Forms Of Political Action Research Articles

Alternative Action Organizations: Social Solidarity or Political Advocacy?

This article investigates the involvement of alternative action organizations in three forms of political advocacy in an attempt to gauge their degree of politicization. These forms can be understood as representing three different ways of making political claims: by raising public awareness with respect to a given cause or issue, by trying to influence the policy maker through “insider” lobbying activities, and by protesting in the streets as “outsiders.” Our findings show strong cross-national variations in all three forms of political activities, although not always following a consistent pattern. They also suggest that there is a relationship between the severity of the economic crisis and the form of advocacy. Most important, our analysis suggests that the politicization of alternative action organizations depends both on certain internal characteristics such as their degree of formalization and professionalization, as well as their thematic focus, and the scope of their activities, and on the broader context in terms of economic crisis, austerity policies, and political opportunities. As regards the latter, we find an impact especially on lobbying and protesting.

Gendered political participation and grassroots activism in Hyderabad, India

Statistics have shown a lack of women’s representation in politics in India at the Parliament level. In post-colonial India, the role and place of women has been consigned to the domestic sphere, as they are conferred the responsibility of upholding the virtues of Indian civilization to nurture their families. This may account for the infrequent participation among women in formal political activities of the public sphere. However, this does not mean that women are not participating in political activism. In this article, I explore, among the working-class community in Hyderabad, how political activism is corporealized through both male and female bodies within social discourses of Indian nationalism, situated in public and private spheres respectively. To understand political participation, discourses of political activism have to be considered beyond the public sphere, and explored in relation to the pervasiveness of nationalist discourses and political activism located within domestic, private spheres.

Factors of political culture in the structure of political environment of public policy

The macro-objective level of studying the political environment of state policy actualizes the comprehension of the political system in the structure of the external environment through the description of the category «political culture». In general, scientific understanding of the phenomenon of political culture has become a derivative of various research traditions. At the present stage, it is possible to identify several more or less formalized conceptual positions on this matter: subjective objective approaches, cultural and political doctrines.The essence of political culture unites the behavioral, activity aspects of subjects in the sphere of politics and the way the political system operates. Also, the notion of political culture captures the established system of values, norms, institutions, political consciousness that has developed historically, and the forms of political activity that correspond to it. At the same time, all these concepts, approaches have a point of intersection, which represents the main environmental feature of the phenomenon of political culture - universality, presence in one form or another in all spheres of social life.Domestic researchers recognize and underscore the importance of the influence of political culture on the whole complex of relations between the participants in the political process, the form of organization of state power, the form and effectiveness of the political system, the structure of institutions of power, the ability of political culture through its regulatory mechanisms to achieve social consensus, to promote or impede democratic development national state. At the same time, the problem of the environmental significance of political culture for public policy in foreign and domestic scientific discourses arises more theoretically than practical.In our case, the empirical basis for such a reflection was the information and analytical materials of the Razumkov Center «Political Culture and Parliamentarism in Ukraine: Current Status and Main Problems». Proceeding from this generalization, political culture in the structure of the political environment is a systematically organized integrity whose influence extends to its sphere components (mental, social, institutional, economic, etc.), Their interaction, the result of interaction. And finds its manifestation at all levels of society. The combination of these areas and their content is the conditions and factors of the public policy environment.

TheRabassaireStruggle: Long-Term Analysis of a Social and Political Movement

AbstractTherabassairestruggle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented the most intense unrest in the Catalan countryside since the peasant rebellions of the fifteenth century, and it was one of the main social movements in rural Western Europe in this period. In this article we examine therabassairestruggle over a period of roughly 150 years. Following Charles Tilly, we understand this social movement as a form of political action, which began in the late eighteenth century, reached maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and came to an end with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Beyond the organizational changes arising from the shifting social and political circumstances, a new long-term overview can shed light on the continuities of the movement, especially in terms of building a social identity and legitimating its claims and its struggle.

Policing unacceptable protest in England and Wales: A case study of the policing of anti-fracking protests

In recent years public order policing policy in England and Wales has undergone significant changes. A ‘human rights compliant’ model of protest policing has been developed since 2009 and this article makes a contribution to the body of academic work considering the impact of these changes on operational policing. Drawing upon a longitudinal case study of the policing of protests against ‘fracking’ in Salford, Greater Manchester, in 2013–14, the article contrasts post-2009 policy and academic discourses on protest policing with the experiences of anti-fracking protesters. To develop this assessment, the article also draws attention to previously unexplored definitions of acceptable and unacceptable protest set out by police in more recent policy, and considers the extent to which these definitions are reflected in the police response to anti-fracking protest. The article suggests that a police commitment to a human rights approach to protest facilitation is, at least in the case of anti-fracking protest, contingent on the focus and form of political activism.

Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army." by Johari Jabir

Reviewed by: Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army." by Johari Jabir Elizabeth Ozment Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army." By Johari Jabir. Black Performance and Cultural Criticism. ( Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 181. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-5394; cloth, $71.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-1330-8.) For enslaved Africans, calling to one's gods for strength and an alternative way of being was to "conjure" (p. 2). In Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army," Johari Jabir explains how performances of sacred music beckoned a healing and transformative spiritual power that enabled members of the First South Carolina Volunteers to withstand dire circumstances and to envision freedom. Jabir's theory of conjuring compellingly encapsulates the creative expression of an African epistemology derived from shared experiences of forced displacement and chattel slavery. Jabir describes singing as a form of political activism through which the regiment transcended the limits of race in America by opening temporalities where new identities could be momentarily experienced, "a way of hearing freedom before seeing it" (p. 98). Nightly performances of songs and ring shouts by the First South Carolina reveal less about the aesthetic dimensions of sound than the fusing of religion, music, and war by African American men. Jabir presents black Civil War soldiering as an improvisatory art form and a method of authorship that members of the First South Carolina Volunteers called "gospel" and what the author terms "Black Communal Conservatories" (p. 154). Jabir's theme of militarized male honor deconstructs prejudiced narratives about black Civil War soldiers and ties together fragmented army life scenes. Military service positioned these men to participate in established rites of passage that nineteenth-century Americans understood as "honor" (p. 108). Readers are invited to interpret honor as a form of freedom or at least as an established route used to claim agency and humanity through public service. Music and religion in this regiment facilitated a militarized black masculinity through which these men announced themselves, controlled their environment, talked back to captors, and stood in for other black Americans. Creative enactments of [End Page 467] soldiering that fall under Jabir's term "spiritual militancy" expose a variety of sacred and secular elements that African Americans blended together in order to understand their world (p. 55). This book makes an important contribution to the field of Civil War history in its resistance to narratives that overgeneralize African Americans as culturally and religiously uniform. Their performances showcased unique ways of knowing that forged collectivity among African people in America, yet the complexity of black American identities simultaneously resisted that unity. The non-Protestant and non-Christian musical and spiritual practices acknowledged throughout the book complicate and humanize individual members of the First South Carolina Volunteers and serve as an excellent reminder about American cultural diversity. Jabir turns to popular culture products in the second half of the book. He analyzes scripting and scoring tropes in the Hollywood blockbuster film Glory (1989), revealing an investment in conditioning viewers to understand the Civil War in terms of black victimhood and white altruism. The author relates this framing, what he terms the "sonic politics" of Hollywood history, to the First South Carolina Volunteers and the problematic archival records he engaged during his research (p. 136). This chapter typifies how Jabir confronts narrative strategies that centralize black cultural assimilation and will prove to be a fantastic companion to Gary W. Gallagher's Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2008), Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1997), and a host of other texts on Civil War memory and public history. Elizabeth Ozment University of Virginia Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Cohort-generations and the cumulative effects of life-events on political integration in Hungary

AbstractIn our study, we wish to give an overview of integration mechanisms in Hungarian society. We focus on system integration, that is, on the political processes and interactions that re-establish social mechanisms of co-existence in society. We approach system integration from the dimension of action. Three hypotheses are tested on the database of Integration and Disintegration Processes within the Hungarian Society project. We present what explanatory factors influence the electoral, traditional and direct forms of political activity. We also discuss the relationship between cohorts, life events and participation, as well as the link between clients and participation.

Racial structural solidarity

Effective political action against racial injustice requires a conception of solidarity based on the social and material reality of this form of injustice. I develop such a notion of solidarity by extending Iris Young’s notion of ‘gender as seriality’ to race. This notion of solidarity avoids the problems encountered by Shelby’s ‘common oppression view’ and Gooding-Williams’s non-foundational view. On Shelby’s ‘common oppression’ view, solidarity is based solely on the victims’ shared condition of oppression. According to Shelby, all victims of racial oppression can be reasonably expected to endorse a set of principles that will move them to common action. Gooding-Williams sheds doubt on the idea that such shared principles exist and defends instead a view of politics as action-in-concert, marked by reasonable disagreement, and a non-foundational view of solidarity constituted through the controversy of politics rather than given in virtue of pre-political commitments or interests. I argue that the problem with such a notion is that it is unable to link the material and social reality of the unjust structures to the forms of political action that would effectively transform social reality. My notion of ‘structural racial solidarity’ would avoid these problems.

Investigating the roots of political disengagement of young Greek Cypriots

ABSTRACTThis study attempted to disentangle the issues underlying the marked drop recorded in political engagement of young Greek Cypriots. To reveal the dynamic processes through which people debate, disagree or convince each other towards the formation of political attitudes, eight focus-groups were carried out with a total of forty participants, equally distributed according to age and gender. The analysis showed that young Greek Cypriots appear uncertain for their future, pessimistic, cynical, and highly disillusioned with traditional politics. Contrary to what is observed in other European countries, young Greek Cypriots do not experiment with alternative forms of political action, remain inactive, and although the country's politicised culture of the past is still reflected in their theoretical discussions about social issues, they express embarrassment and confusion when asked to elaborate on how theory could be transformed into practice. They associate politics with corruption and economic interests, they are scornfully disillusioned with the European Union, and they emotionally distance themselves from important changes to come with the possible reunification of Cyprus. Young Greek Cypriots appear insecure, pessimistic, disoriented, uninspired, and in an urgent need to rediscover passion for ideas which they cannot any more find in traditional politics and forms of political action.

Acting on Media: Influencing, Shaping and (Re)Configuring the Fabric of Everyday Life

Computerization, digitalization and datafication are by far no neutral or self-dependent occurrences. They are, to a large degree, co-determined by heterogeneous actors who reflect about, construct, configure, manipulate or even control media. The contributors to this issue put the spotlight on these actors and investigate how they influence, shape and (re)configure broader social constellations. Instead of exploring what people <em>do with media</em>, the articles focus on the many ways individuals, civil society initiatives, corporations and social movements <em>act on media</em>. The notion of <em>acting on media</em> denotes the efforts of a wide range of actors to take an active part in the molding of media organizations, infrastructures and technologies that are part of the fabric of everyday life. Therefore, by conceptualizing <em>acting on media</em> as a form of political action, the issue aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on the media practice paradigm.

Screening Minors in Latin America Cinema ed. by Carolina Rocha, Georgia Seminet (review)

Reviewed by: Screening Minors in Latin America Cinema ed. by Carolina Rocha, Georgia Seminet Lora Looney Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet, editors. Screening Minors in Latin America Cinema. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2014. 204p. Distinct from their first volume on youth in cinema, Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film, in this new book Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet narrow the scope to Latin America, including Brazil, and compile an anthology of varied critical approaches and research findings. Presented across four thematic sections are twelve chapters written in English that treat films spanning from 1976 to 2013. The theory which binds the compendium of articles is the youth protagonist’s construction of subjectivity and agency on screen. While children and adolescents are frequently examined as “others” in film, drawing on Ann E. Kaplan, Robyn McCallum and Lisa Cartwright’s scholarship, Rocha and Seminet propose that the adult gaze can be reversed so that “the look” is a relational or intersubjective process. Accordingly, as the contributors show, the filmmakers’ recasting of the juvenile protagonist’s alterity moves away from the representation of children and adolescents as the object of adult gaze and moves towards empowering them by giving them voice and selfhood. Cinematic techniques as well as plot devices and sequences support the theses. However, the last section does not conform to this method because it focuses on documentaries whose making and viewing experience are dissimilar. Although Caribbean film is notably absent, each article provides a clear sociohistorical context for the film(s) examined. The social and political milieu is frequently the object of critique through the lens of the young character’s agency. Agency without resort to language is explored by several authors. Rocha argues that the camera focalizes the child’s view in Mutum (2007) because the young character does not have full access to language. Sophie Dufays proposes that La rabia (2008) privileges visual and sound effects to connect with narrative relationships between parents and children in the absence of language. Alejandra Josiowicz discusses girlhood and non-normative sexualities as a form of political activism. In a long discussion on La rabia, and referring to Cartwright’s theory of empathetic identification, Josiowicz shows how the autistic protagonist develops agency through tactile and aural expressions as well as making drawings. [End Page 242] Several articles delve into the frontier between the child’s world and the adult sphere. Examining Marisa Sistach’s films, and introducing her study with Amy Hinterberger’s philosophy, Traci Roberts-Camps defines agency as a means to resist, negotiate and transform power. That she proposes the characters’ lack of agency may complicate the anthology’s overall thesis on youth empowerment. However, Roberts-Camps, who is widely published, deftly explores adult complicity, and institutional neglect, in the gender-based violence experienced by the female adolescent characters in Perfume de violetas (Nadie te oye) (2000) and La niña de la piedra (Nadie te ve) (2006). In Postcoup Chile, the film, Julio comienza en julio (1976) demonstrates that children are not exiled from history according to Walescka Pino-Ojeda, who states that through youthful rebellion, the characters embody continuity of order and the promise of change. Set in 1980s Peru, Las malas intenciones (2011) brings the adult spectator into the child’s interior world through the juvenile character’s imaginative practice. In this film Sarah Thomas effectively shows that the protagonist, although frail and powerless in the adult world, is an agent in the imaginative realm. Child’s play is the focus of Amanda Holmes study on Lola (1989). She examines child’s play, via the analysis of camerawork, as a means for the daughter to construct a deepening relationship with her mother in the context of Post-earthquake Mexico City. Creatively, Laura Senio-Blair analyzes two well-known road films, La misma luna (2007) and Sin nombre (2009), against the Hollywood genre to discover that the youth protagonists crossing the U.S./Mexico border are not narcissistic escapists but rather agents of innocence, optimism and vulnerability. Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema is Rocha’s fourth co-edited volume on Latin American film, and Seminet’s second. It is...

CRIMINALIZING YOUTH POLITICS/A CRIMINALIZAÇÃO DAS PRÁTICAS POLÍTICAS DA JUVENTUDE

Abstract: The present article aims to analyze the contemporary political theories which affirm that the use of the new media - mainly the internet - for politics online would replace more traditional means of democratic participation. Its scope is understanding the political motivations of the individuals - primarily the youth - involved in these direct actions like the use of DDoS, and also its criminalization by the State, indispensable to the understanding this new form of political activism. Keywords: Slacktivism; DDoS; Hacktivism; Cyberpolitics; Democratic Participation.

How do social beliefs affect political action motivation? The cases of Russia and Ukraine

Political action is one of the main methods of social change. Previous research has shown that readiness to participate in such actions is determined by an evaluation of the current situation. The question arises as to how stable beliefs influence such evaluations. In this study we have analyzed the link between such beliefs and readiness to participate in political actions. We assumed that just and dangerous world beliefs are factors that influence readiness to participate in political actions. However, these factors’ influence is mediated by political efficacy. Respondents from Russia ( N = 440) and Ukraine ( N = 249) participated in our study. Structural equation modeling partly confirmed the hypotheses. It has shown that the more people believe in a just world and the less they believe in a dangerous world, the higher their internal and external political efficacy is. Political efficacy, in turn, predicts readiness to participate in various forms of political action. Internal political efficacy is positively linked to normative political collective actions, while external political efficacy is negatively linked to nonnormative collective actions. However, the extent of these patterns is dependent on cultural context.

Violent, political, and administrative repression of the Chinese minority in Indonesia, 1945-1998

Since Indonesian independence, its Chinese minority has been a victim of violent outbreaks, but also of restrictive policies arising from politics and administrative measures. From about 1957, with the closure of Chinese-language schools and subsequent regulations about expression of Chinese culture, many speak of the "erasure" of that culture through such restrictions. Violent anti-Chinese outbreaks have proceeded from the Indonesian Revolution and the presidency of Soekarno (especially the so-called "PP-10" measures against Chinese rural traders) to the era of Suharto, which began with the 1965-1967 anti-Communist massacres and their effects on ehtnic Chinese and came to an end with the provocation of violence against ethnic Chinese in major Indonesian cities. This paper also discusses the reactions to these waves of anti-Chinese measures: rejection, flight, but also countermeasures in the form of political activity. In the years since Reformasi, as attacks on them have subsided, many Chinese Indonesians have chosen to emphasize their participation in Indonesian history and their positive contributions to Indonesian culture.

Swimming with sharks, ecological feminism and posthuman language politics

The critical project the authors propose overturns the assumptions of human centrality that have underpinned much educational thought and practice, questions the ways in which the human and nonhuman are defined, and opens up new forms of engagement with the material, corporeal, and affective world. The authors ask how critical language studies can be rethought to incorporate a better understanding of the place of humans in the more-than-human world. They discuss the growing body of work that connects concern with the environment with other forms of political activism, particularly through an ecological feminist lens. Bringing this discussion back to focus on the place of language and pedagogy in human exceptionalism, the authors explore ways in which alternative understandings of human relations to the more-than-human material world can reorient the logocentricity of critical language studies toward different forms of critical engagement and entangled pedagogies.

Komunikasi Politik Kepresidenan: Studi Kasus Komunikasi Politik Presiden RI Ke-6 Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

Political communication as in other systems, also practiced in the political life in Indonesia. Every day, goverment leaders or political leader deliver statements (official or unofficial), opinions on various forums, and comments about the problems that occur in genedral. It is one of the concrete forms of political activity in which the political elite acted as a communicator. The presidential political communicator is the 6th President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY). In Presidential political communication, the president himself speaks to the media. According to the presidential spokesman at the time, Andi Malarangeng, said that during a press conference, if the material are concering basic or fundamental matters, and has direct impact to the peope, will be made by the president himself. This article will talk about how Indonesia 6th President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono uses political communication throught mass media, and other media, to convey messages to the people

Reinventing Marx for an Age of Finance

This essay accounts for the production of specifically financial products such as hedges, focusing on how and why their liquidity adds value through a critical re-reading of Marx’s account of relative surplus value in the production of commodities. It then considers the political implications of its restatement of Marx’s view of capitalism, arguing that a political price should be exacted for rolling over the option of historical justice in the sense of sudden disaccumulation by issuing a government-backed liquidity guarantee (or “put”). Although economists have calculated the price of a systemic liquidity put as a liability of government--which becomes very high at moments like 2008--they do not take into account forms of political action that increase uncertainty about whether government will provide the guarantee, and in what form, if any, it will demand to be repaid. The essay seeks to pose this last, ultimately political, question about the financialization of capitalism.

Eulogies for the Resistance

Recent studies into the notion of crisis argue that affective states of insecurity can offer an instrumental utility to elites seeking to sustain existing power relations. Through their discursive construction, such imaginative landscapes help legitimize previously illegitimate forms of political action, rationalize heightened forms of collective sacrifice and instill new disciplinary technologies among political subjects. Building on this growing body of scholarly work, in this study I use critical discourse analysis (CDA) to address Hizbullah’s mobilization of a specific ‘crisis imaginary’ as part of its efforts to legitimize its ongoing involvement in the Syrian civil war. This perceptual regime works to uphold a ‘state of exception’ for Hizbullah, sustain the practice of martyrdom as a form of Girardian ‘mimetic desire’ and structure a wider moral universe that continues to bind the party’s audience to the resistance society while maintaining their continued docility.

“MULIPROPAZ”: EXPERIENCIAS DE MEDIACIÓN DESDE LA POTENCIA DE LA VIDA: UNA LECTURA DESDE LA PAZ IMPERFECTA

The plural forms of peace have existed throughout history; they have been expressed in local, particular and especially imperfect ways which have allowed life itself to thrive. However, forms of violence have hidden them under the premise of fear devices that break subjectivities and identities with an obvious outcome of exerting hegemonic power over others. Among conflict of territories that have been historically marked by sustained impoverishment in a violent way, there are groups that deploy actions recognized as pacifists mediations and allow the emergence of “other forms” of inhabiting territories, in which life is enhanced in its most generic way and configures forms of political action as re-existence possibilities in the face of opacities of hegemonic forms which invalidate inhabitants. This document approaches the question about local mobilization forms centered in pacifist and nonviolent practices for the configuration of inhabitation forms and the realities that need to be transform.

Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s

Michael Stewart Foley's Front Porch Politics offers a panoramic view of Americans who joined a variety of social movements in the two decades after the 1960s. Foley argues that interpretations of this era's political history have overemphasized how Americans voted and underemphasized their other forms of political activity and civic engagement. The book's central contention is that “in many ways the 1970s and 1980s turned out to be more like the ‘Sixties’ than were the 1960s themselves” (p. 9). Front Porch Politics is structured as a series of compact portraits of particular movements, synthesizing the scholarship of historians and social scientists into issue-oriented narratives of activists who engaged a sense of place. Activists who fought against chemical and toxic waste in their neighborhoods, who resisted busing in their communities, or who tried to stop the construction of nuclear power plants reflected, for Foley, not a narrow or selfish focus on the preservation of ways of life in the face of social and economic change but a flourishing of grassroots citizen action, albeit that often “relied on self-help” as a key tenet of activism (p. 6).