in grievances. As a result, remittances can be associated with both an increase and a decrease of collective political activity. In this paper, we claim that both effects can co-exist and that the predominance of one mechanism or the other depends on the degree of penetration of remittances at the municipal level. Using data on the existence of vigilante organisations, we find that in most remittance-receiving municipalities, through a resource effect, remittance inflows increase the probability of observing self-defense organisations, but this probability declines at high rates of remittance penetration at the local level. Nonetheless, we observe an activation effect in a majority of remittance receiving municipalities. The paper contributes both to our understanding of international social networks as determinants of civilian action and to the research agenda on how workers’ remittances shape political behaviour in home countries.

Revisiting Political Islam: Explaining the Nexus Between Political Islam and Contentious Politics in the Arab World*

ObjectiveThis study (1) introduces a new framework to conceptualize and measure political Islam, and (2) examines the empirical nexus among Islamic religiosity, ideological support for political Islam (ISPI), and collective protests in the Arab Middle East.MethodsAnalyzing cross‐national attitudes in five Arab states, I conduct a principal component analysis to construct a new index to account for a variation in ISPI, and examine the effects thereof on participation in collective protests.ResultsThe evidence shows that Islamic religiosity matters in challenging political elites via collective action. While politically moderate Muslims appear more likely to engage in nonviolent, collective political protests, political radicals seem less likely to do so.ConclusionThe findings suggest that political ideology plays a central role in moderating the intricate relationship between Islam and collective political activism. The evidence also supports the resource mobilization thesis, among other factors, to explain the dynamics of collective action in the Arab world.

Youth collective activism through social media: The role of collective efficacy

The relationship between social media use and youth’s political participation has been extensively studied. However, explanations for youth’s online collective political activism have been less explored. Previous studies have used the concept of internal political efficacy to examine the relationship between social media and political participation. However, this concept only explains individual political participation, while many political actions are performed collectively. Based on Social Cognitive theory this study propounds the concepts of online political self- and collective efficacy and explores their relationship to online collective political activism. Findings of a survey of members of three activist groups of a US Mid-Western university ( n = 222) suggest that a correspondence exists between efficacy perceptions and the level of agency at which the political activities are performed online. Also, online collective efficacy perceptions influence individuals’ participation in online collective actions, but this relationship is moderated by the perceived interdependence of the actions.

The women’s struggle for equality during South Africa’s transition to democracy

The women’s struggle for equality during South Africa’s transition to democracy Sheila Meintjes (bio) Fifteen years ago, I published the above article in Transformation 30 (1996) in a context where some of the optimism about the prospects for change in South Africa’s transition to democracy had already waned – at least among left wing feminist activists. The question I now ask when I read that article, is what was absent from the thinking that informed it. What and how was I thinking? I recall in the 1970s and 1980s, hot debates within the internal South African left about the relationship between nationalism and socialism. Among feminists, there was a deeper criticism that showed that neither approach would address the critical questions of women’s subordination and women’s oppression. I wondered in reading the piece I wrote, whether through my own enthusiastic and committed involvement in the transition to democracy, in the Women’s National Coalition, whether I had forgotten about the left criticism of nationalist movements and their commitment not to revolutionary transformation so much as to the promotion of a nationalist bourgeoisie. If not forgotten, then placed carefully on the back-burner to simmer away and mature! What did this mean for working class and feminist politics and in particular, for the outcome in terms of fulfilling women’s needs and interests? Left intellectuals had been critical of the idea of the two stage theory of revolution anyway, so why was there such euphoria when the ANC came to power in 1994? Was I naïve enough to think that the ANC would be any different in 1992 than it had been in 1982 or earlier, when it attacked any deviation from its ‘line’ and forbad any internal criticism? As a left-leaning feminist intellectual, I had thought much about what it meant to support the struggle for liberation, and I and others on the left, had joined women’s organisations during the 1980s to argue for what we conceived to be a [End Page 107] transformative agenda. A transformative agenda invoked demands that were in some senses revolutionary – for women’s autonomy in a society that was highly patriarchal, for a participatory model of politics that included the transformation of intimate family relationships in ways that domestic decision-making and roles would involve sharing housework, parenting and working life. A further aspect of this somewhat utopian view was that collective ownership of the economy was also something to strive for. It was a perspective that did not argue for a mere extension of membership of the existing class system, which is the more common meaning behind the term ‘transformation’ in use in South Africa today and behind the idea of Black Economic Empowerment which argues that more blacks (including women) ought to become owners of capital and share in the financial benefits of the existing economic system. Instead, the utopianism dreamed of a collective political activism that would pierce the public/private divide and along with the other foundational principles of the struggle against apartheid, would lead to the development of a non-racial, non-sexist and more just and equitable society. This perspective was one that criticised the potentially reactionary practices in the national liberation movement, and argued for significant redistributive policies. At the same time that the role of the state was seen as important, it was social transformation that was seen to be the answer to the depredations apartheid had wrought on society. Thus participatory democracy was the driver of any state initiated processes of transformation. Organs of People’s Power from grass-roots upwards was the vision. Within the underground, however, critical debate was not easily tolerated, and the evidence of abuse of power and intolerance of debate and disagreement in exile is found in various reports and accounts of reactions to discontent in exile camps and to life in exile. Thus a lack of tolerance for different points of view was not something that had simply come with Mbeki, they were germane to the ANC in exile and can even be seen in the way in which the UDF operated during the 1980s. Among the women’s organisations, for instance...

Protest and Democracy in Latin America’s Market Era

Existing studies hold that Latin America’s market turn has had a demobilizing effect on collective political activity despite the presence of democracy. However, recent work has documented the revival of protest in the region, emphasizing the repoliticization of collective actors in the wake of economic liberalization, especially when democracy is present. This article expands the theoretical scope of the repoliticization perspective, providing the most comprehensive test of the demobilization and repoliticization hypotheses to date. Using time-series data from seventeen Latin American countries, the article confirms the repoliticization view by showing that protest increases with economic liberalization in democratic settings.

The Women of Akmoneia

ABSTRACTThis article is the first publication of a Greek inscription from Akmoneia in Phrygia, dated toa.d.6/7. The monument is an honorific stele for a priestess by the name of Tatia, and was voted by a body of ‘Greek and Roman women’. As a document of collective political activity by a female corporate group, the inscription has no real parallels in either the Greek or Roman world. The monument is set in the context of the Roman mercantile presence in central Phrygia in the late Republican and early Imperial periods, and some proposals are offered concerning the identity and significance of the honouring body.

Democracy, collective action and intra-elite conflict

We analyze a model where there is uncertainty about the future power of two ex-ante symmetric elites to appropriate surplus, and ex-ante surplus sharing agreements are not binding. We show that in an oligarchy, the stronger elite appropriates the entire available surplus, whereas a democracy results in a more balanced surplus allocation between the two elites. In a democracy, the newly enfranchised non-elite organize to act collectively, so that the weaker elite can credibly threaten to form a coalition with the organized non-elite against the stronger elite. Such a threat ensures that the more balanced surplus sharing proposal chosen by majority voting is renegotiation-proof. Therefore, sufficiently risk-averse elites unanimously choose democracy as a form of insurance against future imbalances in relative power. We emphasize that franchise extension to, and low cost of organizing collective political activity for, the non-elite are both necessary features of a democracy. Our formal analysis can account for the stylized facts that emerge from a comparative analysis of Indian and Western European democracies.

Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (review)

Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in Indian and Slave Debates. By Alisse Portnoy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 290. Cloth, $49.95.)Alisse Portnoy's Their Right to Speak examines debates about women's right to petition that arose during Indian removal and slavery controversies of 1830s. Some of Portnoy's ideas will be familiar to readers of this journal, since she published elements of this book here in 2003. Nevertheless, an overview of her findings is in order.Portnoy's story starts in January 1830, when sixty-one women in Hallowell, Maine, signed and sent to Congress a petition protesting government's removal of Cherokee nation from Georgia. Portnoy has found that some 1,500 other women sent similar petitions to Congress over next two years, in a campaign that, surprisingly, Catharine Beecher secretly helped to orchestrate. Beecher's role is especially noteworthy given her later public opposition to similar efforts by abolitionist women, especially her war of words with Angelina Grimke in 1837.Much of Portnoy's book attempts to explain contradiction between Beecher's early leadership of a women's petition drive and her condemnation only a few years later of abolitionist attempts to use same tactic. Looking for consistency in Beecher's arguments during 1830s, Portnoy dismisses usual argument that conservative Beecher condemned radical Grimke as a result of differences in their beliefs respecting gender roles. This seems like a solid start, especially as Beecher's intellect commands respect (if not agreement), and because antiremoval petitions unearthed by Portnoy prove that Beecher was open to some women's public involvement as early as 1830.Portnoy explains Beecher's change by examining differences between antiremoval and abolition, with particular attention to how much support each of causes enjoyed in Whig reform circles. Native Americans, she finds, enjoyed more favorable press than African Americans throughout this period, and this influenced degree to which Beecher and other middle-class reformers felt they could properly embark on petitioning activities. As Portnoy writes, the ways European Americans imagined African and Native Americans more significantly influenced women's early national, collective political activism than conventional gender constraints of period (9). After two chapters detailing how white society depicted Native and African Americans in novels and newspapers (particularly National Intelligencer), Portnoy concludes that reformers like Beecher regarded Cherokees as a sovereign nation with legitimate treaty rights. In addition, individual Native Americans could be bright, brave, honorable, and Christian. In contrast, African American characters in novels such as James Fennimore Cooper's were less than fully human, and nation's newspapers ran frequent advertisements that depicted African Americans as fugitive slaves and as merchandise to be bought and sold. Portnoy argues that in print culture of 1830s, term Negro was synonymous with enslavement, and that this made immediate abolition an undesirable goal for Beecher and other like-minded reformers. These racial assumptions underpinned American Colonization Society (ACS) and its work. …

Are Ethical Asylum Policies Politically Sustainable?

normally artificially separated: ethical theories of the obligations of states to protect strangers and the empirical study of refugee and asylum regimes in liberal democracies. Gibney's analysis makes clear why these two intellectual activities are normally kept apart. Juxtaposing them clearly reveals the tensions between the ideal and the real, the desirable and the possible, the just and the expedient. Most analysts, by temperament or training, lean toward one side of these dichotomies or the other. Yet, a political theory of refugee policy must, Gibney argues, have ethical force and practical relevance; it must identify both values and agency. Gibney believes that it is possible to combine abstract philosophical speculation with empirical study of actual cases to produce an ethically defensible guide to politically viable refugee policies, and that is his goal. The Ethics and Politics of Asylum begins with a prolonged look at various attempts to provide an ethical grounding for state refugee protection schemes. Gibney defines refugees as people in need of a new state of residence, either temporarily or permanently, because if forced to return home or remain where they are, they would--as a result of either the brutality or inadequacy of their state--be persecuted or seriously jeopardize their physical security or vital subsistence (p. 7). Gibney limits his analysis for the most part to entrance criteria. Although entrance issues are at the heart of political controversies about asylum in the Western world, this decision leads him away from a fuller consideration of alternative, nonentrance policies--such as assistance to refugees in place, subsidized resettlement in third countries, or policies designed to address the problems that produce refugees. Gibney divides theories of refugee protection into two broad camps, which he labels partialists and impartialists. Partialists argue that states have a special obligation to give preference to the needs of their members over those of strangers. Partialists derive their positions from a variety of philosophical traditions, including nationalism and conservatism, but perhaps the most important is communitarianism (see, for example Walzer 1983). Partialists defend the national state's prerogative to control access to the national territory, arguing (1) that identity is important to humans, (2) that states and cultures are critical to the formation of identities, (3) that culture and nationality play a practical role in facilitating collective political activity, and (4) that citizens of democracies often express a preference for such controls. Gibney points out, in turn, that states are more than cultures; they are also territories and actors. He asks by what right do states govern their territories, and are they responsible for the harm they do as actors?

Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Beats: New Directions in Beat Studies

Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Beats: New Directions in Beat Studies Skerl, Jennie, ed. 2004. Reconstructing the Beats. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $75.00 he $24.95 sc. 244 pp.Martinez, Manuel Luis. 2003. Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. $24.95 sc. 360 pp.While the Beats' contemporaries generally dismissed them as knownothing bohemians and bewildered internal cosmonauts, scholarly interest in the Beat Generation has increased dramatically over the past two decades (Podhoretz 1958, 307, Fiedler 1971, 399). The principal Beat writers-Jack Kerouac, Alien Ginsberg, and William Burroughs-are now widely recognized countercultural heroes whose works are routinely discussed in university classrooms and academic journals. Jennie Skerl's anthology, Reconstructing the Beats, and Manuel Luis Martine/'s Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera both contribute to this Beat revival by attempting to map directions for criticism and teaching at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Skerl 2004,2). But what new directions should Beat scholarship pursue, and what is at stake in these attempts to reconstruct new paradigms for Beat studies?In the broadest sense, Skerl and Martinez's works share several theoretical assumptions that have guided recent Beat scholarship. Skerl argues that her anthology pursues two primary goals: it attempts to re-historicize, re-contextualize, and reinterpret the principal Beat writers-Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs-from new theoretical perspectives; and it also seeks to recover marginalized figures and expand the restricted (white male) canon beyond few legendary figures (2004, 2). On the surface, Martinez's Countering the Counterculture seems to pursue a similar critical with its first half analyzing how the major Beat writers responded to the advent of conformist and corporate culture in the United States, while its second half explores how Chicano and Mexican American migrant writers participate [dl equally and fully in the production of post World War II American culture (2003, 14-15, 18).The conclusions that Martinez draws, however, differ dramatically from the positions advanced in Skerl's anthology. While Reconstructing the Beats does revise, broaden, and complicate our understanding of the Beat Generation, it ultimately advances a rather traditional sense of the Beats as countercultural rebels (2004, 2-3). For example, Clinton R. Starr's essay expands the Beat Generation beyond a small group of literary celebrities to include a broader group of beatniks and 'week-end Bohemians' who frequented coffeehouses and jazz clubs, but Starr still defines the Beat Generation as a vibrant counterculture that facilitated individual resistance and collective political activism (44, 41, 53). Similarly, Daniel Belgrad explores interesting new relationships between Beat literature and Mexican Magical Realism, but he ultimately concludes that both movements shared a common cultural agenda of opposing the hemispheric dominance of corporate liberalism after 1940 (40). While both critics reconstruct the Beat Generation in new ways, they remain relatively faithful to a traditional sense of the Beats as nonconformists who critique[d] . . . mainstream values and social structures by promoting spiritual alternative[s] to the relentless materialist drive of industrial capitalism (2).Martinez's Countering the Counterculture, however, radically challenges this traditional interpretation of the Beat Generation as an unproblematic counter-hegemonic movement. Deconstructing simplistic views of post World War II American culture which posit a binary opposition between the establishment culture and a dissenting counterculture, Martinez argues instead that a more complex relationship existed between the square mainstream culture and the Beat counterculture (2003, 7). …

Reasons and Reason: Collective Political Activity in Comparative and Historical Perspective

A“political” explanation of collective political activity is examined in the light of 58 varied historical cases. The cases support a description of these activities as largely rational, collectively arrived at, and heavily influenced by recent changes in motives and opportunities.“In” groups are most likely to act collectively when newly threatened,“out” groups when new opportunities present themselves. Emotion and frustrated expectations do not seem to be the best variables on which to base predictive hypotheses. Violence is not strongly associated with communal groups or with emotion as such, but it does seem to be associated with“bad times.” While action is usually based on collectively made decisions, its occurrence does not depend on strong organization; the latter seems, however, to be a condition of continuing and durable effectiveness.