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There are two major women’s movements in Morocco: the Islamists who hold sharia as the platform for building a culture of women’s rights, and the feminists who use the United Nations’ framework to amend sharia law. This book shows how the interactions of these movements over the past two decades have transformed the debates, the organization, and the strategies of each other. This book looks at three key movement moments: the 1992 feminist One Million Signature Campaign, the 2000 Islamist mass rally opposing the reform of family law, and the 2003 Casablanca attacks by a group of Islamist radicals. At the core of these moments are disputes over legitimacy, national identity, gender representations, and political negotiations for shaping state gender policies. Located at the intersection of feminism and Islam, these conflicts have led to the Islamization of feminists on the one hand and the feminization of Islamists on the other. Documenting the synergistic relationship between these movements, this text reveals how the boundaries of feminism and Islamism have been radically reconfigured. It offers a conceptual framework for studying social movements, one that allows us to understand how Islamic feminism is influencing global debates on human rights.

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. This book recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, the book argues that the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers’ People’s Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent.

This book explores the question of how contemporary collectives are creating diverse, new forms of creative economies that arrange diverse peoples, animals, natural environments, technologies and others around economic concerns. Like older forms of left association, these collectives seek to bring about change. They do so, however, not by working to overthrow and replace an underlying capitalist ‘system’ with an equally totalising alternative like socialism, but by experimenting with and inventing diverse new forms of economic life in the present. This book examines how economic concerns are formed and the techniques through which concerned groups are gathered and come to create alternative economies. In doing so it maps out a geography of collective action. It takes actor network theories of action as a starting point for thinking about how collective action brings the new into being, and argues that contemporary collectives are best theorised as hybrid collectives. This approach enables an understanding of how collectives initiate change and provides a view to the diverse forces through which they do so, including through the generation of non-discursive bodily experiences such as affects and emotions. In particular, this book argues that the relational and geographical nature of performative action is central to understanding the way in which hybrid collectives create alternative economies.

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they endeavor to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world. This book examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the past 100 years. The book asks how visual media work to produce witnesses—audiences who are drawn into action. The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to this text, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. The book presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action.

This book offers a window into an intriguing and previously unexamined segment of the anti-Iraq War movement comprised of veterans and military families. The book documents important political and ideological diversity within the U.S. military community and demonstrates how military experiences can motivate peace activism. Through descriptions of the tragic and moving experiences of activists, it outlines how the current lack of a military draft may be contributing to a new civilian-military divide where civilians have little connection to the sacrifices of the all-volunteer force, which negatively impacts the peace movement. This book advances social movement scholarship by demonstrating how emotions and identity shaped this movement and were used by the movement to make claims. Activists created a multi-organization movement where they could combine two seemingly contradictory aspects of their lives: an intimate connection to the military and anti-war activism. The bonds between military peace movement activists transformed their negative emotions from war, including fear and guilt, into emotions of resistance, including righteous anger and group pride. Activists strategically deployed their combined military and peace activist identities in order to attract attention from the media and others, assert authority on issues relating to the military and war, challenge dominant pro-war framings of the Iraq War, and heighten the emotional resonance of tactics such as war memorials.

The history of the maquiladoras has been punctuated by workers’ organized resistance to abysmal working and living conditions. Over years of involvement in such movements, this book’s author was struck by an elusive but significant feature of these struggles: the extent to which organizing is driven by attachments of affection and antagonism, belief, betrayal, and identification. What precisely is the “affective” dimension of organizing for justice? Are affects and emotions the same? And how can their value be calculated? This book takes up these questions of labor and community organizing—its “affect-culture”—on Mexico’s northern border from the early 1970s to the present day. Through these campaigns, the text illuminates the attachments and identifications that motivate people to act on behalf of one another and that bind them to a common cause. The book’s unsettling, even jarring, narratives bring together empirical and ethnographic accounts—of specific campaigns, the untold stories of gay and lesbian organizers, love and utopian longing—in concert with materialist theories of affect and the critical good sense of Mexican organizers.

When the military’s ruling party violently quashed Burma’s pro-democracy movement, diplomatic condemnation quickly followed—to little effect. But when Burma’s activists began linking the movement to others around the world, the result was dramatically different. This book explains how Burma’s pro-democracy movement became a transnational social movement for human rights. Using the experience of the Free Burma movement, this book demonstrates how social movements create and appropriate legal mechanisms for generating new transnational political opportunities. It presents three corporate accountability campaigns waged by the Free Burma movement. The cases focus on the legislation of “Free Burma” laws in local governments throughout the United States; the effort to force the state of California to de-charter Unocal Oil Corporation for its flagrant abuse of human rights; and the first-ever use of the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act to sue a corporation in a U.S. court for human rights abuses committed abroad. This work also raises the issue of how foreign policies of so-called constructive engagement actually pose a threat to the hope of Burma’s activists—and others worldwide—for more democratic economic development.

Have the dynamics of contention changed? This is the question that was asked to the social movement scholars who contributed to this volume. The easy answer to the question is “we don’t know, as we haven’t done the proper longitudinal research.” At the same time, it is hard to believe that the dynamics of contention have not changed. The past years the world seems in constant turmoil, whether we look at China, the Arab world, the African continent, Latin America, Central Europe or the Western world. What is remarkable, however, is that everything came together in so many parts of the world. Our “all star team” including “some of [today’s] most influential scholars in the field” (to cite our two external reviewers) was asked to not only reflect on our focal question, whether the dynamics of contention changed, but also to respond to each other’s answers. These discussions resulted in a rich compendium of answered and unanswered questions, of challenges and provoking thoughts, and of directions recommended to be found in this volume. Four concepts framed that discussion ánd shaped the framework of this volume: grievances and identities: the dynamics of demand; organisations and networks: the dynamics of supply; the dynamics of mobilization; and the changing context of contention.

The passage of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California in 2008 stunned gay rights activists across the country. Although facing a well-funded campaign in support of the ballot measure, LGBT activists had good reasons for optimism, including the size and strength of their campaign. Since 1974, the LGBT movement has fought 146 anti-gay ballot initiatives sponsored by the Religious Right and has developed innovative strategies to oppose these measures. This book examines how the tactics of LGBT activists have evolved and unravels the complex relationship between ballot measure campaigns and the broader goals of the LGBT movement. This book measures, both those merely attempted and those successfully put before voters, this book draws on archival research and interviews with more than one hundred LGBT activists to provide a detailed account of the campaigns to stop such ballot measures from passing into law. As the book shows through in-depth case studies, although LGBT activists lost the vast majority of these fights, they also won significant statewide victories in Oregon in 1992 and Arizona in 2006, and local successes, including ones in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1998 and 2002. This book analyzes how LGBT activists constantly refined their campaign tactics in response to both victories and defeats. It also stresses that such campaigns have played both a complementary and contradictory role within the LGBT movement.

Many immigrant communities along the U.S. border with Mexico are colonias, border settlements lacking infrastructure or safe housing. This book examines the leadership of Mexican women immigrants in three colonias in New Mexico, documenting the role of NGOs in shaping women’s activism in these communities. This book uncovers why such attempts to exercise political agency are so rarely successful. Central to the relationship between NGOs and women activists in colonias, the book argues, is the looming presence of the neoliberal political project. In particular, the discourses of caretaking that NGOs use to recruit women into leadership positions simultaneously naturalize and depoliticize the activist work that these women do in their communities. The book discovers the connections between colonias as isolated communities and colonia leaders as political subjects who unintentionally reinforce neoliberal policy. In the long run, she finds, any politicization that might take place is limited to the women leaders and seldom involves the community as a whole. Surprisingly, this book reveals, many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) promote neoliberal ideals, resulting in continued disenfranchisement, despite the women’s activism to better their lives, families, and communities.

As the nationwide campaign for same-sex marriage rages in states across the United States and crowds of same-sex couples rush to marriage license counters, the goal of marriage is contested within LGBT communities and the LGBT movement. Rarely has a social movement goal so central to a movement’s political agenda been so fraught. At the same time that anti-gay forces fight to preserve marriage for one man and one woman, lesbian and gay activists argue with passion about the viability and social consequences of same-sex marriage. The goal of this book is to understand the debate within LGBT communities over same-sex marriage, how this conflict has influenced the nationwide campaign for same-sex marriage, and the extent to which disputes and fears that surround same-sex marriage are justified. The essays in this volume analyze the discourses, strategies, and composition of LGBT social movement organizations pursuing same-sex marriage. They also address the dire predictions of some LGBT commentators that same-sex marriage will spell the end of queer identity and community. Case studies illuminate the complex politics of same-sex marriage, making clear that the current debate among LGBT activists over whether marriage is assimilationist or transformative is far too simplistic. Instead, the impact of the marriage equality movement and the meaning of marriage equality activism is complex, often marked by contradictory impulses, that are analyzed throughout this volume.

Negotiating Sex Work provides a timely and necessary intervention in to current public and political debates about sex work, debates which are primarily divided between those who view selling sexual services as legitimate work, and those who view it as a form of coercive sexual exploitation (or sex trafficking). By presenting scholarship from a range of countries and disciplinary and methodological traditions, this book intervenes in this long-standing debate by emphasizing sex workers’ political agency, an emphasis that highlights the limits of the poles in political and policy debates. In so doing, it specifically offers a critique of the broader sex trafficking debates that dominate the current politics of sex work.

Visibility matters to activists—to their social and political relevance, their credibility, their influence. But invisibility matters, too, in times of political hostility or internal crisis. This book presents an intimate look at how Namibian and South African lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organizations have cultivated visibility and invisibility as strategies over time. As such, it reveals the complexities of the LGBT movements in both countries as these organizations make use of Western terminology and notions of identity to gain funding even as they work to counter the perception that they are “un-African.”Different sociopolitical conditions in Namibia and South Africa affected how activists in each country campaigned for LGBT rights between 1995 and 2006. Focusing on this period, the text shows how, in Namibia, LGBT activists struggled against ruling party leaders’ homophobic rhetoric and how, at the same time, black LGBT citizens of South Africa, though enjoying constitutional protections, greater visibility, and heightened activism, nonetheless confronted homophobic violence because of their gender and sexual nonconformity. As it tells the story of the evolving political landscape in postapartheid Namibia and South Africa, the book situates these countries’ movements in relation to developments in pan-African LGBT organizing and offers broader insights into visibility as a social movement strategy rather than simply as a static accomplishment or outcome of political organizing.

This book links research on cleavage politics and the populist right with research on social movements. Both research fields have extensively dealt with the transformative power of globalization on political mobilization and conflict. At the same time, this book highlights that both fields tend to neglect the existence of different arenas of political mobilization, and focus on different features of the politics of globalization. By adopting a dynamic cleavage perspective, this study bridges the division. In part, its findings qualify recent research on the repercussions of globalization on social movements and protest politics. More specifically, the sweeping claim tested in this book is that globalization induces new structural conflicts into West European societies, and that the mobilization of these potentials has given rise to a new integration-demarcation cleavage. Based on original data on protest events and election campaigns in six West European countries, i.e., Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, this book shows that the integration-demarcation cleavage has left its mark on both electoral politics and protest politics. However, its impact on protest politics is less pronounced as compared both to electoral politics and to the impact of the new cleavages being on the rise in the 1970s and early 1980s. To arrive at this conclusion, this book suggests that it’s crucial to compare the two central transformations of West European politics, which have taken place since the 1970s, as well as to examine different political arenas and, even more importantly, their interactions within an integrated theoretical approach.

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition is an interdisciplinary of work of critically engaged political theory that traverses the fields of political science and Indigenous studies. The arguments developed in the book draw critically from both Western and Indigenous traditions of political thought and action to intervene into contemporary debates about settler-colonization and Indigenous self-discrimination in Canada. The book challenges the now commonplace assumption that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state can be “reconciled” via such a politics of recognition. It also explores glimpses of an alternative Indigenous politics. Drawing critically from Indigenous and non-Indigenous intellectual and activist traditions, the book explores a resurgent Indigenous politics that is less orientated around attaining an affirmative form of recognition and institutional accommodation by the colonial state and society, and more about critically revaluing, reconstructing and redeploying Indigenous cultural practices in ways that seek to prefigure radical alternative to the social relationships that continue to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans. This book offers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans’ campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities. Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently challenged the welfare institutions. By creating opposition movements and voicing alternative visions of citizenship, African American leaders, the text argues, turned Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty into a battle for equality. Koreans countered the city’s and the nation’s exclusionary policies and asserted their welfare rights. The work exemplifies transnational antiracist networking, showing how black religious leaders traveled to Japan to meet Christian Korean activists and to provide counsel for their own struggles.

An iconic figure of the Asian American movement, Richard Aoki (1938–2009) was also, as the most prominent non-Black member of the Black Panther Party, a key architect of Afro-Asian solidarity in the 1960s and 1970s. His life story exposes the personal side of political activism as it illuminates the history of ethnic nationalism and radical internationalism in America. A reflection of this interconnection, this book weaves together two narratives: Aoki’s dramatic first-person chronicle and an interpretive. Aoki’s candid account of himself takes us from his early years in Japanese American internment camps to his political education on the streets of Oakland, to his emergence in the Black Panther Party. As his story unfolds, we see how his parents’ separation inside the camps and his father’s illegal activities shaped the development of Aoki’s politics. This book situates his life within the context of twentieth-century history—World War II, the Cold War, and the protests of the 1960s. It demonstrates how activism is both an accidental and an intentional endeavor and how a militant activist practice can also promote participatory democracy and social service.

The theory and practice of social movements come together in strategy—whether, why, and how people can realize their visions of another world by acting together. This book offers a concise definition of strategy and a framework for differentiating between strategies. Specific chapters address microlevel decision-making processes and creativity, coalition building in Northern Ireland, nonviolent strategies for challenging repressive regimes, identity politics, GLBT rights, the Christian right in Canada and the United States, land struggles in Brazil and India, movement-media publicity, and corporate social movement organizations.

Since World War II, students in East and Southeast Asia have led protest movements that toppled authoritarian regimes in countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. Elsewhere in the region, student protests have shaken regimes until they were brutally suppressed—most famously in China’s Tiananmen Square and in Burma. But despite their significance, these movements have received only a fraction of the notice that has been given to American and European student protests of the 1960s and 1970s. This book tells the story of student protest movements across Asia. Taking an interdisciplinary, comparative approach, the chapters here examine ten countries, focusing on those where student protests have been particularly fierce and consequential: China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. They explore similarities and differences among student movements in these countries, paying special attention to the influence of four factors: higher education systems, students’ collective identities, students’ relationships with ruling regimes, and transnational flows of activist ideas and inspirations.

This book is a story about inequality, its many forms and far reaching consequences, and unconventional efforts to challenge it. The book expands our understanding of inequality by making sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species. I consider how radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge these socioecological inequalities through a vision they call total liberation. These activists see inequality as a threat to life itself—for oppressed peoples, species, and ecosystems—and take direct action against institutions in an effort to enact social change. The government, corporations, and the media have labeled these individuals “eco-terrorists” and have cracked down on activist networks through the use of punitive legislation, surveillance, infiltration, grand jury subpoenas, and imprisonment. Activists maintain their resolve that they seek a world in which all forms of inequality and unfreedom are confronted. Along the way, they must address their own demons associated with internal movement dynamics reflecting elitism and insensitivity within their ranks. Therefore these movements are of sociological and political significance because they simultaneously confront and embrace systems of inequality that reflect the dominant social order. Based on interviews with 100 activists, extensive fieldwork observations, and exhaustive analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and ‘zines produced by movement activists, organizations, and networks, Total LIberation is a close-up, insider’s account of one of the most important—and feared—social movements today.