Struggles Of Movements Research Articles

Protests and civil society in Russia: The struggle for the Khimki Forest

The main question on which this article focuses is this: What conditions determine whether a group carrying out protests in Russia is more likely to be successful in attracting support by recruiting people to participate in its activities and gaining sympathy from many members of the population? There is strong agreement among experts on Russian society and politics that protests in defense of abstract, general rights do not appeal to most citizens. This article focuses on groups using protest tactics that have been more successful in gaining support, such as the Defenders of the Khimki Forest. The evidence that is presented in this article suggests that Russians are more likely to take part in protests by an organized group if it seeks remedies for concrete problems that directly affect them and their families. The appeal to felt needs that are grounded in everyday experiences also seems to be an important factor that helps a group to evoke a favorable response toward its actions among broad circles of the general public. For those doing scholarly research, to interpret the development of civil society in Russia mainly in terms of the struggles of human rights groups and political opposition movements would lead the researchers to neglect the activities of most social organizations in Russia.

Institutionalization of the Agroecological Approach in Brazil: Advances and Challenges

This article sketches a brief panorama of the advances and challenges involved in the implementation of the agroecological approach in Brazilian institutions. It begins with an account of the struggles of rural social movements working at the deepest grassroots level of the country's “agroecological field.” The processes that led to the creation and development of the National Agroecology Alliance (ANA) and the Brazilian Agroecology Association (ABA-Agroecologia) are presented as a key part of the construction now under way. Taking as a baseline the evolutions in the internalization of agroecology in official teaching, research, and rural extension services, the article identifies some of the powerful practical, theoretical, and politico-ideological obstacles preventing the rupture with the paradigm of modernization on the part of state institutions.

Negotiating Culture in the Promotion of Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Latin America

SummaryCulture interacts with development in multiple ways. However the importance of culture within development should not be seen as translating to crystallising and solidifying its meaning or providing definitive ideas of what works. In this paper, I look at the relevance of culture to the promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment, and examine how some women's movements in Latin America have negotiated and contested meanings around culture and as a result have re‐signified gender values, attitudes and behaviours.The example of Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo questions the cultural construct of motherhood and the traditional role of the mother caring for the family within the home, and the women's neighbourhood action based in Bahia, Brazil which I look at contests and extends the notion of that domestic space. The importance of deconstructing and fighting against stereotypical images and patriarchal views of women in order to uphold gender rights is clear from the examples I look at on domestic violence, sex worker violence and the Black Women's Movement's struggle against sexist and racist images.In conclusion I argue that in employing ‘transformatory thinking’ the women's groups that I look at in this paper have worked together as women to contest and confront accepted cultural meanings and by doing so have begun to re‐structure the gender order and promote gender equality.

Introduction: the Olympic Flame Relay. Local knowledges of a global ritual form

This article introduces and contextualizes an anthropological study of the Olympic Flame Relay across 25 years, from Los Angeles 1984 through the aftermath of Beijing, punctuated by the announcement by the International Olympic Committee Executive Board in March 2009, that there would be no more global relays. This extended ethnological research offers a rare case study of continuity and change in a leading transnational and transcultural ritual form. It also further exposes the managerial revolution, with its characteristic language of ‘world's best practice,’ that has succeeded the commercial revolution in international Olympic affairs. Analysis of the transnational flow of Olympic operations management offers important corrections to much existing globalization theory, demonstrating both how powerful and how culturally and politically parochial world's best practices can turn out to be. Finally, this extended case study offers a further development of the author's theoretical work on complex cultural performance systems, in particular the dialectic between the performative genres of ritual and spectacle that indexes the wider Olympic Movement's struggle to preserve itself from the successes of the Olympic sports industry.

Space hijacking and the anarcho-politics of leisure

Political scientists, social movement theorists and cultural geographers have made us aware of forms of micro-political resistance that have challenged the privatisation, corporatisation and securitisation of the city. An increasing tactical feature of such resistance has been the deployment of leisure practices and performances to challenge the dominant norms and ideologies governing the use of urban space. This paper focuses upon a case study of a creative intervention organised by a London-based group of anarchists. We consider the tactics employed by the Space Hijackers – a group of self-styled ‘anarchitects’ who have been prominent in questioning the spatialities of everyday urban life through leisure activity and creative protest opportunities. We assess the deliberately liminal tactics employed by the Space Hijackers, situated betwixt and between the normative social regulation of public space and a ‘pre-figurative’ or utopian vision of its future. Through the case study and a review of some prominent attempts to define the leisure–politics relationship, this essay highlights a need to further interrogate the nature and uses of leisure within micro-political struggle and citizen movements that seek to affect social change, and so continues the dialogue about how we are to understand ‘leisure politics’.

Chinese Literary and Cultural Trends in a Postrevolutionary Era

In the wake of its reform and opening to the outside world during the past three decades, China has indeed entered a postrevolutionary or postsocialist era in which economic construction is highlighted to such an extreme that class struggle and large-scale mass movements are never called for in any public media. Stability and economic flourishing are desires of ordinary people, including some elite humanities intellectuals who have certainly benefited from the reform and openness. Through several years of heated debates on postmodernism and postcolonialism, literary and cultural studies scholars have come to agree that postmodernism is no longer a unique phenomenon in Western postindustrial society; indeed, it has long been more than a periodizing term, for there are metamorphosed versions of it evident in the decolonization process of a number of non-Western countries. Although the ideas of postmodernists and postcolonial critics are far past their prime, postmodernism is still discussed by us Chinese scholars in more or less the same way as in Western academia with regard to its critical and creative reception in China as well as to how it pertains to the issue of globalization and China’s current practice of it.1 From our vantage point in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we can see how the 2000s have been characterized by globalization and transnational capitalization, both culturally and economically. Thus, throughout the course of this article, I would like to offer my reflections on current Chinese literary and cultural trends in this postrevolutionary era, starting with our cultural and intellectual strategies and how they can be put forth in the face of so much Western influence.2

The rule of law and citizenship in central India: post-colonial dilemmas

This article argues that the ‘rule of law’ has become a central goal in popular struggles the world over, and it is citizenship struggles which infuse the rule of law with substantive, as against a thin procedural, meaning. This is especially true in post-colonial societies like India, with a tradition of inherited colonial law designed for subject-hood rather than citizenship, growing inequality which affects both the enactment and interpretation of law, and the violation of law by those who are meant to protect it. Demanding implementation of existing laws, breaking laws that are patently unjust whether through armed struggle or non-violent social movements, or seeking to change laws in favour of new and more democratic laws, are all major avenues by means of which people express their aspirations as citizens. However, law's mutually constitutive relation with social practice means that people enter into political and legal negotiations already constituted as certain kinds of legal subjects, which constrains their imagination in certain ways.

Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (review)

Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, by Avinoam J. Patt. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009. 373 pp. $54.95. This book is a valuable addition to the rich coUection of scholarly works on the Holocaust survivors, usually referred to as (the Remnant Survivors). In the center of this historical chapter were the Displaced Persons (DPs) who following liberation strived to leave their blood-soaked homelands, were gathered in camps and assembly centers provided by the AUies in occupied Germany and Austria, and remained stuck there until immigration became possible in 1948-1950 - mostly to the newly founded State of Israel or to the United States of America. As DPs they became part and parcel of the Zionist struggle against the British Mandate to open the gates of Palestine, which eventually led to the establishment of the sovereign Jewish state. The history of the She'erit Hapletah thus represents a crucial transitionfrom Holocaust to Redemption, which has been extensively dealt with by scholars over the last two decades. At first, scholars were mainly interested in the DP issue as an object, rather than in the DPs themselves, and focused on external conditions and policies, exploring the role of the survivors' issue in the international arena in general, and on the Zionist agenda, in particular. They were foUowed by scholars who started to penetrate into the survivors' lives and actions as subjects from within, using the wealth of source materials created by the survivors themselves, focusing each on a specific group, issue, or process. Finding Home and Homeland belongs definitely to this latter scholarly trend and deals with an issue hitherto quite overlooked - the youth of She'erit Hapletah. It concentrates on the children, youngsters, and young adults who comprised the majority of the survivot s' population, and follows their whereabouts after liberation. His main question is how and why these young people were attracted to Zionist youth movements and to kibbutzim, went through hachshara (agricultural training) and prepared themselves for Aliyah and settlement. To answer these questions he implements an innovative method which uses new source materials, namely, at the center of his study he puts two kibbutzim founded in Poland, and follows intensively their evolvement in Poland, their route to the DP camps and hachshara farms in the American zone of Germany, and their eventual immigration to Palestine. He has been able to do this by discovering and using the kibbutz diaries and archives kept by these groups, which open a unique vista revealed through the eyes of individuals, who wrote intensively about their experiences along their journey between holocaust and redemption. The story of these kibbutzim is elegantly woven into the complex history of the survivors in Poland and in Germany, the political context, the organizational development in the DP camps, and the struggle of the youth movements against a myriad of political, economic, cultural, and social obstacles posed by the prolonged transitional situation that threatened to destroy the morale of the survivors. …

Protests under a Semi-Authoritarian Regime in Russia

The main question on which this paper focuses is this: What conditions determine whether a group carrying out protests in Russia is more likely to be successful in attracting support by recruiting people to participate in its activities and gaining sympathy from the majority of the population? There is strong agreement among experts on Russian society and politics that protests in defense of abstract, general rights do not appeal to most citizens. This paper focuses on groups using protest tactics that have been more successful in gaining support, such as the Defenders of the Khimki Forest. The evidence that is presented in this paper suggests that Russians are more likely to take part in an organized group if it seeks remedies for concrete problems that directly affect them and their families. The appeal to felt needs that are grounded in everyday experiences also seems to be an important factor that helps a group to evoke a favorable response toward its actions among broad circles of the general public. For those doing scholarly research, to interpret the development of civil society in Russia mainly in terms of the struggles of human rights groups and political opposition movements would lead the researchers to neglect the activities of most social organizations in Russia and the complex realities of the settings in which those organizations strive to serve the interests of their members.

Australian Labour History: Contexts, Trends and Influences

From their inception, the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and its Bulletin (later Labour History) represented a claim to recognition for labour history within Australian academia. At the same time, they expressed the fellowship of the activist and scholar. This article will suggest that labour history has been shaped by the evolving professional imperatives associated with university-based research, publication and teaching of Australian history in an increasingly globalised academic culture. Yet labour history has also continued to derive distinctiveness from a longer history of identification with the labour movement's struggle for social justice; its roots in what I call 'activist popular history', 'critical objective history' and 'academic history'; and a healthy scepticism concerning the illusion of disinterested scholarship.

Anti-Mafia Policies in Italy: The Need for Collaborative Governance and Transition of the Policy Actors from Isolation to Coalition

This paper focuses on the struggle of anti-mafia movements in Italy. This study has found that there is still lack of consistency in classification of anti-mafia policies. Moreover, there is neither unity among the policy actors nor active cooperation among multiple actors while designing anti-mafia policies. Therefore, this paper first aims to simplify an explanation of the policy actors by following an actor-based approach in order to classify the actors as direct (state) and indirect (nonstate) actors; then, it traces the direction of the policies from top to down and from bottom to top and determines the dimension of the policies as being at the macro and/or micro level. Second, this paper suggests that there should be collaboration that binds all actors legally in order to avoid multiple actors clashing and steer them from isolation to cooperation so as to take advantage of optimum point in anti-mafia policies. Finally, it is stressed that the building of cooperation should be through the “3 C” cycle - cohesion, consolidation, and commitment - in order to make effective and reflexive policies.

Damming the Amazon: Local Movements and Transnational Struggles Over Water

Growing contestation has arisen in the Brazilian Amazon regarding two proposed large hydroelectric dam complexes: Belo Monte and Rio Madeira. I explore the intersections between transnational and local contestation of these projects over time. I specifically focus on how scientific research and technical assessments are the field upon which these two different levels of activism operate, reflecting the importance of democracy in science and public involvement therein. I argue that the types of knowledge-based claims activists make and the political constrictions in which they work differentiate transnational and local claims. These cases address questions about the interaction of local and transnational organizers and how highly charged symbolic environmental resources are protected or developed as an outcome of movement struggles. This study also emphasizes the need to recognize hydrological resource development as an aspect of Amazonian development, especially as national and transnational demands for energy and agricultural exports increase.

A homicide by suspension

Hanging is one of the commonest medico-legal entities that a forensic pathologist may come across and is almost always a suicide. We report a case of homicide by hanging, masquerading as a sudden death, where a 32-year-old man was hanged by his wife, helped by her boyfriend, who nearly escaped from the grip of the law. The autopsy findings were almost in keeping with that of a suicidal suspension except for the small contusion in the inner aspect of the lower lip and multiple abrasions in the lower part of the legs, which were due to the struggle and terminal asphyxial movements. Furthermore, the victim was under the influence of alcohol, which is usually expected in a case of this nature.

The Home, the Veil and the World: Reading Ismat Chughtai towards a ‘Progressive’ History of the Indian Women's Movement

This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the ‘waves’, ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ of the Euro-American women's movement and adopted to postcolonial women's movements, such as those in India, Jamaica and South Africa, is belied by the piecemeal legislative gains won by activist efforts. Some of the questions governing my enquiry are: What lessons can a questioning of teleology teach us about the gains and losses of postcolonial women's movements? If the alternative to teleology is, as I suggest, a genealogy, then what constitutes a genealogical enquiry into the women's movement in India? In face of apparent and self-acknowledged losses and ineffectiveness in recent times, would the movement's apparent unity across religious differences be a way of initiating such an inquiry or is another mode of analysis required? The paper directs attention to the Indian women's movement's attempts at bringing together women of different religious persuasions, legislative, and religious edicts related to Muslim women's right to co-habitation and divorce, and ‘cases’ that serve as testing points of the movement's struggle against religious and state authority. It also points to the neglected factor of economic security for women as a way in which a genealogical inquiry can proceed so as to strengthen the legislation and the movement itself.

A short Study of Indigenouse Social Movments and the Political Ecology in Mexico and Latin America

Struggles of traditional movements have become blurred in the face of globalization intersecting with new demands and causes revolving around globalization, such as indigenous, women and human rights, environment, etc. The internationalization of civil society refers to cross-border linkages established by social movement organizations in peace, human rights, and environmental, gender, and labor, indigenous and other social movements. This paper aims to analyze the historical social approach and under the frame of indigenous political ecology of social movements for recognition of indigenous rights in contemporary Mexico.

Surviving the Assault? The Australian Disability Movement and the Neoliberal Workfare State

This article provides an analysis of the key areas of struggle for the Australian disability movement during the Howard years of government. After providing a brief overview of the Australian disability movement and its historical development, we then move to situate the struggles of the Australian disability movement within the broader context of welfare to work, one of the central tenets of neoliberal social policy restructuring. From here, three sites of struggle emerge that have been central to the Australian disability movement's struggles for representation, recognition and redistribution and principally include state restructuring of disability open labour market supports, state legitimation of disability sheltered workshops and, finally, the pensioner-categorization of disability within social security law and policy.

Ofensiva do capital e novas determinações do trabalho profissional

Discute-se, neste artigo, as condições nas quais se realiza o trabalho profissional dos assistentes sociais. Toma-se por fundamento "as configurações do trabalho na sociedade capitalista", as contrarreformas do Estado e as (in)consequentes alterações na natureza e na orientação das políticas sociais, conduzidas pelo grande capital em todo o mundo. Assim, a compreensão da pauperização da força de trabalho dos assistentes sociais ganha sentido na análise dos movimentos mais gerais da luta de classe e das necessidades do capital em se articular para garantir a realização de sua função primária, o aumento dos lucros.

Micro and Macro Causes of Violence

The dominant emotion in violence-threatening situations is confrontational tension/fear (ct/f), which causes most violence to abort, or to be carried out inaccurately and incompetently. For violence to be successful, there must be a pathway around the barrier of ct/f. These pathways include: attacking the weak; audience-oriented staged and controlled fair fights; confrontation-avoiding remote violence; confrontation-avoiding by deception; confrontation-avoiding by absorption in technique. Successfully violent persons, on both sides of the law, are those who have developed these skilled interactional techniques. Since successful violence involves dominating the emotional attention space, only a small proportion of persons can belong to the elite which does most of each type of violence. Macro-violence, including victory and defeat in war, and in struggles of paramilitaries and social movements, is shaped by both material resources and social/emotional resources for maintaining violent organizations and forcing their opponents into organizational breakdown. Social and emotional destruction generally precedes physical destruction.

Market-led ‘agrarian reform’ in Brazil

This article surveys the process of implementing the World Bank's market-led ‘agrarian reform’ model in Brazil and analyzes some of its consequences and effects. It places the model in a recent political context (the Cardoso administration, 1995–2002), explaining the opposition and criticism of land struggle movements and rural organizations. It questions the political and ideological arguments related to the model's persistence, particularly with regard to the decision to maintain the programme on the part of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's administration after 2003.

A Movement Wrestling: American Labor's Enduring Struggle with Immigration, 1866–2007

This article examines the American labor movement's struggles since the nineteenth century over how to respond to mass immigration. Labor's struggles have turned on whether it views new waves fundamentally as a threat, which elicits a strategy of restriction, or an opportunity, which elicits a strategy of solidarity. It also captures the advantages of alongue-dureeapproach for understanding the fraught and evolving relationship between American unionism and immigration. Rather than a Briggsian story of labor traditionally embracing a restrictionist position, our archival and interview research from the Reconstruction Era to present shows that labor's position on immigration has been in regular contention—with disagreements getting resolved in a restrictionist direction during certain periods and an expansionist one during others. Likewise, the familiar scholarly claim that an unprecedented “turnabout” in labor's response to immigration can be pinpointed to 1999 ignores more than a century of internal debate and variegated external activism on this issue. We lay out an analytical model for understanding why the labor movement has viewed new immigrant workers as a threat in certain contexts and an opportunity for growth in others. The model highlights how three external variables—the fluid structure of the labor market, immigration trends, and the state's disposition toward organized labor—establish either a secure or insecure environment within which unions respond to immigration. It also underscores the importance of how dominant modes of unionism within the movement interact with these external forces to shape its perception of “new” immigrants in restrictive or solidaristic terms. Significantly, the sequence and recombination of these forces during the past century or more have transformed how organized labor responds to new immigrant workers in an insecure environment today. Our research presents a diverse movement honestly wrestling with immigration's profound conundrums, including elemental issues of who it identifies as part of its fold (workers deserving of fraternity and sorority) and who it deems as permanent outsiders (workers who were a menace to the cause).