Grassroots Protest Research Articles

Climate Action and the UNCRC: A ‘Postpaternalist’ World Where Children Claim Their Own Rights

In this paper, it is argued that we are in a ‘postpaternalist’ era for children’s rights, involving grassroots action from children (for the first time, on a global scale) rather than well-meaning adults ‘giving’ children their rights. Child/youth climate action has involved under-18s acting for the environment through grassroots protest, media work and lobbying. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has arguably to date been approached in a paternalist way, whereby children need adults to help them to access rights. Yet, child/youth climate advocates have taken their own action, and demand equality as they enter rights spaces. They are frequently working with adults as equals and allies in litigating climate cases, for example. It is argued that (although there are rights challenges in a postpaternalist time) these young rights leaders have transformed human rights for the better, and adults should facilitate their work in a way that is child- and youth-friendly.

Belarusian Politics and Society Web Archive: Preserving the Belarusian Grassroots Protest

Abstract Belarusian Politics and Society (BPAS) is a curated web archive created under the auspices of the Ivy Plus Library Confederation to preserve online grassroots content created in, or related to, Belarus since 2020. The article describes the historical context of the creation of BPAS (focusing on the events in Belarus in 2020–2022 and particularly, the role of online media) and the web archiving context (by exploring Internet Archive’s coverage of Belarus) as well as demonstrates how both contexts guided the curatorial work on BPAS and the decision to focus the scope of collection on fragile grassroots content. Special attention is given to the issue of content loss and content shift in the Belarusian internet.

Walls: Participatory Design Activism

Nikki Juen and Basma Hamdy are two graphic design professors from North America and the Middle East respectively. Despite the distance between them, they are both operating in the spaces between the individual and institution, subject and system, and their practice, in different ways, is concerned with public mass demonstrations but also individual efforts and grass roots protest. They discuss how their approach to design teaching and practice is more concerned with energies over objects, with processes over products, and with legacies over artifacts and how their work moves beyond the four walls of the institution and outside the traditional definitions of design practice into fluid, participatory spaces.

Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil by Jacob Blanc

Reviewed by: Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil by Jacob Blanc Matthew P. Johnson Jacob Blanc Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. xviii + 296 pp. Table, notes, references, and index. $27.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-4780-0489-9); $104.95 cloth (ISBN 978-1-4780-0429-5); $27.95 electronic (ISBN 978-1-4780-0532-2). Jacob blanc's before the flood is the story of the Justice and Land Movement (MJT), a grassroots campaign by Brazilian farmers in western Paraná state to wrest compensation from Itaipu Binational, a government-owned corporation contracted to erect a big hydroelectric dam that would flood, among other things, their farms. The setting is the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the latter years of Brazil's repressive military dictatorship, which had started in 1964. In 1979, the military regime began a process known as abertura, a series of political reforms designed to stem the tide of popular protest by formally restoring some democratic freedoms. The Brazilian and Paraguayan governments had agreed to build the Itaipu Dam in 1973, and by the end of the decade, the governments had their sights set on completing the dam and filling its reservoir by October 1982. The indemnification process had been proceeding in a slow and, in the eyes of the farmers, unfair, manner. In the context of abertura and the looming flood, these farmers organized to demand just compensation for their soon-to-be-flooded lands. The protests culminated in two big encampments at Itaipu's offices in 1980 and 1981, which pushed the company to agree to some of the movement's demands. Blanc's story centers on two arguments. First, Blanc contends that an unintended consequence of building Itaipu was the rise of political consciousness among displaced farmers, who created a local protest movement (MJT) and helped engender a nation-wide land movement. Both campaigns sought to challenge the dictatorship itself and to advocate politically for those in the countryside. Second, Blanc maintains that class and race conditioned the experience [End Page 273] of dictatorship and redemocratization. For white farmers who owned land, the dictatorship was a period of unprecedented repression, whereas for landless farmers and Indigenous communities, it was a continuation of repression that the state had long subjected them to. Landed farmers were also more able to reap the rewards of protest than their landless and Indigenous counterparts. Blanc uses this second argument to challenge the traditional periodization of the dictatorship. He argues that emphasizing the dates that the military came to power and stepped down (1964-85) misrepresents the era as an unprecedented period of authoritarian rule for all Brazilians. Rather, for many marginalized communities, repression was rampant before and after the dictatorship, and for these groups, military rule was not a dramatic rupture from a state of freedom. This book also contributes to the literature on the dictatorship and abertura by drawing attention to the countryside, an area that scholars have long neglected in favor of social movements in urban centers. Lastly, Blanc builds on the work James Scott, who discusses how states see or overlook certain groups. Blanc argues that visibility works both ways and that scholarship needs to consider how certain groups attempt to be seen. Because of the national and international spotlight on Itaipu, the project was a unique chance for farmers to become visible to a state that otherwise overlooked them. The book's greatest strengths relate to its second argument. Blanc skillfully demonstrates how social status conditioned the experience of dictatorship and grassroots protest. He shows that the membership of the MJT was not as homogenous as is often portrayed. The movement had its own hierarchies that prioritized the needs of land-owning farmers, most of whom were of European descent, at the expense of the interests of landless famers, who were often non-white, and the Avá Guarani Indigenous community. The MJT's internal hierarchies also excluded women from leadership roles and largely erased their contributions from its history, despite the fact that women played essential roles in sustaining the movement. In the beginning...

A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s

Reviewed by: A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s by Elizabeth Todd-Breland Jillian Deas (bio) ELIZABETH TODD-BRELAND, A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s. University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN 9781469647173. Elizabeth Todd-Breland explores the history of Chicago schools to discuss the politics that impacted and influenced Black achievement and the power, resources, and representation that maintain controlling politics. According to Todd-Breland, desegregation is a strategy to acquire “educational equity and liberation” (p. 6), which shifts to community control as a strategy. The lack of consensus in Black Chicago communities regarding education led to the rise of community control as a tactic to improve the resources and programming that occurred within the Black communities dictated by local control. When the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965) launched, many community organizers transitioned from grassroots protest and activism to community-support agencies due to newly available funding opportunities. The rise of racial pride through Black Power movements led to the recognition that “African-Centered education” (p. 85) was starkly missing from what [End Page 155] students were receiving, which led to parents transitioning their children to private educational institutions. Todd-Breland discusses Independent Black Institutions by presenting the question, “can we create or re-create the Afrikan mind in a pre- dominantly European-American setting?” This educational framework only impacted a small portion of the Black population in Chicago during the 1960s, as most students remained in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. Harold Washington became Chicago’s first Black mayor in 1983, through the local political power possessed by Chicago Black teachers, who played a major role in his election. Accordingly, they exhibited heightened expectations of Washington to provide more equitable educational opportunities for Chicago’s teaching force and students. In the second section, Todd-Breland separates Chicago school reform and corporate school reform to analyze and consider the power, resources, and representation that impacted the Chicago education system. Centered on the rise of the first Black mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington seemed to introduce a new level of Black politics and achievement. By the close of Washington’s political career, education reform leaders were more interested in decentralizing schools to local control with the rise of corporate and private school reform. The rise of neoliberal ideology, private and school choice options, aimed to solve all the issues that parents, students, educators, and communities were concerned with, nonetheless, much of the interest in corporate reform was self-serving and motivated by the hope of making profits, which commodified students, particularly Black students. A strength of this book is the concurrent nature of the content. The grit and determination displayed by Chicago’s Black educators is displayed through their repeated strikes for better conditions for the students and themselves. Additionally, we are introduced to some key players in the teachers’ and community’s movement toward equitable educational opportunities, such as Rosie Simpson, Barbara Sizemore, Soyini Walton, Lillie Peoples, and Karen Lewis. Todd-Breland clarifies her hopes for Black women educators and the Black community and her purpose in pursuing this history in the introduction and then mutes many of her positions until the end of the book. This allows the reader to trust her objective analysis and the authenticity of the history being told. She lays out the facts as she found them through archives, oral histories (p. 23), other texts, and videos. Structurally, she intertwines the women presented, whether they were connected through shared experiences or ideologies. Prominent organizations and male activists are mentioned but are limited to their contributions or deviations from the movement; this helps keep the focus on the unwritten histories of these women. Todd-Breland discusses the middle-class focus held by the Chicago Urban League and the fact that they didn’t support the Black woman educator’s movement. This in-depth exploration was initially a strength, but this wasn’t maintained with the other entities she discusses. One area [End Page 156] that would have benefited from further exploration is Reverend Jesse Jackson’s background before coming to Chicago to organize Operation Breadbox (p. 116...

Politeness and social change: The metapragmatics of Slovakia's 2018 ʽdecent revolutionʼ

A murder of a Slovak investigative journalist in February 2018 led to a wave of massive rallies across the country and abroad which demanded a fair investigation of the murder as well as some political concessions. The grass-roots protests were held under the slogan Za slušné Slovensko (For a Decent Slovakia) in which the concept of slušnosť (decency) was chosen to echo the ethos of the November 1989 Velvet Revolution. In a wave of ensuing societal discourses about (im)politeness, slušnosť has proven to be a highly contested term. This contestedness is examined in two threads from Internet discussion fora which are attached to news articles reporting on March 9, 2019 mass gatherings. The analysis demonstrates how posters negotiate their understandings of slušnosť with regard to their group-based stances and identities. Also, the paper points out the indexical resources which posters use to construct their own and others' identities and demonstrates how (im)politeness, morality and identity construction are closely interrelated. The paper adopts the approach of ʽpoliteness as a social practiceʼ and uses ʽtactics of intersubjectivityʼ as the main analytical tool. The metapragmatic analysis of a societal change is contextualized within wider socio-political developments in post-1989 Slovakia.

Mobilization in Military-Controlled Transitions: Lessons from Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt

How, and under what circumstances, does popular mobilization democratize military rule? Democratization does not always involve grassroots protest, but it is important to understand its role when it does. The authors make two propositions. First, mobilization can aid transitions, and forestall military tutelage regimes, by generating popular demands for democratization, altering politicians’ incentives and capacities to push for democracy, and establishing legacies that preserve and deepen democracy after civilians assume power. Elected civilians do not automatically challenge militaries or replace them with more accountable governance, if not so compelled from below. Second, mobilization is most likely to have a democratizing impact when it crosses social cleavages and develops organizational structures. When it reinforces cleavages, militaries easily denounce dissent as threatening national unity or security. When it lacks organization, it cannot translate disruptive power into transformation of state institutions. Comparative analysis of Brazil (1974-1999), Turkey (1980-2013), and Egypt (2011-2013) demonstrates these relationships.

The afterlives of a successful revolution: Zakes Mda’s Rachel’s Blue and Jaco van Schalkwyk’s The Alibi Club outside of the global novel

This article examines how two recent novels set in the USA but written by South African writers, Zakes Mda and Jaco van Schalkwyk, articulate a new circuitry of relationships across the Atlantic within the frame of cultural flows. This circuitry is not about the national, global, or the post-transitional, it is not about South African or American exceptionalism, but is rather about imagining new spaces and forms of political articulation that bring a post-liberation consciousness to global circuits that resonate with similar inequalities. I contend that the idea that things can be fought over and changed is so endemic to South African cultural life that it has become a sort of everyday common sense or an afterlife of a successful revolution, as the strength of civil society and grass roots political organizations and protests reveals in South Africa of the present. The afterlives of a successful revolution then allow for a recalibration of relationships where catastrophe and its effects are understood globally through writers like Mda and Van Schalkwyk. In this article, the novels under discussion reveal a changed relationship between South Africa and America through the ascension of new flows and circuits that place South African modernity at the center of representations of American trauma.

A ‘MONTAGE OF MINORITIES’: HAWAI‘I TOURISM AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF RACIAL TOLERANCE, 1959–1978

AbstractThis article studies the Hawai‘i tourism industry's efforts to market Hawai‘i as a multi-cultural paradise where positive racial experiences could be bought and sold. With jet travel arriving in Hawai‘i the same year as statehood, the tourism industry, aided by the new state government, exploited Hawai‘i's newfound prominence, luring planeloads of American tourists who thronged its beaches, hotels, and cultural spectacles. Tourism helped turn racial tolerance into a saleable, if intangible, commodity. Marketers invited mainlanders to partake in the islands’ celebrated ‘Aloha Spirit’: an elusive vision of social harmony said to be the defining feature of the Hawai‘i vacation. By attending ethnic festivals, eating exotic food, and interacting with locals, visitors might even bring some Aloha Spirit home with them. Hawai‘i's society thus became not only a site of consumption, but an object of consumption itself. What such utopian ideas obscured was that the broader construction of Hawai‘i as a multi-cultural paradise was part of state efforts both to transform Hawai‘i's economy and to promote US influence in the Pacific. While the limited historiography on multi-culturalism situates its emergence in grassroots protest, this article argues for the elite origins of the multi-cultural ideal, which served the interests of both business and US foreign policy.

Land Expropriation and Grassroots Protest in the Establishment and Expansion of Sorokdo Charity Hospital under Japanese Colonial Rule

조선총독부는 1916년부터 1933년까지 세 차례에 걸쳐 소록도의 토지를 수용하여 나요양소를 건설하고 확장하였다. 지금까지 이 과정은 소록도갱생원측의 자료와 일부 언론보도에 입각하여 기술되어 왔다. 이 글은 이 과정을 소록도 『토지대장』과 『임야대장』의 분석을 통하여 검증하려는 것이다.BR 첫째, 소록도자혜의원 설립을 위한 제1차 토지수용은 소록도 서쪽지역의 마을을 중심으로 이루어졌는데, 당시 총독부는 주민들에게 추가 토지수용은 없을 것이라는 약속으로 주민들로부터 양보를 받아냈다. 둘째, 제2차 토지수용은 1926년 시설 확장을 위한 것으로써, 소록도 남부의 일부 토지를 수용하는 것이었다. 소록도 주민들은 1916년의 약속을 내세워 이를 받아들이지 않고, 강력하게 반발하였는데, 일제 당국은 경찰력을 동원하여 이를 진압하면서 토지수용을 강행하였다. 마지막으로 제3차 토지수용은 1933년 조선나예방협회를 전면에 내세운 시설 대확장 사업에 따른 소록도 전 도의 매수였다. 이 때 총독부는 이전의 경험에 따라, 상대적으로 토지보상문제에 많은 관심을 기울였으며, 주민들 또한 1926년의 경험 때문에 저항의지를 상실하고 총독부의 토지수용을 받아들이고 섬 밖으로 이주하였다.BR 소록도 토지와 임야에 대한 공부를 실증적으로 분석한 결과, 토지 및 가옥을 수용당한 주민들의 규모는 지금까지 알려진 것과는 상당히 다른데, 이 차이를 정확하게 규명하는 것은 쉽지 않다. 왜냐하면 문헌자료의 한계와 더불어 원주민들로부터의 증언을 확보하기가 어렵기 때문이다. 원주민들의 고향상실감은 오랫동안 지속되었으나, 식민지 상황에서, 그리고 해방 후 소록도병원이 국립시설로 유지되면서, 이들은 공론장에서 자신들의 목소리를 낼 수 있는 기회를 얻지 못했다.

Between Grassroots Protest and Green Politics: The Democratic Potential of the 1970s Antinuclear Activisim

This article narrates the development of the antinuclear movement from the bottom up, showing how local protests initiated changes in Germans' ideas about democracy and public participation, precipitating the Green Party's emergence. The narrative begins with the pre-history of the 1975 occupation of the Wyhl reactor site in Southern Baden. It shows that vintners' concerns about the future of their livelihoods underpinned protests at Wyhl, but argues that the anti-reactor coalition grew in breadth after government officials' perceived misconduct caused local people to connect their agricultural concerns with democracy matters. It then explains how local protests like the Wyhl occupation influenced the formation of the German Green Party in the late 1970s, showing how the sorts of convergences that occurred amidst “single issue” protests like the anti-Wyhl struggle enabled a wide variety of activists to come together in the new party. Thus, the article argues that particular, local concerns initiated a rethinking of participation in electoral politics. Far from fracturing society, these local concerns promoted diverse new coalitions and shaped an inclusive approach to electoral politics.

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959

A funny thing happened on the way to the mosque: promoting civil society and religious pluralism through local conflict

Understood primarily as a meta-narrative reflecting citizens' reluctance to accept migration and Islam as permanent components of their society, grass-roots protests against mosque construction also highlight a democratic paradox regarding multi-level governance: while national governments bear chief responsibility for ensuring fundamental religious freedoms, local authorization procedures affecting mosque construction (e.g. zoning, building permits) have rendered communal spaces a Ground Zero for the regulation of Islamic faith communities. While similar protests have taken place across Europe, German officials face special problems in responding to challenges by neighbourhood groups, rooted in the complicated nature of federalism, the legacy of National Socialism and a new, if misunderstood, element of ‘militant democracy’ at local levels. The Pankow-Heinersdorf case, staged on the outskirts of eastern Berlin, shows that multifaceted interventions can help contesting parties come to terms with religious differences, develop their networking and dialogue skills and actually contribute to more effective democratic participation at the local level.

The Research Works Act: a comment

It’s been a tale of two ‘opens’; recent events in US political life suggest a reconciliation with the concept of open marriage but a relationship with open access to scientific research that may be headed for splitsville. In a rare feat of bipartisanship during a Congress famed for partisan pettiness, the Research Works Act (RWA) has received cross-party sponsorship in the House and is now being heard in Committee. The Act, in its own words, seeks to prevent Federal agencies from requiring that authors ‘assent to network dissemination of a privatesector research work’. Translation? It will be illegal for Federally funded research grants to have open access strings attached. This includes a bar on policies insisting on deposition in public repositories; in fact, it will be illegal to ‘cause’, ‘permit’ or ‘authorize’ such a deposition. RWA has not attracted the same volume of headlines as the equally controversial SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), which was another recent bill pertaining to internet freedoms. But although the opponents of RWA cannot rival the political and global reach of the likes of Google and Wikipedia, a spirited, academia-led campaign against RWA is underway on the blogosphere and Twitter. As with many grassroots protests in the social media era, the RWA rebutters have mixed a sense of genuine outrage with mischievous and irreverent humor.

“This Board Has a Duty to Intervene”: Challenging the Spadina Expressway through the Ontario Municipal Board, 1963–1971

This article examines the pivotal role played by the unelected Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) in the opposition to the Spadina Expressway, from initial proposals in 1963 to the expressway’s 1971 cancellation by the provincial government. After considerable grassroots protests, the matter came to a head in a full OMB hearing in late 1970. There, the OMB had to balance majority interests—as expressed by Metro Council, strongly in favour of the project—versus minority interests of community activists, residents in the path of the expressway, and a growing international network of expressway opponents. Indeed, because the scope of the OMB’s mandate was wide, it was able to study the effects of expressways elsewhere in North America. While the OMB eventually voted in favour of the expressway, this was the first non-unanimous decision in its long history. Chairman Joseph Kennedy’s dissenting opinion stood up for minority rights, set the stage for a debate on the role of the OMB in municipal planning and governance, and made it palatable, legitimate, and respectable for the Ontario premier to cancel the expressway four months later. This article also discusses the OMB more generally, exploring its significance in light of continuing municipal debates surrounding the role of unelected land use tribunals versus local governments.

Environmental movements and campaigns against waste infrastructure in the United States

Campaigns against waste infrastructure in the US emerged in the 1970s against a background of increasing public anxiety about the impacts of high-tech industrialism upon the environment and human health. Independently of major environmental NGOs, and unlike earlier anti-nuclear campaigns, which also involved grassroots protests, waste campaigners quickly became networked and raised new issues of environmental justice. Initially focused upon landfills and hazardous waste, the environmental justice movement took up and amplified local protests against waste incineration. Independently of popular protest, changes in public policy and the economics of the waste industry also contributed to the unpopularity of waste incineration, and recycling regained appeal. Campaigns against waste infrastructure have contributed to the broadening of the US environmental movement as well as to ecological modernisation.

Who shot FAP? The Nixon welfare plan and the transformation of American politics

This essay takes the battle over President Nixon’s proposals for welfare reform as a lens through which to understand political change at the end of the 1960s. In explaining the rise and fall of the Family Assistance Plan, it argues that scholars should take their attention away from President Nixon and place it on the times during which he governed, especially on grassroots protest, the response to it, and the complexities of the Republican coalition. It adds to the research on the 1960s an appreciation of the changing role of liberal Republicans. It adds to the study of domestic policy an understanding of how the Vietnam war shaped policy at home. It adds to political history an account of welfare politics amidst the conservative renaissance of the early 1970s.

Reporting Dissent in Wartime

A B S T R A C T ■ The 2003 Iraq War was highly controversial in the UK, generating domestic opposition and a widely supported anti-war movement, the Stop the War Coalition. This article assesses the extent to which anti-war protesters were successful at securing positive coverage in the British press immediately before and during the invasion of Iraq. The study shows that, although anti-war protesters received more favourable than unfavourable coverage prior to the war, once the war got under way, a `support our boys' consensus led to the narrowing of what Daniel Hallin has termed the `sphere of legitimate controversy' with the anti-war movement relegated to a `sphere of deviance'. The article also demonstrates that elite-led protest was more successful at influencing newspaper debate than grassroots protest. Overall, the results highlight the problems protest movements have in securing positive media representation during war. ■

Place making, grassroots organizing, and rural protest: A case study of Anahim Lake, British Columbia

Contemporary rural social movements bring diverse interest groups and stakeholders together at the local scale in the pursuit of common visions and goals, often against the backdrop of an external threat. The challenge for a movement's leaders is to negotiate and design a rural agenda that resonates with this complex constituency. One way to approach this problem is to construct and politicize a local sense of place as a means of rallying insiders against outside forces and pressures. This article explores the place-making activities of rural leaders operating within a complex social setting through an analysis of a grassroots social movement in Anahim Lake, British Columbia. The study uses the concept of the “place frame” to explore how Anahim's activists created a local discursive framework that enabled them to bridge dissimilar environmental values and practices within the community. The removal of external pressures following protest, however, saw the dissolution of this alignment. In documenting this process, the article contributes to a fuller understanding of the significance of place in grassroots protest and activism.

What a Little Democracy Can Do: Comparing Trajectories of Reform in Malaysia and Indonesia

Economic crisis sparked political mobilization in both Malaysia and Indonesia in the late 1990s, but with very different results. Reformism in competitive electoral authoritarian Malaysia took a largely electoral route, yielding marginal, top-down institutional change and the enhancement of democratic norms. The hegemonic electoral authoritarian regime in neighbouring Indonesia, on the other hand, was toppled by a sudden upsurge of grass-roots protest, encouraged by elite factionalism. Changes to Indonesian political institutions and personnel since then have disappointed many reformers, and mounting cynicism endangers the entrenchment of democratic political culture. The article argues that a relatively more democratic system grants more space for autonomous challengers to organize and mobilize over the long term than a less open system does. Specifically, civil society agents in the former may accumulate both social capital and its organizational-level counterpart, coalitional capital, facilitating mobilization. Such a regime, though, is better able to contain or otherwise defuse protest than is a more autocratic variant. The latter is thus more vulnerable to dramatic collapse, despite its fragmented political opposition, and faces serious hurdles in subsequent democratic consolidation.