Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective
Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective

Author: Marcel Paret

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1317127307

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From the Arab Uprising, to anti-austerity protests in Europe and the US Occupy Movement, to uprisings in Brazil and Turkey, resistance from below is flourishing. Whereas analysts have tended to look North in their analysis of the recent global protest wave, this volume develops a Southern perspective through a deep engagement with the case of South Africa, which has experienced widespread popular resistance for more than a decade. Combining critical theoretical perspectives with extensive qualitative fieldwork and rich case studies, Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective situates South Africa’s contentious democracy in relation to both the economic insecurity of contemporary global capitalism and the constantly shifting political terrain of post-apartheid nationalism. The analysis integrates worker, community and political party organizing into a broader narrative of resistance, bridging historical divisions between social movement studies, labor studies and political sociology.

Why Civil Resistance Works
Why Civil Resistance Works

Author: Erica Chenoweth

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2011-08-09

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 0231527489

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For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

Fractured Militancy
Fractured Militancy

Author: Marcel Paret

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1501761811

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Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists, Fractured Militancy tells the story of postapartheid South Africa from the perspective of Johannesburg's impoverished urban Black neighborhoods. Nearly three decades after South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, widespread protests and xenophobic attacks suggest that not all is well in the once-celebrated "rainbow nation." Marcel Paret traces rising protests back to the process of democratization and racial inclusion. This process dangled the possibility of change but preserved racial inequality and economic insecurity, prompting residents to use militant protests to express their deep sense of betrayal and to demand recognition and community development. Underscoring remarkable parallels to movements such as Black Lives Matter in the United States, this account attests to an ongoing struggle for Black liberation in the wake of formal racial inclusion. Rather than unified resistance, however, class struggles within the process of racial inclusion produced a fractured militancy. Revealing the complicated truth behind the celebrated "success" of South African democratization, Paret uncovers a society divided by wealth, urban geography, nationality, employment, and political views. Fractured Militancy warns of the threat that capitalism and elite class struggles present to social movements and racial justice everywhere.

Crisis Under Critique
Crisis Under Critique

Author: Didier Fassin

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-04-13

Total Pages: 711

ISBN-13: 0231555482

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The word “crisis” denotes a break, a discontinuity, a rupture—a moment after which the normal order can continue no longer. Yet our political vocabulary today is suffused with the rhetoric of crisis, to the point that supposed abnormalities have been normalized. How can the notion of crisis be rethought in order to take stock of—and challenge—our understanding of the many predicaments in which we find ourselves? Instead of diagnosing emergencies, Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Contributors inquire into the social production of crisis, evaluating a wide range of cases on five continents through the lenses of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. Considering social movements, intellectual engagements, affected communities, and reflexive perspectives, the book foregrounds the perspectives of those most closely involved, bringing out the immediacy of crisis. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention that utterly recasts one of today’s most crucial—yet most ambiguous—concepts.

Digital, Political, Radical
Digital, Political, Radical

Author: Natalie Fenton

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-09-26

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1509511709

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Digital, Political, Radical is a siren call to the field of media and communications and the study of social and political movements. We must put the politics of transformation at the very heart of our analyses to meet the global challenges of gross inequality and ever-more impoverished democracies. Fenton makes an impassioned plea for re-invigorating critical research on digital media such that it can be explanatory, practical and normative. She dares us to be politically emboldened. She urges us to seek out an emancipatory politics that aims to deepen our democratic horizons. To ask: how can we do democracy better? What are the conditions required to live together well? Then, what is the role of the media and how can we reclaim media, power and politics for progressive ends? Journeying through a range of protest and political movements, Fenton debunks myths of digital media along the way and points us in the direction of newly emergent politics of the Left. Digital, Political, Radical contributes to political debate on contemporary (re)configurations of radical progressive politics through a consideration of how we experience (counter) politics in the digital age and how this may influence our being political.

The Southern Past
The Southern Past

Author: William Fitzhugh Brundage

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 9780674028982

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Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. Indeed, today's controversies over flying the Confederate flag, renaming schools and streets, and commemorating the Civil War and the civil rights movement are only the latest examples of this ongoing divisive contest over issues of regional identity and heritage. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups. For more than a century after the Civil War, elite white Southerners systematically refined a version of the past that sanctioned their racial privilege and power. In the process, they filled public spaces with museums and monuments that made their version of the past sacrosanct. Yet, even as segregation and racial discrimination worsened, blacks contested the white version of Southern history and demanded inclusion. Streets became sites for elaborate commemorations of emancipation and schools became centers for the study of black history. This counter-memory surged forth, and became a potent inspiration for the civil rights movement and the black struggle to share a common Southern past rather than a divided one. W. Fitzhugh Brundage's searing exploration of how those who have the political power to represent the past simultaneously shape the present and determine the future is a valuable lesson as we confront our national past to meet the challenge of current realities.

Protest in South Africa
Protest in South Africa

Author: Heidi Brooks

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2024-01-23

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1920690387

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Popular protest has become a regular feature of post-1994 South Africa. As a young democracy born out of resistance, we may understand the contemporary manifestations of protest as extensions of this broader history. However, it is notably in the context of formal democratic institutions that popular protest has become an increasingly normalised mode of influencing policy, demanding service delivery and forcing change. Protest is constitutive of South Africa's democratic politics, but also reflective of it. Protest in South Africa: Rejection, reassertion, reclamation explores the underpinnings of contemporary protest and both its short-term causes and structural drivers. Focusing on the surge of protest from the mid-2000s, this edited volume provides an overview of the complexity of protest action, the diversity of protest spaces and actors, and responses to protest from both citizens and state. The volume situates its analysis against the backdrop of the global wave of protest witnessed since the turn of the 21 century, while examining protest in South Africa's local and historical contexts. Contributors to the volume examine protests in relation to, among other factors, provision of infrastructure and services, contestations around socio-economic development, issues of citizenship, and demands for inclusive democratic governance. Chapters also examine the role of women in protest action, the policing of protest, and the intersection of protest action with spaces of formal politics. The volume also alerts us to the darker side of protest, and the destruction and division it may foment. It thus considers the prospects of South Africa's evolving, sometimes violent, protest terrain for social and state stability and democratic progress. In the diversity of spaces, sectors and communities of interests in which collective action has emerged, Protest in South Africa: Rejection, reassertion, reclamation shows how protest is underpinned by a rejection of the status quo, a reassertion of interests, and a reclaiming of the political and democratic space.

The Politics of the Near
The Politics of the Near

Author: Jérôme Tournadre

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2022-05-17

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 082329997X

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The Politics of the Near offers a novel approach to social unrest in post-apartheid South Africa. Keeping the noise of demonstrations, barricades, and clashes with the police at a distance, this ethnography of a poor people’s movement traces individual commitments and the mainsprings of mobilization in the ordinary social and intimate life of activists, their relatives, and other township residents. Tournadre’s approach picks up on aspects of activists lives that are often neglected in the study of social movements that help us better understand the dynamics of protest and the attachment of activists to their organization and its cause. What Tournadre calls a “politics of the near” takes shape, through sometimes innocuous actions and beyond the separation between public and domestic spheres. By mapping the daily life of Black and low-income neighborhoods and the intimate domain where expectations and disappointments surface, The Politics of the Near offers a different perspective on the “rainbow nation”—a perspective more sensitive to the fact that, three decades after the end of apartheid, poverty and race are still as tightly interwoven as ever.

The Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution, and Social Transformation
The Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution, and Social Transformation

Author: Berch Berberoglu

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-09-26

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 3319923544

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This handbook on social movements, revolution, and social transformation analyzes people’s struggles to bring about social change in the age of globalization. It examines the origins, nature, dynamics, and challenges of such movements as they aim to change dominant social, economic, and political institutions and structures across the globe. Departing from a theoretical introduction that explores major classical and contemporary theories of social movements and transformation, the contributions collected here use a class-based approach to examine key cases of social movements, rebellions, and revolutions worldwide from the turn of the twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries. Against this wide-ranging background, the handbook concludes by charting the varied and competing future developments and trajectories of social movements, revolutions, and social transformations.

Rising Powers, People Rising
Rising Powers, People Rising

Author: Alf Gunvald Nilsen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-04-26

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1000376036

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Rising Powers, People Rising is a pathbreaking volume in which leading international scholars discuss the emerging political economy of development in the BRICS countries centred on neo-liberalization, precarity, and popular struggles. The rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers of people to the margins of current growth processes, where life is characterized by multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. These socio-economic fault lines have, in turn, given rise to political convulsions across the BRICS countries, ranging from single-issue protests to sustained social movements oriented towards structural transformation. The contributions in this book focus on the ways in and extent to which these trajectories generate distinct forms and patterns of mobilization and resistance, and conversely, how popular struggles impact on and shape these trajectories. The book unearths the economic, social, and political contradictions that tend to disappear from view in mainstream narratives of the BRICS countries as rising powers in the world-system. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.