Abstract In 2019 and 2022, Indigenous leaders mobilized rural comunas in general strikes that forced the national government of Ecuador to negotiate the terms of newly introduced fiscal and policy measures. These mobilizations came despite long-term demographic decline in these same rural comunas . Further, the ministries charged with granting this authority to comunas today exercise little oversight. Why, then, has the comuna persisted as the preferred form of local organization amid widespread shifts to postagrarian ways of life? We have approached this problem through field research in over a dozen rural comunas , a review of comuna registrations, interviews with comuna leadership, and intergenerational dialogues among comuna members. In practical terms, we find comuna leadership consolidating an agenda focused on infrastructure development in the place of activism for land or the pursuit of agricultural investments. At the same time, it is through rituals of registration and management that local authorities not only find legitimacy but also secure a measure of “cultural autonomy” insofar as comuna members associate the disciplined fulfillment of procedures with the historical expansion of social rights. As the younger generation pursues nonagrarian careers, older comuna members underscore the mutuality of comuna life and lay out a moral purpose and a pathway that in effect centers state procedure as essential for indigenous autonomy.

Locked in the room with a dead man. This is how the narrator of Arrigo, Marcelo Ridenti's debut novel, begins (telling us) and ends (writing) the story of the activist who encompasses a century of revolutionary struggles in Brazil. From the general strike of 1917—in which he participated as a child—through the Tenente revolts, the resistance to the Vargas dictatorship, the armed struggle against the Civil-Military Dictatorship of 1964, and on to Lula's victory in 2002, Arrigo's trajectory—which also includes the fight against Francoism in the Spanish Civil War, the resistance to Nazism in France, socialist training in Cuba, the enthusiasm for Mao's Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the celebration of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal—embodies decisive moments of what Eric Hobsbawm defined as the "Age of Revolutions."

ABSTRACT Hindered by regulatory and contractual restrictions, and amid tension with the established press, the early British Broadcasting Company (Corporation after 1926) was frustrated in its efforts to develop reportage and newsgathering functions. After it emerged as an important source of information during the General Strike, when some restrictions were temporarily lifted, it created a regular news service which over time evolved into an expanded entity with broadened mission and resources. This article, incorporating primary sources from the BBC Written Archives Centre, traces the non-linear development of the BBC’s news operations in its formative years, and highlights personalities, policies, discussions, and organizational shifts relevant to their operations.

A comprehensive dataset on political strikes in Latin America: Event characteristics, mobilization dynamics, and socio-political contexts (1990–2020)

Is nonviolence revolutionary? It’s a contested question: some scholars and activists argue that nonviolent resistance is only suited to reform systems of oppression, while others believe that it has revolutionary potential. This paper examines the concept of revolutionary nonviolence through the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his working-class contemporary, the ultra-radical William Benbow. Through a reading of Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy” and Benbow’s Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes I argue that the only revolutionary form of nonviolent resistance is the general strike. I advance a reading of Shelley’s “Mask” as figural interpretation rather than allegory, drawing on the work of Erich Auerbach. I conclude by examining the proximity between “The Mask” and a print published by Benbow during the Queen Caroline Affair in order to demonstrate a shared radical language vital to understanding the politics of Shelley’s most famous political poem.

This paper examines how social movements influenced Greece’s macroeconomic adjustment during the financial crisis and austerity period (2010–2015). The purpose is to identify the channels through which mobilizations—anti-austerity protests, general strikes, youth actions, and solidarity networks—interacted with the economy. The main hypothesis is that social protest operates as an economic force via three mechanisms: expectations (shifts in household and firm beliefs affecting consumption, confidence, and investment), disruption (coordination and operating costs from strikes and stoppages affecting output and employment), and institutional feedback (policy sequencing and credibility under EU–IMF conditionality shaping behavior). Using a theoretical, literature-based methodology—a structured narrative review of peer-reviewed studies, policy documents, and historical syntheses—we map these mechanisms onto outcomes (GDP, unemployment, investment, consumer confidence). The findings support the hypothesis: expectations and feedback dominate the transmission to investment and confidence, while repeated disruption is most salient for labor-market dynamics; solidarity infrastructures cushion social costs but have ambiguous aggregate effects. The scope is interpretive and Greece-specific, yielding testable propositions for future causal work. Limitations follow from the design: the study does not estimate effect sizes or establish causality; conclusions are analytically persuasive rather than statistically demonstrative. The contribution is a mechanism map that integrates social-movement theory with crisis political economy and clarifies where empirical identification should focus.

In the growing secondary literature on Jacques Derrida’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s text – “Force of Law” and “Toward the Critique of Violence,” respectively – the former is often read as elaborations on the conditions of (im)possibility for violence and nonviolence in the latter. Through a reading of a little known and rarely read anarcho-pacifist pamphlet by Arnold Roller entitled “Der Generalsteik und die Soziale Revolution,” I deconstruct the ambivalent meaning of “Gewalt [Force/Violence]” to outline a potentially anarcho-pacificist position of nonviolence latent in Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence” as the “pure means” of anarchist praxis in the general strike. Roller’s pamphlet provides a supplement to Benjamin’s theorization of the general/political strike through an articulation of what comes after the de(con)struction of the sovereign apparatus of power through the creation of a society not predicated upon the State’s monopoly on violence. In this sense, then, I outline a critique of deconstruction in which it is parasitic upon the State’s monopoly of violence and, in fact, becomes complicit in the replication and reproduction of violence and the State. The anarcho-pacifist position, I contend, makes use of a revolutionary “Gewalt,” or “divine force,” as Benjamin articulates in the end of his article, which “holds back” the violence in the signification of force-without-violence. I conclude that deconstruction necessitates a violent suppression of any nonviolent position under the ruse of a deconstructive affinity with justice.

Abstract Recent appeals to the aesthetic-affective realm, specifically to sublimity, tend to concentrate on how it can work to disrupt political power. But another, older, tradition of interpretation looks to sublimity not as a generator of dissensus, but rather as a feeling that can bind people together to enact democratic power. Its roots are in eighteenth-century figures as diverse as Kant, Robespierre, and John Adams. But there is a perennial problem with this tradition: The enthusiastic exaltation associated with being motivated by the sublimity of popular democratic movements is difficult to differentiate from a similar motivation evident in fascist ones. I engage this difficulty in two ways. First, I trace how it troubles William E. Connolly’s attempt to link the aesthetic-affective dimension in politics with the myth of a general strike as a way of motivating future collective democratic action. But my engagement with Connolly is not just critical. It also, secondly, draws positive value from his thinking about how mortality needs to be folded into our political sensorium. That insight is crucial if we are to conceive and cultivate a sense of sublimity that is associated not just with enthusiasm, but also with a certain kind of sobriety about our finitude, our human limits. The embrace of a two-fold sense of sublimity, encompassing both “enthusing” as well as “sobering” dimensions, can help constitute a democratic sensibility that deflates proto fascistic tendencies to see ourselves as embodying an unlimited will to power when we participate in collective insurgency.

Fault characterization is a crucial aspect of exploring geothermal resources. Recent research approves lineament mapping as a useful tool in structural studies. It is largely problematic to decipher the lineaments that are specifically linked to faults, ridges, or other tectonic structures. The study aims to characterize faults from lineaments using magnetic data from the Magadi-Nguruman area, west of Lake Magadi within the Kenyan Rift system. The magnetic data was reduced to pole before lineament generation using the Center of Exploration Targeting (CET) processes and Euler Deconvolution. A rose diagram was used to determine the orientation of the 21 major lineaments. Seven cross-sectional slices across the lineaments provided the data for calculating Euler solutions for the linear magnetic anomaly sources. The obtained Euler plots delineated the approximate depth, dip angles, identity, and strike of the structures linked to the lineaments. The case study results characterized 80% of the generated lineaments as faults with a general strike in the N-S direction. The dipping angles of the detected faults ranged between 36° and 83°, with the majority dipping towards the southern basement of Lake Magadi. The depth ranges of the detected faults were between 0.25 km and 0.74 km. The trends observed in this work are consistent with the reported regional fault orientations, thus qualifying the protocol used in this work. Magadi-Nguruman is sufficiently faulted for a possible geothermal system near Lake Magadi.

Abstract Since the Wright brothers demonstrated the first powered, sustained, and controlled flight in 1903, the airspace has been shared between birds and humans. Novel aircraft and advanced mobility concepts such as urban air mobility (UAM) are emerging in full swing. In that concept, a safe and efficient aviation transportation system will use highly automated aircraft that will transport passengers or cargo at low altitudes within and between metropolitan regions. To accomplish these missions, new types of aircraft which are sometimes known as air taxis are being developed. A successful integration of these aircraft into existing airspace is complicated and needs to take into account various aspects. One of these is the risk of wildlife strikes in general and bird strikes in particular. While bird strike constitutes a risk to any type of aircraft, the risk is predicted to be higher in case of air taxis. The proposed operational cruising altitude of air taxis is lower resulting in higher probability of collision as these are the altitudes where birds typically fly. In addition, air taxis are smaller in size and have lower certification requirements compared to conventional aircraft. As a result, the severity of damaging bird strikes is higher. To assess the risk and formulate suitable regulations, an extensive analysis is required providing more quantitative insight into the bird strike challenge. Therefore, a theoretical model of bird strike to quantify the impact force exerted due to a strike by considering different bird and aircraft-related parameters was developed previously. This paper aims to validate this theoretical model experimentally. While impact forces have been extensively studied for bird strikes in case of conventional aircraft, this work seeks to apply these principles in a novel context, where traditional aircraft standards may not fully address the unique challenges posed by air taxis. The paper presents a methodology for implementing an experimental setup, allowing for the theoretical impact force model to be fully validated and providing insights into the bird strike influencing parameters. A test matrix containing 7 test cases, 9 test scenarios, and 135 iterations is formulated to conduct the bird strike experiment, and the influencing parameters are considered for theoretical model verification. The paper closes with the presentation of the experimental results for validating the theoretical model which indicate 92.89 % conformance of experimental results with the theoretical model.

Abstract Scholars have shown how race war is foundational to the discipline of International Relations and the hierarchies of international order. This paper asks how the legacies of slavery in global politics and the politics of race war shaped other conceptions of war as global politics in international relations—mainly class war through a genealogy of the general strike. This paper demonstrates how the general strike was transformed from this radical overturning of the slave master's world order (race war) into a politics of labor reform (class war). I trace the “general strike” through Robert Wedderburn's interpretation of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the Demerara Revolt 1823, and its subsequent canonization in socialist thought by the radical William Benbow. Wedderburn's holiday sought to overturn the ontological status of the enslaved as property through a radicalized race and class war. British abolitionists reformed the politics of the strike to maintain a class peace, by divorcing class war from the radical politics of the Haitian Revolution and incorporating the enslaved into forms of waged labor. Finally, British socialists sought to revive antagonistic narratives of class war but did so by warding off the radical legacy of the Haitian Revolution and excluding the enslaved.

This article analyses the evolution of the system of GULAG special regime camps during 1948–1954 and the development of the status, identity and the formation of the community of political prisoners incarcerated there, as well as the resistance and struggle of political prisoners for the liquidation of the special imprisonment regime in the camp is also reviewed. The author of the article summarizes the most recent works of Lithuanian and foreign historians, and has utilized an abundance of memoirs of former political prisoners and sources published in separate collections of documents. The Soviet Union officially maintained that there were no political prisoners in the country, only persons who had committed crimes against the state. Articles on anti-state crimes of the criminal codes of Soviet republics were applied broadly in practice. Their wording meant that not only ideological enemies of the Soviet state and the system were covered by the political charges, but also affected apolitical Soviet citizens. Therefore, political prisoners imprisoned in the GULAG for anti-state crimes for a long time failed to form an ideologically uniform and purposeful community able to successfully resist abuse at the hands of the camp administration and criminal prisoners. However, after the Second World War the composition of the political prisoner population changed: more determined and active enemies of the Soviet system were imprisoned in camps, including members of anti-Soviet armed resistance and underground youth organisations. This not only changed the situation of political prisoners in the camps, but also was one on the main reasons for separating political prisoners from the general prisoner population in 1948 and moving the politicals to camps of special regime. Camps of special prison regimes, which were active in 1948–1954, possessed features of both camps and closed prisons. Their aim was to isolate and then physically and morally break the most active enemies of the Soviet state. However, despite the strict regime, special camps became the main place for the political prisoners' consciousness-raising and discovery of their identity. Continuing their tradition of armed resistance, members of resistance movements who were imprisoned in camps after the Second World War struggled against criminal prisoners and prisoners who assisted the administration of camps. The forms of resistance were similar but they developed in an organised manner, to various extents, in all camps of the special regime. During 1951–1952, the resistance of political prisoners in the special regime camps manifested itself by single actions and hunger-strikes. While the community of political prisoners was taking shape, these spontaneous unorganised protest actions developed into mass strikes and revolts. In 1953–1954 thousands of prisoners of Gorlag, Rechlag and Steplag camps went on strike. During the general strikes. the strength of the relations among the communities of political prisoners and the effectiveness of methods of unarmed struggle were tested. Although the largest strikes during 1953–1954 in the special regime camps were suppressed, the Soviet government was forced to satisfy the demands of the prisoners: liquidate the special imprisonment regime; create better working and living conditions; begin the review of criminal cases of political prisoners and then to rehabilitate them. By the end of 1956, most political prisoners were released from the camps and amnestied.

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the impact of citizens' perceptions of economic and political conditions on nonviolent uprisings. For a global sample of high‐income (Europe) and developing economies (Sub‐Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and North Africa), on average, negative perceptions of political conditions have a significant positive effect on the number of anti‐government protests and general strikes while negative perceptions of economic conditions do not, even after accounting for actual economic conditions and the quality of governance. This holds for European and high‐income countries but not for developing economies where both economic and political perceptions matter. The international contagion of protests attenuates this regional heterogeneity, possibly implying that in Europe, the incidence of uprisings in nearby countries tends to generate protests at home through its effect on political perceptions. This invites the possibility of countries perennially facing vicious cycles of protests. Overall, the effects of political perceptions and protest contagion are robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables, seemingly valid instrumental variables, alternative count‐data estimators, and sample composition.

This article examines the 2016–2017 general strike (hartal or bandh) in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the site of a nearly eighty-year struggle for self-determination. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork (2016–2018) conducted in the capital city of Srinagar amid and in the aftermath of the indefinite strike, I show how the strike and the suspension of daily life it entailed was sustained through novel spatiotemporal techniques that coordinated and routinized the actions of the Kashmiri public. Yet sustaining the strike was not only defined by routine and self-restraint. Instead, as the article demonstrates, certain forms of financial labor, too, prolonged the strike—but they did so, counterintuitively, by breaking it. I focus in particular on Kashmiri bank employees, who were at times seen as betraying the strike, but who described their continued work during strike hours as essential for keeping the economy and hence society running. By emphasizing bank employees’ liminal position of breaking the strike while supporting the cause of Kashmiri self-determination, I highlight the labor, sacrifice, and ambivalence that sustain—and threaten to unravel—political mobilizations.

ABSTRACT English-speaking Canadians seemed largely removed from the dramatic international upheavals of 1968. The events of that year in English Canada bore faint resemblance to what was unfolding elsewhere: no general strikes paralyzed Canada; police did not fire on peaceful protestors; assassins did not shoot prominent figures; riots did not erupt in cities; tanks did not roll through the streets. Canada’s 1968 was, in part, a Canadian affair, reflecting the country’s distinctive history and culture. But in English Canada, 1968 was less a national phenomenon than a North American one. English Canadian radicals were less inclined to rebel against the domestic establishment than against the United States, often echoing the arguments and ideas of their American counterparts. English Canadians occupied a peripheral position within the broader North American context, meaning that protests were milder in Canada than south of the border. Canadians reacted with horror to what they saw in the United States, but at the same time they reflected American thought. Canadians have long defined themselves in opposition to their southern neighbor, but 1968 revealed that much of their critique of the United States came from Americans themselves.

Abstract For decades, the study of Chartism has been one of the most vibrant fields of modern British history. Indeed, this nineteenth-century radical movement was a major empirical focus for proponents of the so-called linguistic turn that has exerted such a major influence on the discipline. Interest in the Chartists does not abate, with valuable recent studies all combining—to greater or lesser extent—close attention to Chartist verbal and symbolic forms of communication with novel thematic concerns. However, more remains to be said about the language of Chartism, the topic that provided the original impetus for so much subsequent work. Specifically, the generally accepted argument that languages of constitutionalism and democracy were inextricably intertwined can be questioned, a task made easier by digitization of key organs of the Chartist press. This article revisits this intertwining in the pages of the Northern Star from the movement’s beginnings in the late 1830s to its disintegration in the late 1840s. It commences with results of a quantitative analysis of Chartist discourse and reconsideration of the relationship between the constitutional and democratic idioms in the movement’s early phase. Four factors are then discussed, which help explain the increasing prevalence of the language of democracy through the 1840s: heightened social conflict during the general strike of 1842; Chartist engagement in formal politics; international developments; and the crisis of 1848. However, despite the dominant linguistic trend, connections between democracy and social class, forged in the early 1840s, were not immutable but contingent.

The article presents an analysis of the approach of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to the colo-nial question. The purpose of this article is to provide the analysis of the programme suggestions and tactics of the Brit-ish communists for resolving of the colonial and national questions in 1920s and to answer the question why the CPGB’s colonial platforms were relevant and unpopular at the same time. The relevance of the research topic stems from the fact that the communists in their programmes raised the question of self-determination of colonial peoples. The national question remains significant nowadays, while the experience of the British communist understanding of the issue of self-determination is little-studied. A variety of sources is used in the article: the programmes of the CPGB of 1924 and 1929, the Communist Papers, party resolutions and manifestos, the documents of the Communist International (CI). At the beginning of the article the author provides the data on the development of the national movements and the over-all economic decline of the British Empire. In the second part the author analyzes the CPGB platform concerning the co-lonial peoples. Moreover, the tactics of the CPGB are analyzed through the prism of the regulations of the Congresses and Plenums of the CI in 1920s. Then the author marks a number of factors in the British Empire and its metropolis which were favorable for the activi-ties of the CPGB in 1920s. Among them are the aggressive policies of the British governments in colonies and depend-ent territories, the failure of the mandate system of the League of Nations, the overall decline of the imperialist ideology in the British society and the rise of the labor movement in 1925 – 1926. After that the factors which obstructed the communist activities are named: the defeat of the General Strike, repressions against the British communists and the CI’s line change. Though the author concludes that all the negative factors are not sufficient for the explanation of the com-munists’ colonial rhetoric unpopularity. As a result, the author turns to the ideological sources of the CPGB colonial platform and formulates the general conclu-sion that the reason of the failures of the British communists in their attempts of making their position on the British Empire widespread consists in their radical position on self-determination, which was neither pragmatic, nor popular among the British workers.

The article examines the quasi-religious mode of creativity of the Soviet avant-garde film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) in the context of secular modern culture. Since the time of the French Revolution, the theme of violence, which has penetrated into European public discourse, has firmly fixed in the public consciousness the indissoluble connection between the semantics of revolution and terror. The phenomenon of Sacramental violence, considered in detail, refers to the theory of "proletarian violence", the ideologists of which were the philosophers Georges Sorel (1847-1922) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The "revolutionary trilogy", created under the influence of their teachings, contains the theological justifications of revolutionary terror, which determined the legitimacy of violence on the part of the proletariat, starting with the idea of a general strike and ending with the world socialist Revolution. Basically the "revolutionary trilogy" is a secular hybrid form containing many heterogeneous religious elements, among which Marxism as a quasi-religion plays a dominant role, which is associated with the introduction of class attitudes into drama and the imaginative structure of Eisenstein's films. The trilogy presents inversions of messianic models borrowed by marxism from the Russian culture of the Silver Age: the messianism of the proletariat, the Russian Christ As the Messiah, the kingdom of God on earth. A special attention in the course of considering the phenomenon of sacred violence is given to the concept of the Sacred by Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), the secular analogue of which contributes to the formation of the Soviet model of sacredness. The article also examines the concept of sacred violence as presented by the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962), which helps to identify the archaic religious layer in the image of revolutionaries. Much attention is paid to the study of the theme of sacrifice, captured by Eisenstein's "cinema of violence". Following the provisions of the theory of the French philosopher Rene Girard (1923-2015), the presence of several types of sacrifice in the trilogy, including archaic and Christian, is justified. The text emphasizes that the sacrifice performs the function of sacralizing both the martyrs of the revolution and the power established with their help.

Field observation has been carried out recently in the Tanjung Aur II region, South Bengkulu in order to recognize the structural configuration of rock sequences, employing two fundamental approaches such as the analysis of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and the surface mapping, particularly on geological structures. The DEM analysis reveals two general patterns of the NE-SW and NW-SE lineaments. The NE-SW trend appears consistent with the structural features resulted from the WNW-directed rifting event, whereas the NW-SE orientation seems coincident with the general strike of the Bengkulu Basin. The field mapping has recognized five types of brittle structures and two ductile deformations. The outcropping brittle deformation includes the Tanjung Aur II-A listric extensional fault, Tanjung Aur II-B listric extensional fault, Tanjung Aur II-C domino extensional fault, and Tanjung Aur II-D listric extensional fault that all strike to NE-SW, and the Air Selali compressional fault which trends to NW-SE. The recognized ductile structures are those of the Air Kenidian Anticline and Syncline, which have a general trend to NW-SE. Importantly, the encountered structures suggest two distinct episodes of tectonic events, transtension and transpression. The transtensional regime associated with the WNW extension of rifting. The synrift event commenced in Paleogene or Paleocene-Eocene time, and proceeded up to Neogene. Hence, the sedimentary influx within the basin had likely been accommodated by the occurring tectonic deformation which resulted in the synrift listric extensional faults. The transpressional regime in the study area led to ductile deformation responsible for thrusting and folding of sedimentary sequences. This post-rifting episode perhaps associated with the onset of Barisan orogeny that allowed inversion of sedimentary basin in Late Neogene or Plio-Pleistocene time. Herein, this tectonic episode is considered as the last event that caused the rock successions to be uplifted and the generated structures in rock units to be exposed at the surface due mainly to denudation and erosion.

For forty-two days in the late spring and early summer of 1919, the city of Winnipeg, Manitobasituated on the northeastern edge of the North American Great Plains, near the longitudinal centre of Canadabecame the stage for the most dramatic confrontation between capital and labour in Canadian history. In a momentous display of working-class solidarity, some 35,000 workershalf of them belonging to no union at allout of a total population below 180,000, answered the call of the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council and downed their tools. The ensuing near-total shutdown of the city began in support of the metal and building trades workers' proto-industrial unionist demand that employers negotiate with a common front of trade unions collectively rather than one-by-one with individual union locals. However, the call for a general strike also served as a galvanizing moment for mass working-class anger and discontent fuelled by low wages, unemployment, and severe inflation in the post-World War I period. The Citizen's Committee of One-Thousand, formed by the business community to break the Strike, financed a vigilante police force nearly two-thousand strong. These "special constables" replaced the city police force, fired en masse by the mayor for strong pro-strike sympathies. Tensions rose as the Strike persisted and ultimately ended six weeks after it began through use of state violence: the arrest of union leaders; a riot that witnessed mounted police charge into a crowd of strikers killing two and injuring over thirty; and, finally, the military occupation of the downtown core by a thousand militiamen armed with machine guns and armoured vehicles. For a Better World: The Winnipeg General Strike & the Workers' Revolt is the latest addition to the substantial popular and scholarly literature on the Strike. Its main contribution lies more in breaking new ground and uncovering new avenues for research than it does in memorializing the Strike alone. The central themes and questions are raised by the editors in their comprehensive historiography and revisited in the concluding chapter. One such theme is the strike or revolution dichotomy. Was the Strike motivated by traditional trade union demands like collective bargaining and living wages? The arrested Strike leaders themselves held this position, albeit while awaiting trial on charges of seditious conspiracy. Or was the Strike a social