Contentious Politics

Looking at the case of the 2011 Wukan rebellion in Guangdong Province, the following article explores the role played by foreign media in influencing the protests’ ultimate outcome: an intervention from above by provincial authorities in favor of the villagers. Placing Wukan into a four-level model incorporating local, provincial, national and international dimensions of the protest, this exercise considers how the Wukan “model” for contention may affect future acts of popular contention in China during the digital age. It suggests that while appealing directly to foreign media can help claimants increase their leverage over local officials and prompt interventions from above, such actions are likely to modify and accelerate but not fundamentally transform existing patterns of localized, community-specific acts of contention seen earlier in the Reform Era.   

In this article the authors conduct focused case studies on Zambia and Ghana to investigate the increasingly diverse popular reactions to Chinese engagement throughout the region of sub-Saharan Africa. In this effort they challenge the existing binary exploitation/opportunity paradigm through which growing Chinese engagement in sub-Saharan Africa is often analyzed. Instead, they propose an alternative framework, which centers less on the positive or nefarious nature of Chinese involvement and more on the institutional structures of African regimes. As opposed to closed autocracies and consolidated multiparty democracies, fluid transitional states create opportunities for the appearance of anti-Chinese populist movements akin to Michael Sata and the Patriotic Front in Zambia.

In the context of the new period of mobilization begun in Spain with the rise of the indignados in May 2011, protests against home evictions are today at the center of local and international discussions. This article seeks to make an initial examination of these mobilizations and their relationship with routine politics in Spain. After a brief historical introduction the article looks at the different kinds of action, both contentious and conventional, employed by the movement against the evictions, as well as the various scale shift mechanisms that have diversified the number and range of actors involved in this particular case of contentious politics. The conclusions look at the question of as to what point recent developments have broken with the deep-rooted tendency toward a lack of interaction between protest movements and institutional actors.

After having for long time been neglected by social anthropologists, cities are nowadays central in numerous researches, and more particularly in the field of migration and transnational mobility. However, studies of the impact of migrants on cities themselves remain insufficient. Based on ethnographic work within the United Nations office in Geneva, this paper argues that the impact of international civil servants on the city's settings and space lies in an expatriates' "ethnoscape" (Appadurai 1990) transforming Geneva's architecture, public space and patterns of sociability. The paper also analyses in what terms these urban mutations get contested in a central neighbourhood where inhabitants criticize gentrification, the rise of rental prices and eviction. Not only do the results of this study shed light on the process through which the presence of the UN office transforms Geneva in a global city, but they also show how such transformations of the urban space may produce the symbolic and spatial boundaries of contested territories that bring inhabitants to negotiate oppositional identities. In a broader theoretical perspective, this paper allow us to defend, along authors such as Boltanski and Thévenot, a pragmatist approach of boundaries, paying attention not only to their role in the discursive drawing of specific communities and public problems but their actual anchorage in every day practices. In other words, boundaries - in their various phenomenal manifestations - participates in the phenomenological and practical separation of contrasted urban worlds, that is of differentiated ways to organize - and relate to - urban everyday experience. This raises the question of how a boundary actually works as a separation and differentiation process, how it influences perceptions and actual experience of the world. 

The years since 2011 have witnessed the (re-)birth of a global cycle of struggles around the issue of democracy. With the representative institutions of liberal democracy in crisis, social movements appear to be increasingly moving away from claims-based and state-oriented contention towards a global project of autonomy. In this article, we focus on those movements that have articulated a critique of representation and expressed a desire to radically transform democratic processes from below. Referring to the ensemble of these struggles as the Real Democracy Movement (RDM), we set out to trace its autonomous roots in the Global Justice Movement, the Zapatista uprising and the long-standing traditions of anarchism, autonomism and anti-authoritarianism more generally. We identify five specific elements that characterize the RDM: (1) its autonomy from the state; (2) its commitment to horizontalism and direct democracy; (3) its emphasis on direct action; (4) its method of occupation; and (5) its embrace of prefigurative politics. We conclude that the analytical framework of contentious politics may not be able to fully appreciate the nature and significance of the RDM as an autonomous movement and prefer instead to speak of a “politics of resistance and prefiguration”. Far from being a mere call for attention, the RDM may be the harbinger of a new era of radical democratic aspirations in which autonomous movements could come to play a central role.

More than 30 years ago the violent death - on 11 March 1977 - of a left-wing student in the Italian city of Bologna brought an end to a student protest movement, the ‘Movement of ’77’. Today nostalgia dominates public commemorations of the movement as it manifested itself in Bologna. However, this memory is not an exclusive memory of the 1977 generation. A number of young, left-wing activists that draw on the myth of 1977 in Bologna and in particular on the memory of the local Workers Autonomy faction appropriate this memory in a similarly nostalgic manner. This article then explores the value of nostalgia in generational memory: how does it relate to past, present and future, and to what extent does it influence processes of identity formation among youth groups? I argue that nostalgia is more than a longing for the past, and that it can be conceived as progressive and future-orientated, providing empowerment for specific social groups.

Abstract / This study examines the tags and the news sources used to visually portray the Spanish Revolution, Indignados,15M and Democracia Real Ya movements on seven dates and eight Spanish and international news outlets. Multi-tagged articles and the diversity in the inner tagging systems of media outlets are the challenges in collecting and connecting the findings for a proper analysis. Results overall suggest,  that while there is no indication of changes in patterns of information flow, but that ownership and political views were the main criteria used to frame and tag the same events in the media differently. Above all, the study highlights the relevance of tags as online information gatekeepers that mirror or distort citizens knowledge construction in news framing.

This book offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective on the key European social movements in the past 40 years, including “new social movements” from the 70s to the early 90s, global justice struggles from 1999 to the mid-2000s, and contemporary anti-austerity protests. Part I is an innovative analysis of the relationship between European social theory and Europe’s history of social movement struggles. Part II explores new social movements from French anti-nuclear power movements via Italian autonomous politics to British anti-roads protest as precursors to the global justice movement, highlighting historical continuities and national specificities. Part III examines the cultural processes involved in constructing the anti-capitalist global justice movement, including collective memory, processes of international diffusion, activist mobility and the specifics of the East European experience. Part IV looks at the “European Spring” of anti-austerity protest and indignados, including the interaction between the Tunisian revolution and Greek protests, the “saucepan revolution” in Iceland and the dramatic 15-M mobilizations in Spain. The conclusion discusses the European “Occupy” events and the future of movements in Europe. The book stands alone in its combination of historical analysis of European movement development with ethnographic attention to the specifics of national and regional movement contexts.

The relationship between democracy and Islam is very complex, hence requires a rigorous scholarship to understand this complex interplay. The present paper examines the “success” as well as impediments in democratic consolidation in a Muslim majority state, Bangladesh. Through assessing electoral competitiveness, constitutional guarantees and implementation, women’s rights and political participation, and victory of secular party over Islamist, this paper considers Bangladesh as a “successful” Muslim democracy. Islam, this paper argues, is not a problem in democratization while there are a number of factors obstructing democratization in the Muslim majority states. To analyse the nexus between Islam and democracy, it is imperative to pay meticulous attention to explain the nature of the state and its social formation, origin, nature and practices of Islam in a particular society rather than just labelling Islam as incompatible with democracy. In the Muslim majority state like Bangladesh, as this paper argues, civil-military-bureaucratic structure leading to a symbiotic nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and military oligarchs, fragmentation, familialization and clienteistic party politics leading to neo-patrimonilism, lack of social capital and trust, and unequal distribution of economic and political resources are hindering democratic consolidation.

"
This book evaluates the present European Union (EU) approach to state-building, both in policy and operation. It offers a review of the literature on (EU) peace building, EU, state-building and conflict resolution, before examining in detail the European Union’s role as a state-builder in the case of the Occupied Palestinian Territories following the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and over 140 interviews carried out in Brussels, London, Jerusalem and Ramallah with EU, Palestinian and Israeli officials as well as academics, members of NGOs and civil society, the author evaluates the present approach of state-building and offers a framework to test the effectiveness of the EU as a state-builder. Examining security sector reform, judiciary sector reform and the rule of law, the book measures the contribution of the EU to state-building against a backdrop of on-going conflict and a polarised social setting.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, EU politics, Middle Eastern politics and state-building.
"

The material here comprises discussion points and some reference links for a diverse group of people in Brisbane, Australia, who fancy themselves as “gentle thinkers”, and who meet from time to time to talk things over. All kinds of things. The topic on hand, “The Democracy Problem”, is probably of interest to thoughtful individuals in many latitudes, so I am putting it online as a general stimulus for some creative discussion. Any opinions expressed in this piece are entirely my own, and may be dissected without mercy.