This volume consists of five essays on the National Movement that arose to overthrow British rule in India. Three of these essays are devoted to the two men, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, whose divergent ideas dominated the National Movement and to different degrees influenced its course. A fourth essay studies in detail how ideas and practice enmeshed to produce the civil disobedience movement in its initial phase, 1930-31, being undoubtedly the most powerful mass agitation organized by the Congress. The final essay studies the contributions made by the Left, especially the Communists, to the National Movement, seeking to fill a gap quite often found in conventional histories.
Why do some national movements use violent protest and others nonviolent protest? Wendy Pearlman shows that much of the answer lies inside movements themselves. Nonviolent protest requires coordination and restraint, which only a cohesive movement can provide. When, by contrast, a movement is fragmented, factional competition generates new incentives for violence and authority structures are too weak to constrain escalation. Pearlman reveals these patterns across one hundred years in the Palestinian national movement, with comparisons to South Africa and Northern Ireland. To those who ask why there is no Palestinian Gandhi, Pearlman demonstrates that nonviolence is not simply a matter of leadership. Nor is violence attributable only to religion, emotions or stark instrumentality. Instead, a movement's organizational structure mediates the strategies that it employs. By taking readers on a journey from civil disobedience to suicide bombings, this book offers fresh insight into the dynamics of conflict and mobilization.
This book examines the participation of the women of North India in the Indian nationalist movement, portraying how women's lives were significantly affected and reshaped by their involvement in the freedom struggle. The author discusses how women's participation in this mass movement was encouraged by `the domestication of the public sphere' so that they could enter the public domain without being alienated from their domestic lives. She argues that the raised consciousness engendered by women's participation in the freedom struggle paved the way for a gradually evolving idea of women's emancipation.
After decades of scholarship on the civil rights movement at the local level, the insights of bottom-up movement history remain essentially invisible in the accepted narrative of the movement and peripheral to debates on how to research, document, and teach about the movement. This collection of original works refocuses attention on this bottom-up history and compels a rethinking of what and who we think is central to the movement. The essays examine such locales as Sunflower County, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and Wilson, North Carolina; and engage such issues as nonviolence and self-defense, the implications of focusing on women in the movement, and struggles for freedom beyond voting rights and school desegregation. Events and incidents discussed range from the movement's heyday to the present and include the Poor People's Campaign mule train to Washington, D.C., the popular response to the deaths of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, and political cartoons addressing Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The kinds of scholarship represented here--which draw on oral history and activist insights (along with traditional sources) and which bring the specificity of time and place into dialogue with broad themes and a national context--are crucial as we continue to foster scholarly debates, evaluate newer conceptual frameworks, and replace the superficial narrative that persists in the popular imagination.
67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.
This book provides an interpretive and critical analysis of Kurdish identity, nationalism and national movement in Turkey since the 1960s. By raising issues and questions relating to Kurdish political identity and highlighting the ideological specificity, diversity and the transformation of Kurdish nationalism, it develops a new empirical dimension to the study of the Kurds in Turkey. Cengiz Gunes applies an innovative theoretical approach to the analysis of an impressively large volume of primary sources and data drawn from books and magazines published by Kurdish activists, political parties and groups. The analysis focuses on the specific demands articulated by the Kurdish national movement and looks at Kurdish nationalism at a specific level by disaggregating the nationalist discourse, showing variations over time and across different Kurdish nationalist organisations. Situating contemporary Kurdish political identity and its political manifestations within a historical framework, the author examines the historical and structural conditions that gave rise to it and influenced its evolution since the 1960s. The analysis also encompasses an account of the organisational growth and evolution of the Kurdish national movement, including the political parties and groups that were active in the period. Bringing the study of the organisational development and growth of the Kurdish National Movement in Turkey up to date, this book will be an important reference for students and scholars of Middle Eastern politics, social movements, nationalism and conflict.
In The Arab Awakening, George Antonius details the story of the Arab movement: its origins, development, and obstacles. Initially published on the brink of WWII in 1939, this history is the first of its kind in its examination of Arab nationalism from the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century. According to Antonius, Arab nationalism began stirring under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and erupted with the Arab Revolt, which lasted from 1916 to 1918. This book traces the evolution of Arab nationalism from Ottoman colonialism, to Anglo-French imperialism, and finally to political independence. Antonius demonstrates how the Arab nationalist movement was a positive force that advocated for political rights. Antonius's original research traces the shaping of the modern Middle East and remains of significant historiographical value for scholars and activists. Published prior to the creation of Israel, Antonius's classic provides the story and significance of Arab nationalism and offers insight on modern problems in the Middle East. George Habib Antonius (1891-1942), a Lebanese-Egyptian scholar and diplomat, was among the first historians of Arab nationalism. Antonious graduated from Cambridge University and joined the newly formed British Mandate of Palestine as deputy of the Education Department. His groundbreaking research in The Arab Awakening sparked debate on the origins of Arab nationalism, the role of the Arab Revolt, and the political changes post WWI.
The minjung (people's) movement stood at the forefront of the June 1987 nationwide tide that swept away the military in South Korea and opened up space for relatively democratic politics, a more responsible economy, and new directions in culture. This volume is the first in English to grapple specifically with the nature of a national development that lies at the center of the last three decades of tumult and change in South Korea.
Many of the world's states—from Algeria to Ireland to the United States—are the result of robust national movements that achieved independence. Many other national movements have failed in their attempts to achieve statehood, including the Basques, the Kurds, and the Palestinians. In Rebel Power, Peter Krause offers a powerful new theory to explain this variation focusing on the internal balance of power among nationalist groups, who cooperate with each other to establish a new state while simultaneously competing to lead it. The most powerful groups push to achieve states while they are in position to rule them, whereas weaker groups unlikely to gain the spoils of office are likely to become spoilers, employing risky, escalatory violence to forestall victory while they improve their position in the movement hierarchy. Hegemonic movements with one dominant group are therefore more likely to achieve statehood than internally competitive, fragmented movements due to their greater pursuit of victory and lesser use of counterproductive violence. Krause conducted years of fieldwork in government and nationalist group archives in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, as well as more than 150 interviews with participants in the Palestinian, Zionist, Algerian, and Irish national movements. This research generated comparative longitudinal analyses of these four national movements involving 40 groups in 44 campaigns over a combined 140 years of struggle. Krause identifies new turning points in the history of these movements and provides fresh explanations for their use of violent and nonviolent strategies, as well as their numerous successes and failures. Rebel Power is essential reading for understanding not only the history of national movements but also the causes and consequences of contentious collective action today, from the Arab Spring to the civil wars and insurgencies in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.
The resurgence of Palestinian nationalism in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war tended to overshadow the fact that Palestinian national consciousness is not a new phenomenon, but traces its origins back to the time when the first stirrings of nationalism were being felt in many parts of the under-developed world. This work, first published in 1974, is based on both Arabic and Hebrew primary sources as well as English and French official and unofficial documents, and was the first detailed study of the infancy period of Palestinian nationalism. The book begins by establishing the position of Palestine and Jerusalem in Islamic history and their significance within the concepts of Islam, and outlines the social and political features of the Palestinian population at the beginning of the First World War. The author then charts in detail the development of Palestinian nationalism over the decade after the War. Two major forces influenced this development and reacted with it: Zionism, with its ambitious schemes for settling Jews in Palestine and creating a National Home for them there, and Arab nationalism on a wider scale, which was emerging spontaneously with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the spreading of ideas of self-determination. The growing threat posed by Zionism awoke the Palestinian population to the need for organization and the establishment of their own identity to oppose it, while the focus of their national aspirations widened or narrowed according to the ability which they felt at any given time to confront Zionism and achieve self-expression within a Palestinian rather than an all-Syrian national framework. The events of these turbulent years – the confrontations with the British, delegations, boycotts, proposals and rejections, the emergence of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Wailing Wall conflict and its repercussions – are all described within the context of these wider considerations, which also include Britain’s own role as holder of the Mandate over Palestine.
