Militant Campaign Research Articles

Review: The Masjid in Contemporary Islamic Africa

Review: <i>The Masjid in Contemporary Islamic Africa</i>

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Economic shocks and militant formation

A prominent debate in the civil war literature asks whether commodity price shocks incentivize fighting, but existing analyses find inconsistent results. This paper shows these results arise, in part, because research conflates the decision to form a militant campaign with the start of civil conflict. Using original data on 973 militant groups, I sequentially disaggregate between civil conflict onset and the earlier stage of militant mobilization. I use fixed effect regression methods to test for indirect and interaction effects that could obscure the shock-civil conflict relationship. First, I estimate the effect of export commodity price shocks on mobilization onset. Second, I re-examine the shock-civil conflict relationship conditioning on the number of militant groups mobilizing at the time of the shock. The results show economic shocks indirectly increase the risk of civil conflict by driving militant formation. Disaggregating these stages of militant activity advances research about two-stage conflict processes as well as the indirect causes of violence.

Legitimating Extremism: A Taxonomy of Justifications for Political Violence

ABSTRACT Terrorism is an inherently communicative enterprise in that it attempts to convey messages using violent means. Furthermore, the effective use of rhetoric is fundamental to the sustainment of militant campaigns. Nevertheless, the literature on terrorism currently lacks a comprehensive blueprint for analyzing terrorist discourse. This paper proposes a framework for classifying narrative frames that serve to justify acts of political violence. Drawing on the social movements literature, it utilizes the jihadist organizations Al Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State as primary examples to show how militants utilize defensive, moralistic, legalistic, imperialistic, and apocalyptic framing to legitimate acts of terrorism. It also demonstrates how these same categories can be applied to extremists animated by ideologies other than jihadism.

London’s Suffragettes, Votes for Women, and Fashion

Suffragettes’ militant campaigns for voting rights are commonly dissociated from fashion, yet, in fact clothing and accessories were widely used by Emmeline Pankhurst and her fellow activists to gain visibility and increase public support for the suffrage movement. As commented by Katrina Rolley (1990), the suffragettes were frequently confronted with unfavourable representation of themselves in the press. Yet, thanks to their distinctive use of fashion, as observed by Paula Bartley (2002), the so called “Coronation Procession” held on 17 June 1911 in London was “one of the most colourful and spectacular of all the women’s suffrage demonstrations” (122‒123). Because there is little research on the importance of fashion in public space and the relationship between fashion and the women’s movement, the objective of the article is to show how sartorial practices of suffragettes countered their negative representation in the press. By applying elements of Cognitive Metaphor Theory to selected political cartoons by William Kerridge Haselden in the Daily Mirror, and fashion advertisements in Votes for Women magazine, the article demonstrates that the suffragettes used fashion in order to both increase their public visibility and to conform to normative femininity.

“From One Shore to the Other”: Other Revolutions in the Interstices of the Revolution

AbstractThis interview with Imed Soltani and Federica Sossi focuses on the campaign of the families of the missing Tunisian migrants, “From One Shore to the Other: Lives that Matter”. The campaign started in 2011 to demand that Italian and Tunisian institutions be held accountable for the disappearance of young Tunisian migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to Italy. The campaign brought together the families of Tunisian migrants and the Italian feminist collective “Le Venticinqueundici” as part of a migration struggle that involves the entire region but is rarely taken up as a cross‐shore militant campaign. The conversation between Soltani and Sossi illustrates the strengths of the campaign and the difficulties that arose in running it across shores, and offers a theoretical reflection on the notion of political recognition in an effort to decolonise the gaze on what counts as political subjectivity and political struggle.

“The Last Great Strike”: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America by Ahmed White

Reviewed by: “The Last Great Strike”: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America by Ahmed White Henry Himes “The Last Great Strike”: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America. By Ahmed White. (Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2016. 416pp. Paper $29.95, ISBN 978-0-5202-8561-3.) In contemporary society, one would be hard-pressed to believe that an event such as the 1937 Little Steel Strike ever took place. The history of the strike often reads like a work of fiction with its accounts of industrial espionage, aerial confrontations, brutal fisticuffs, bombings, gun battles, and an outright massacre. Indeed, nothing of its kind has been seen since; hence, the title of this work, “The Last Great Strike.” Although the strike plot could have easily been dreamed up in the mind of a brilliant author of fiction, the 1937 Little Steel Strike was unfortunately not a work of fiction. Instead, the strike, according to Ahmed White, is “a complex and sobering story, untold, that speaks essential truths about the New Deal and the place of unions and labor rights in modern America” (6). White divides the book into three sections. Part 1 is a well-written secondary source account of the open-shop era from the Homestead strike of 1892 to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. Although academics already trained in the intricacies of the open-shop era would find this section unnecessary, it nevertheless offers the novice reader a strong accounting of the open shop in steel, establishing the context needed to understand the strike. Part 2 focuses strictly on the strike itself, and is by far the strongest section of the book. Before this study, the historiography of the 1937 Little Steel Strike was fragmented. White, drawing on those earlier sources and adding new archival research, weaves together a compelling narrative of how the strike progressed throughout the disconnected towns and cities across the nation’s industrial heartland. From the small steel-producing town of Monroe, Michigan, to the blood-soaked industrial fields of south Chicago, to the deadly battlegrounds of northeast Ohio, White masterfully reconstructs the history of this brutal conflict. In the final section of the book, White attempts to chart how the Steel Workers Organizing Committee’s (SWOC) defeat impacted the union in the post-strike years. He analyzes the union’s reaction to the defeat, [End Page 100] arguing that SWOC’s international leaders worked to limit direct action tactics, preferring instead “legal and political action as effective alternatives to ‘direct action’” (246). This section is not as persuasive as the previous two sections, and at times unjustifiably paints SWOC leaders as the saboteurs of some unrealized revolutionary moment. The book’s primary strength is its accounting of the strike itself. More than any other study on the Little Steel Strike thus far, White’s narrative is the broadest in scope and most comprehensive. However, the book stumbles in the third section. In the estimation of this reviewer, the third section tends to portray the rank-and-file steelworker as more radical and revolutionary than he actually was.1 Moreover, White argues that upon losing the strike, SWOC leaders abandoned “aggressive large-scale shop floor and street-level organizing” tactics for a strategy that focused on winning union recognition through the National Labor Relations Board and the courts (274). Indeed, after the failed strike, the union often fell back on a legal strategy; however, there is evidence that suggests such an approach was not necessarily top-down driven. For example, at the 1940 SWOC convention, SWOC president Philip Murray cautioned convention delegates not to rely too heavily on the law, asserting, “and somehow or other the workers and many of the employees in and around these plants, instead of indulging in ordinary, militant campaigns of organization around the properties say, ‘Oh, let’s wait and find out what the National Labor Relations Board is going to do and what the courts are going to do,’ relying entirely too much upon the Board and not putting enough pep into it ourselves.”2 Murray believed...

Al Qaeda's Twenty-Year Strategic Plan: The Current Phase of Global Terror

This study examines Al Qaeda's organizational dynamics, doctrinal precepts, strategic objectives, operational priorities, and tactical vectors in the context of its Twenty-Year Strategic Plan. This seven-stage Strategic Plan is addressed with a particular focus on its current phase (Stage 5), 2013–2016, involving the mobilization of Muslim forces for the “Declaration of the Caliphate.” In this regard, particular attention is paid to the Al Qaeda engagement in militant jihadist campaigns across the Middle East and other Muslim domains. The study concludes with an overall assessment of global threats and ongoing risks arising from the current phase of Al Qaeda's Twenty-Year Strategic Plan.

Militant Abolitionism: Douglass, Emerson, and the Rise of the Anti-Slave

This essay, relying on a wealth of original sources, reveals for the first time the dynamic and personal relationship that evolved between Fredrick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson from 1844 until the onset of the Civil War as they mounted a militant campaign against the heinous institution of slavery.

Queen Caroline’s Pains and Penalties: Silence and Speech in the Dramatic Art of British Women’s Suffrage

In Britain, the act that launched the militant campaign of the suffragettes in 1905 was the interruption of a political meeting in Manchester. The violent silencing and arrest of the women ensued. The women’s suffrage campaigns in Britain became more vigorous in the early twentieth century. They frequently foregrounded the oppressive silencing of women in their political speeches at public meetings, in newspapers, and in the courts. Having deliberately sought arrest, some militant suffrage activists exploited the arena of the court room to expound on their political position. In various audacious and spectacular ways, the exclusion of women from the democratic process was challenged, not least by a sustained attack on the legal system. Drama, one of the more successful cultural forms of protest, was often used to expose the inequities of the existing social fabric, and as an aesthetic form it deploys the body as well as the voice. This paper will examine the forceful, antirhetorical function of silence in British women’s suffrage drama from the early twentieth century, focusing on the appropriation of Queen Caroline (1768–1821) as a silent proto-suffragette in Pains and Penalties, a play about her trial, written by Laurence Housman (1865–1959) and directed by Edith Craig for the Pioneer Players theater society.

A political history of National Action: Its fears, ideas, tactics and conflicts

Nation Action began in 1982 as a student-based radical nationalist group opposed to increased Asian immigration and multiculturalism in Australia. Adopting early to mid 20th century labourist policies, and blending them with traditional Australian radical nationalism, the group aimed to increase its appeal and membership through militant propaganda campaigns. However, its authoritarian structure and tactics fractured the group internally and prompted opponents to describe it as a neo-Nazi organisation. Such labelling served only to enhance its appeal to people who espoused white supremacist beliefs and were prepared to engage in increasingly violent behaviour. This examination of National Action suggests that the group was unable to develop either an effective organisational structure or a relevant set of ideas and objectives that could win it the broad popular support it sought. While aiming to rise above student-based politics, National Action never realised this goal and subsequently declined into obscurity.

Culpable Complicity: the medical profession and the forcible feeding of suffragettes, 1909–1914

The forcible feeding of suffragettes in prisons in Edwardian Britain was an abuse that had serious physical and psychological consequences for those fed, and one in which the medical profession was complicit, by failing as a body to condemn the practice as both medically unnecessary and dangerous. An over‐cosy relationship with the Government through the five‐year period during which compulsory feeding took place resulted in either silence or outright support for the Home Office from the profession’s key spokesmen—the Presidents of the Royal Colleges and the editors of the main medical journals. Sir Victor Horsley, an eminent but controversial figure, led opposition to forcible feeding, but, with relatively few male colleagues backing him, it continued unchecked. Undeterred, Horsley worked tirelessly to make his profession aware of the realities of the practice and recognise that, as the militant campaign had escalated, the Home Office had used the doctors administering it to punish, rather than treat, the hunger strikers.

Uptake and genre: The Canadian reception of suffrage militancy

Synopsis From 1909 onward, the Canadian suffrage debate was heavily influenced by reports on suffrage militancy from Great Britain and the United States. Militancy played an influential role in Canadian suffrage history not through its practice–there was no Canadian militant campaign–but through an ongoing discussion of its meaning. Using Anne Freadman's notions of genre and uptake, this paper analyzes the discursive uptake of suffrage militancy—from news reports on front pages, to commentary on women's pages, to reviews of Emmeline Pankhurst's Canadian speaking engagements. The Canadian debate about militancy is a fertile site for drawing out the roles of genre and uptake in the political positioning of both suffragists and suffrage sceptics. Talk about militancy serves as a way to regulate the uptake of this particular genre of political action, whereby both sides tended to share the optimistic view that Canadian suffragists where not yet in need of militancy.

Writing suffragette history: the contending autobiographical narratives of the pankhursts

On 10 October 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organisation that was to become the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian England. Their militant campaign was led by Emmeline and her eldest daughter, Christabel, the WSPU's Chief Organiser, the two younger Pankhurst daughters, Sylvia and Adela, also becaming active in the movement. While all four women wrote accounts of the campaign, the focus here is on the published autobiographical narratives of the three elder Pankhurst women – Emmeline's My Own Story (1914), Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement (1931) and Christabel's Unshackled (1959). In particular, the ways in which these women presented themselves and each other, and how they related the story of their private family relationships as mother, daughters and siblings, is explored

Public history and popular memory: issues in the commemoration of the British militant suffrage campaign

Drawing on Raphael Samuel's work on the construction of historical knowledge, this article argues that British militant suffrage feminists had a strong sense of their role in history. Once the vote was won, militants became the first public historians of their own suffrage history by collecting ‘relics’ of the campaign and commemorating suffrage events. The work of curators, especially at the Museum of London and National Library of Australia, Canberra, also enabled wider access to the movement's ephemera. Subsequent generations have ‘remembered’ suffrage in different ways, including depiction in fiction, film, local histories and the physical landscape. An exploration of such depictions might help us start to understand the continuing fascination with this aspect of women's history.

Writing suffragette history: the contending autobiographical narratives of the pankhursts

Abstract On 10 October 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organisation that was to become the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian England. Their militant campaign was led by Emmeline and her eldest daughter, Christabel, the WSPU's Chief Organiser, the two younger Pankhurst daughters, Sylvia and Adela, also becaming active in the movement. While all four women wrote accounts of the campaign, the focus here is on the published autobiographical narratives of the three elder Pankhurst women – Emmeline's My Own Story (1914), Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement (1931) and Christabel's Unshackled (1959). In particular, the ways in which these women presented themselves and each other, and how they related the story of their private family relationships as mother, daughters and siblings, is explored

Public history and popular memory: issues in the commemoration of the british militant suffrage campaign

Public history and popular memory: issues in the commemoration of the british militant suffrage campaign

The militant suffrage movement: citizenship and resistance in Britain, 1860-1930

The image of upper-class chaining themselves to the rails of 10 Downing Street, smashing windows of public buildings, and going on hunger strikes in the cause of votes for women have become visually synonomous with the British suffragette movement over the past century. Their story has become lore among feminists, in effect separating women's fight for voting rights from contemporary issues in British political history and disconnecting their militancy from other forms of political militancy in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mayhall examines the strategies that suffragettes employed to challenge the definitions of citizenship in Britain. She examines the resistance origins within liberal political tradition, its emergence during Britain's involvement in the South African War, and its enactment as spectacle. Enlarging the study of the militant campaign for suffrage, Mayhall analyzes not only its implications for the social history of gender but also, and more importantly, its connections to British political and intellectual history. This book is already being touted as a critical revisionist work in the history of suffrage in Britain.

The pankhursts and the war: suffrage magazines and first world war propaganda

With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst dramatically changed the course of their militant campaign. Instead of fighting against the Government, they joined forces with their old Liberal adversaries, including Lloyd George, to support the war effort. Accordingly, they employed their periodical of the preceding years, The Suffragette, as a valuable resource for spreading the new word, renaming it Britannia to reinforce their patriotic and imperialist intent. On the other side of London, in the East End district of Poplar where she had set up her headquarters, Sylvia Pankhurst, the renegade sister, also changed the emphasis of her social campaigning. Sylvia had broken with her mother and sister two years earlier, when it became clear that the differences in their political ideas were irreconcilable. Sylvia's path lay in the fight for social reform for the working classes of the East End; men, women and children. A feminist she remained, but a socialist feminist, and, with the onset of the War, a pacifist as well, fervently articulating her views on all three ideologies through the mouthpiece of her organisation, The Woman's Dreadnought. This article explores the literary response of the Pankhursts and their associates to the War, contrasting the patriotic zeal of Britannia with the radicalism of The Dreadnought, asking how these New Women used the press to win support for their various ideas. What devices did they employ and how successfully were they received by their contemporary readers?

‘Incipient Toryism’? The Women's Social and Political Union and the Independent Labour Party, 1903–14

Although the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded by women who were also activists in the Independent Labour Party (ILP), early versions of its history, by participants, largely concurred that the two organizations drifted apart rapidly. They argued that the suffragette WSPU was then dominated by an increasingly middle-class leadership who eschewed socialism in favour of a rigidly-enforced political independence and were ultimately found favouring the right after the First World War. Recent local studies of the WSPU suggest a different picture at grass-roots level, where significant branch activists retained their loyalty to suffrage and socialism throughout the militant campaign. This article challenges the prevailing idea of a middle-class and potentially right-wing WSPU leadership. It draws on the author's Merseyside research and other recent local studies of the WSPU to offer a reassessment of its links with the ILP and concludes that at branch level the WSPU remained a much broader political church than has hitherto been claimed.