Struggle For Democracy Research Articles

Women Politicians, Social Movements, and Misogyny in Democratic Struggles

In this essay, I investigate the relationship among women in politics, social movements, and misogyny through an examination of public discourse surrounding women politicians—in particular, Carrie Lam, the former chief executive of Hong Kong. The participants in a series of protests in Hong Kong against an anti-extradition bill that began in 2019 generated a large volume of audiovisual materials for the purpose of raising social consciousness, conducting civic education, and creating networks for solidarity. Many of these protest materials contained blatantly misogynistic messages targeting pro-establishment women politicians. I focus on women leaders to explore gender politics in social movements. In assessing the public discourse about Lam during the 2019 movement, I demonstrate that gender politics is consistently inscribed within social movements in postcolonial Hong Kong, in which context the progressive pursuit of democracy, self-determination, and freedom remains imbued with patriarchal culture, including paternalism. This patriarchal culture, unsurprisingly, combines seamlessly with sexism, misogyny, and a gendered imagination of the city’s possible political futures.

From Victory to Democracy: The “Democracy” in Thailand’s Victory Monument

Abstract This paper discusses the symbolic transformation of Thailand’s Victory Monument in the Thai public memory, from embodying militarism to representing the complicated concept of Thai democracy. In the beginning, the monument had an indirect connection to democracy. However, due to the spatial agency, such as protest activities occupying this structure, it has turned into one of Bangkok’s democratic spaces. By looking at the stories of contentious politics and narratives surrounding this structure, this study reveals that the development of the Victory Monument’s meanings mirrors the democratic struggles of the Thai people. It also applies prevailing discourses on Thai democracy to elucidate the connection between the monument and democratic movements. This research provides an understanding of Thailand’s democratic struggles through a different lens, promotes historical awareness, and preserves public memory by emphasizing the role of public monuments in Thai history, society, and democracy.

The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic by Shira Lurie (review)

The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic by Shira Lurie (review)

From Mimeographs to Self-organization

Abstract This essay unpacks how Beijing-based workers’ handbills and posters during the 1989 democracy movement functioned as a counterinstitution that enabled everyday workers to translate economic demands into political self-organization through groups like the Workers’ Autonomous Federation. In contrast to liberal dissident writing at the time by the likes of Fang Lizhi and Liu Xiaobo, workers’ organizing strategies and political vision have seldom been analyzed. The author argues that these writings represent an important effort to create an inchoate civil society under authoritarian conditions, while going beyond these conditions by empowering workers to ground a broader struggle for democracy in reorganizing the control of society and productive industries through independent politics.

Re-reading on the Conversion and Caste Supremacy among the Dalit Christians in Kerala

Religious conversion played a considerable change in the socio-religious life of Kerala, especially among the indigenous communities. The socio-religious upheaval movement was one of the landmarks in the history of Kerala during the 19th century. During this period, there was a considerable transformation in the socio-economic life in Kerala affected by the ‘civilizing mission’ of the protestant missionaries in the physical life of the natives, such as social, economic, political, educational, and cultural life. For that purpose, they used the tools of modernity, like fashion, food, rituals, beliefs, etc. It cannot be neglected that the missionaries in the 19th century played a notable role in the society. But we cannot read the history of Indigenous people regardless of the history produced by culture, politics, religion, and values. Conversion is a strong historical tradition that treats Christianity as an offshoot of colonialism. In the Indian context, Christianity is an integral part of the socio-cultural history of the nation, rather than as people are separated from it. During this period witnessed tremendous changes in almost all fields of socio-economic life. That is why historians considered, the 19th century as the decisive period as far as Indian history is concerned. These changes were visible in the traditional life of the native Dalit peoples and were mainly brought about by the colonial impact. The backward Christians, under the dominance of the ruling majority and the economic dominance of them, could not develop a proper ideology. There is an opinion that Dalit conversion was peripheral and one-sided. That is, it happened under the influence of British hegemony and missionary influence. Religious conversion gave the slave society a kind of religious unity. But it could not completely develop freedom. Today Christian congregations face the struggle for democratization.

Investigating Conflict-Sensitive Journalism: Aljazeera News Report on the 2017 Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar

The Rohingya Crisis in 2017 has called for widespread condemnation of Myanmar. However, reports on this event have only escalated tensions. This paper explores the practice of peace/war journalism by an international media, Aljazeera, in reporting such a crisis. To do so, this research utilizes Lynch’s peace journalism framework as a standard of conflict-sensitive media. This paper argues that evidence of peace journalism does exist, but other factors imply that war journalism is still strong. Such practice of war journalism has (1) disregarded the crisis' global ramifications; (2) put a narrow context that ignores Myanmar's democratic struggle; (3) portrays conflicting parties' religious relationships as victim-perpetrators; (4) dehumanized Buddhists, monks, and the Myanmar people in general; (5) lacked accounts from grassroots peacemakers; and (6) created an excessive emphasis on elite-level negotiation, particularly in light of pressure from world leaders.

The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington's Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan's America

The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington's Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan's America

Understanding Bangladesh's security governance through peacekeeping assemblage: does contribution matter?

Abstract How do international peacekeeping experiences inform the security governance of contributing states from the global South? This article advances theoretical and policy arguments that international peacekeeping exposure contributes to forming multitudes of effects on domestic security affairs and shaping the contributing countries' security governance. The analysis problematizes the transformation of norms, policies, practices and institutional approaches in shaping the national security outlook of the contributing nations. Considering peacekeeping as a discursive ‘glo-cal’ affair and Bangladesh as a critical case, this study underscores how Bangladesh's contributions to United Nations Peace Support Operations (UNPSOs) inform its security governance. The article adopts a qualitative–interpretive approach to examine the assembling effects of Bangladesh's participation in such endeavours. It highlights the transformation in security institutions, new capacities in knowledge and income-generating sectors, new peacekeeping norms, and partnerships in security cooperation as the cornerstones in the national security outlook. Extending the purview of the existing literature on contributors' roles and impact, this article has offered assemblage as a dynamic conceptual lens to understand new domestic significance for the armed forces as global peace providers. Challenges related to the struggle for democracy, political stability and good governance persist in Bangladesh; nevertheless, the peacekeeping assemblage explains how the country has considered accelerating its global peace endeavours.

“Failing splendidly” and the price of success: Feminist struggle between revolution and reformation

With Euripides’s Bacchae Honig, in A Feminist Theory of Refusal (2021), chooses a story that easily can be read as an “errant path”: the story of a group of “honey-mad” women who, driven by a Dionysian force, slaughter their own kin and are eventually put back into place by fatherly reprimand. Against that, Honig retells the story of the women of Cithaeron as what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “splendid failure” - “a possibility first nurtured outside the city is extinguished, but memory remains” (p. 5). In the three moments that I look at in the following, we find an affirmative politics and a politics of celebration that Honig herself follows in her writing: she lays new foundations upon which future democratic struggle can build. The narrative of “failure,” even in the “splendid form” that Honig employs, however, misses an important aspect of the story: namely the violence and forms of domination that held back the city. Honig reproaches Arendt for not being attuned to the archive’s logic of closure that prevents the seeds of the women’s struggle to flourish in the city. But is Honig? Recognizing the conditions that have led to the bacchant’s failure might push us to think about the work of reformation, or rather transformation, as part of a revolutionary feminist struggle.

Misunderstanding Myanmar through the lens of democracy

Abstract This article takes the 2021 military coup in Myanmar and its violent aftermath as a starting point for analysing the dominant lens through which western observers commonly narrate the country's politics as a struggle for democracy. It shows how focusing on questions of the political system is insufficient for explaining political processes and conflict dynamics, and how it risks sanitizing the country's past and presence of nationalism, ethnic conflict and genocide. A postcolonial reading suggests that finding solutions to conflict and authoritarianism in Myanmar demands questioning the role of the modern nation-state itself. This analysis contributes to recent research which has found that Conflict and Peace Studies develops theories from some conflicts over others, reflecting how western interests shape academic choices in a field that aims to inform policy and practice worldwide. This article contributes to this debate on knowledge production by arguing that this selectivity bias is not simply a function of general western interest (or lack thereof). It is also linked to the frames that govern our interest in and understanding of countries and regions worldwide. Studying ‘forgotten conflicts’ in the global South not only necessitates a turn to specialist literature, but also demands moving beyond Eurocentric frames of reference.

The South's Democracy Struggle Reaches New Urgency

Abstract: This article examines the history and impact of the Voting Rights Act 1965 and the South's current political landscape more than a decade after the devastating 2013 Shelby v. Holder Supreme Court decision, which eviscerated the landmark civil rights legislation. The VRA has been under constant attack in recent years, with efforts to reduce its effectiveness. These attempts have led to the implementation of suppressive voting laws and restrictive election policies by Southern lawmakers. The region has become more racially diverse, but these measures dilute the influence of a diverse electorate. With the 2024 election quickly approaching, debates on voting and elections are at an all-time high across the country. In response to systematic efforts to undermine democracy, grassroots activists have come together to fight these measures and offer new proposals to fully restore the VRA and build a more inclusive and sustainable democracy across the South.

Revolutionary Confucianism? Neo-Confucian Idealism and Modern Chinese Revolutionary Thought

This article explores the relationship between materialism and philosophical idealism in the political philosophy of Marxist revolutionary movements, by illuminating the influence of Neo-Confucian idealism on the sinification of Marxism. Although they had virtually no access to the writings of the young Marx, Li Dazhao and Mao Zedong incorporated idealist philosophical ideas into their sinified Marxism. I argue that three elements of Neo-Confucian idealism contributed to the sinification of Marxism that emerged by the 1940s: (1) acknowledgment of the real existence of the material world as apprehended by the mind-and-heart in Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism; (2) emphasis on human will and consciousness, drawn from Wang Yangming’s Neo-Confucianism; and (3) recognition of an autonomous, even decisive role of consciousness and culture in revolutionary change. The resulting sinified Marxism constituted a revolutionary New Confucianism, highlighting the most universal, humanistic, liberative elements in the Chinese philosophical tradition. These community-affirming and spiritually rich elements can be mobilized against authoritarian forces to support the continuing struggle for human rights and democratization within and well beyond China today.

Democratizing Platform Work from Below

This article aims at contributing to the debate on democratizing work by looking at platform work and food delivery in particular. Based on an extended multi-sited ethnography, the article analyses two relevant case studies of workers' organisations, the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain in the UK and the grassroots group Deliverance Milano in Italy. First, it shows how efforts to democratise and decommodify platform work, as well as the issue of decarbonisation, take shape collectively from below and through conflict in order to compensate the absence of a robust and effective regulatory system. Therefore, it is primarily an effort to create a dêmos with the right to demand rights. Second, the conflict emerges as a means of improving working conditions, denouncing greenwashing practices, an opportunity for collective learning and experimenting practices of resistance. Due to these reasons, practices of conflict inspire the renewal of collective representation strategies in non-standard working contexts with a workforce scattered and casualised. Finally, the struggles for democratization, decommodification and decarbonisation in food delivery show that the contribution of independent unions and grassroots group plays a fundamental role, complementary to that of well-established trade unions and public institutions.

Review: The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington’s Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan’s America, by Gordon K. Mantler

Review: <i>The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington’s Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan’s America</i>, by Gordon K. Mantler

Democratic Despotism, Democratic Culture, and the Democratic Ideal

Abstract In this paper, I outline Du Bois’s WWI-era theory of democracy, which comprises three parts: first, an historically specific explanation of the racially exclusionist character of the modern struggle for democracy; second, a justification of universal suffrage; and third, an account of democratic culture, the promotion of which he believed was necessary to supplement the enfranchisement of black people where white supremacy still threated the achievement of justice.

Resisting Bodies: Between the Politics of Vulnerability and “We-Can”

ABSTRACT This article presents a critical phenomenology of embodiment in radical democratic struggles, focusing on racialized citizens inhabiting and navigating public spaces and on anti-racist protests. It contrasts the notion of the precarious body, central to critical theorists like Judith Butler, with an alternative phenomenological understanding, locating the political significance of the body in spontaneous movement (Arendt) and competence (Merleau-Ponty). Attending to either precariousness or mobile-capable bodies reveals distinct dimensions of radical democratic struggles. While precariousness addresses the unequal distribution of social-material conditions, it tends to overshadow the shared lived experience of freedom among citizens countering inhibitions of free movement, often motivated by their disproportionate exposure to precarious conditions in the first place. From a phenomenological perspective, public action is permitted by capable and mobile bodies. It is argued that public space opens the power of “we-can” bodies by soliciting citizens' movement among others and their engagement in shared projects, according to their bodily capacities. Pluralistic interaction, aiming to maintain or create free spaces of movement, is presented as the political practice of freedom par excellence, exemplified by radical democratic walking practices in the Black civil rights movement.

Media Policy, Structural Power, and Political Development at the US State-Corporate Interface

This article illuminates an underappreciated political dimension of capitalism by elaborating media policy as a site for the dynamic interaction of corporate power and the state. Synthesizing Marxian analyses of monopoly capital, American political development (APD) perspectives on public policymaking, and communication studies conceptions of media systems as fields of democratic struggle, I trace the institutional mechanisms that enable corporate media interests to reinforce systemic imperatives and maintain political-economic dominance. I illustrate my argument with examples from the Telecommunications Act of 1996. My analysis sharpens APD’s critical edge by defining path dependency, policy feedback, and policy drift as processes through which capital leverages structural power to fend off political challenges under changing economic, social, and technological conditions. State-sanctioned ownership and control of news outlets, communication platforms, and information networks furnish a unique mechanism for influencing the structural terms of public discourse on all issues, including media policy. This implicates corporate media power in the ongoing US political communication crisis and as a central force in the entrenchment of inegalitarian and undemocratic social relations. Lending greater theoretical coherence and empirical grounding to these material and ideological dynamics historicizes public communication and highlights contingent political openings for radical engagement with media policy.

The Echoes of Social Justice Trends in Kenya: A Case of The Rt. Rev. Bishop Alexander Kipsang’ Muge

The late Bishop Alexander Muge of the Anglican Church of Kenya, Diocese of Eldoret, made a remarkable contribution to the struggle for social justice in Kenya in the post-colonial era. However, his contribution to the struggle for social justice in Kenya has not been scholarly studied, hence the need for the present study. The purpose of the study was to establish the extent of Muge’s contribution to the making of Kenya’s trends in social justice. The objective of the article was to evaluate Rt. Rev. Alexander Kipsang’ Muge’s efforts towards empowering Kenyan society socially and economically. Liberation theology, as understood and used by theologians in Latin America in the early 1900s, was applied to the exploration of Muge’s struggle for social justice and the economic empowerment of Kenyan society. Knowledge of Muge’s contribution to the making of Kenya’s history as well as being one of the architects of the struggle for democracy in Kenya, underlie the significance and justification of the study. Data was collected from both primary and secondary sources. Archival and oral sources were significant in generating data. Purposive sampling, especially the snowball technique was used to identify interviewees. Analysis and interpretation of data employed a quantitative historical method. The findings of the study fill a knowledge gap about Rt. Rev. Bishop Alexander Kipsang’ Muge’s contribution to the cause of justice and socio-economic empowerment of the post-colonial Kenyan society.

Siblings, comrades, friends: Kin(g)ship, hierarchy, and equality in Thailand’s youth struggle for democracy

AbstractThis article provides an innovative anthropological analysis of youth activism in contemporary Thailand by examining its past and current manifestations through an unusual theoretical nexus—that between (cosmological) politics and kinship tropes. Against the backdrop of the Buddhist kingdom’s long-standing cult of the ‘Father-King’, the article focuses on the 2020 Thai democracy movement in relation to student demonstrations in the 1970s. It aims to explore the ambiguous permutations in the meanings of kinship that have marked Thai young people’s democratic engagement in a range of social fields—including friendship, siblinghood, and comradeship. Drawing upon archival material, oral histories of student revolts, and extended ethnography with today’s youth activists in a number of political sites—anti-government rallies, universities, and private homes—the article reveals how kin relationships, hierarchies, and affects are entangled in diverse political formations of youth dissent. Through a detailed reading of these complex entanglements, it shows how relationships of ‘equal friendship’ and ‘hierarchical siblinghood’ substantiate the symbolic grounds of Thai youth activism, as conflicting instantiations of ‘filial insubordination’ to monarchical parenthood. While youth activists advocate for an egalitarian, ‘friendship-based’ polity, explicitly questioning the democratic viability of Thailand’s Buddhist kin(g)ship, they are simultaneously caught up in (seemingly inescapable) hierarchical sibling relationships that validate the latter’s ontological legitimacy in practice, generating subtle tensions. It is argued that attention given to the varied cultural shapes of these tensions can make it possible to unearth the deep, kinship-based core of Thai social conflict that is concealed beneath public forms and straightforward political stances.

Alexander B. Makulilo; Eugène Ntaganda; Francis A. Away; Margaret Sekaggya &amp; Patrick Osodo, Election Management Bodies in East Africa: A Comparative Study of the Contribution of Electoral Commissions to the Strengthening of Democracy. Nairobi: Open Society Foundations, 2015. 293 pages, ISBN 978-1-920677-96-1

Election Management Bodies (EMBs) are critical to the conduct of elections and the consolidation of democracy. Nevertheless, there remains a scanty comprehensive analysis of EMBs in East Africa. Makulilo, Ntaganda, Away, Sekaggya, and Osodo’s book ventures into that journey. Their book analyses the nature and role of EMBs in five East African countries, namely Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, centring election management at the heart of democratisation and democratic consolidation. The book situates EMBs into a broader perspective, assuming "their status as a product of the struggle for democracy, their anchorage in the constitutional traditions of each society, their place in the history of political reform, and their interaction with the other institutions of each country" (p. viii). The book's essence draws from the reality that African elections and governance contestations primarily revolve around the management and administration of elections (p. 1).