Author : Jeroen Gunning
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 440 pages
File Size : 37,32 MB
Release : 2014
Category : History
ISBN : 0199394989
Demonstrates how social movements can become mass scale with the aid of smart social networking and media management.
Author : Jeroen Gunning
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 440 pages
File Size : 22,88 MB
Release : 2014-01-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0190257644
On 25 January 2011, tens of thousands of Egyptians came out on the streets to protest against emergency rule and police brutality. Eighteen days later, Mubarak, one of the longest sitting dictators in the region, had gone. How are we to make sense of these events? Was this a revolution, a revolutionary moment? How did the protests come about? How were they able to outmaneuver the police? Was this really a 'leaderless revolution,' as so many pundits claimed, or were the demonstrations an outgrowth of the protest networks that had developed over the past decade? Why did so many people with no history of activism participate? What role did economic and systemic crises play in creating the conditions for these protests to occur? Was this really a Facebook revolution? Why Occupy a Square? is a dynamic exploration of the shape and timing of these extraordinary events, the players behind them, and the tactics and protest frames they developed. Drawing on social movement theory, it traces the interaction between protest cycles, regime responses and broader structural changes over the past decade. Using theories of urban politics, space and power, it reflects on the exceptional state of non-sovereign politics that developed during the occupation of Tahrir Square.
Author : W.J.T. Mitchell
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 147 pages
File Size : 43,98 MB
Release : 2013-05-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 022604288X
Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors’ lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. “You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland,” Taussig writes in the opening essay, “and now you can’t leave or do without it.” Following Taussig’s artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter—by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics—Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument. Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011’s revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment—an occupation itself.
Author : Catherine E. Herrold
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 20,14 MB
Release : 2020-03-18
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0190093250
The 2011 Arab Spring protests seemed to mark a turning point in Middle East politics, away from authoritarianism and toward democracy. Within a few years, however, most observers saw the protests as a failure given the outbreak of civil wars and re-emergence of authoritarian strongmen in countries like Egypt. But in Delta Democracy, Catherine E. Herrold argues that we should not overlook the ongoing mobilization taking place in grassroots civil society. Drawing upon ethnographic research on Egypt's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the wake of the uprisings, Herrold uncovers the strategies that local NGOs used to build a more democratic and just society. Departing from US-based democracy advocates' attempts to reform national political institutions, local Egyptian organizations worked with communities to build a culture of democracy through public discussion, debate, and collective action. At present, these forms of participatory democracy are more attainable than establishing fair elections or parliaments, and they are helping Egyptians regain a sense of freedom that they have been denied as the long-time subjects of a dictator. Delta Democracy advances our understanding of how civil society organizations maneuver under state repression in order to combat authoritarianism. It also offers a concrete set of recommendations on how US policymakers can restructure foreign aid to better help local community organizations fighting to expand democracy.
Author : Asef Bayat
Publisher : University of California Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 30,83 MB
Release : 2021-02-23
Category : History
ISBN : 0520295331
Localities, countries, and regions develop through complex interactions with others. This striking volume highlights global interconnectedness seen through the prism of the Middle East, both “global-in” and “global-out.” It delves into the region’s scientific, artistic, economic, political, religious, and intellectual formations and traces how they have taken shape through a dynamic set of encounters and exchanges. Written in short and accessible essays by prominent experts on the region, Global Middle East covers topics including God, Rumi, food, film, fashion, music, sports, science, and the flow of people, goods, and ideas. The text explores social and political movements from human rights, Salafism, and cosmopolitanism to radicalism and revolutions. Using the insights of global studies, students will glean new perspectives about the region.
Author : Christopher Davidson
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 933 pages
File Size : 24,65 MB
Release : 2016-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1786070022
For more than a century successive US and UK governments have sought to thwart nationalist, socialist and pro-democracy movements in the Middle East. Through the Cold War, the ‘War on Terror’ and the present era defined by the Islamic State, the Western powers have repeatedly manipulated the region’s most powerful actors to ensure the security of their own interests and, in doing so, have given rise to religious politics, sectarian war, bloody counter-revolutions and now one of the most brutal incarnations of Islamic extremism ever seen. This is the utterly compelling, systematic dissection of Western interference in the Middle East. Christopher Davidson exposes the dark side of our foreign policy – dragging many disturbing facts out into the light for the first time. Most shocking for us today is his assertion that US intelligence agencies continue to regard the Islamic State, like al-Qaeda before it, as a strategic but volatile asset to be wielded against their enemies. Provocative, alarming and unrelenting, Shadow Wars demands to be read – now.
Author : Adel Abdel Ghafar
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 46,12 MB
Release : 2016-10-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1317222091
Egyptians in Revolt investigates the political economy of the Egyptian labor and student movements. Using elements of social movement theory within a broad political economy framework, it assesses labor and student mobilizations in four eras of contemporary Egyptian history: the pre-1952 era, the Nasser era, the Sadat era and the Mubarak era. Egyptians in Revolt examines how both student and labor groups responded to the political economy pressures of the respective eras. Within the context of social movement theory, the book argues that political opportunities and threats have had a significant impact on both student and labor mobilizations. In addition, the book explores how the movements have, at times, been able to affect government policies. However, the argument is made that the inability of both groups to sustain momentum in the long term is due to cooptation efforts by established political forces and the absence of viable and enduring organizational structures that are autonomous of state control. By combining analysis to include both labor and student movements, Egyptians in Revolt is a valuable resource for understanding the Egyptian political economy and its impact on mobilizations. It will therefore be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, as well as those interested in social movement more broadly.
Author : Benjamin Abrams
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 35,82 MB
Release : 2023-06-09
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 022682683X
"When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, half a million people showed up to Black Lives Matter protests. Between 15 and 26 million Americans participated in protests surrounding the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others. The New York Times ran the headline, "Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in US History." In The Rise of the Masses, sociologist Benjamin Abrams sets out to explain how such largely spontaneous movements arise. While most massive movements require tremendous resources and organizing, Abrams is interested in cases where people with no connection to organized movements take to the streets, largely of their own accord. He looks to the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, and the historical example of the French Revolution to lay out a theory of how and why massive movements come together without the large-scale organization that usually goes into staging a protest. Drawing on first-person interviews and archival sources, Abrams claims that people organically mobilize when a movement speaks to their pre-existing dispositions and when structural and social conditions make it easier to get involved. Abrams lays out a novel explanation, Affinity Convergence Theory, to help us understand how and why these riots and protests mobilized so many people and explains the structural and personal factors that incite protests. And the historical and regional breadth of his cases give new insight into mass collective behavior. He explains how his findings can help explain other mass protests-the gilets jaunes in France or the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, for example-and even how affinity convergence theory can predict movements to come"--
Author : Ching Kwan Lee
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 50,11 MB
Release : 2019-11-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1501740946
In a comprehensive and theoretically novel analysis, Take Back Our Future unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The essays presented here by a team of experts with deep local knowledge ask: how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? Take Back Our Future argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The contributors outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, Take Back Our Future demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.
Author : Frédéric Volpi
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : pages
File Size : 31,38 MB
Release : 2017-06-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0197548008
This book offers a much-needed corrective to dominant approaches to understanding political causality during episodes of intense social mobilisation in North Africa. Drawing on analyses of routine governance and of 'revolutionary' mobilisation in four countries of the Maghreb - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya - before, during and after the 2011 uprisings, Volpi explains the different trajectories of these uprisings by showing how specific acts of protest created new arenas of contention that provided actors with new rationales, practices and, ultimately, identities. The book illustrates how the dynamics of revolutionary episodes are characterised by the social and political de-institutionalisation of routine mechanisms of (authoritarian) governance. It also details how post-uprising re-institutionalisation and/or conflict are shaped by reconstructed understandings of the uprisings by actors, who are themselves partially the products of these episodes of phenomena.
