Protest

My manuscript will be published with Routledge in 2014.  The book offers a study of the class conflict played out in and around the World Trade Organization (WTO) between 1999-2009. Theoretically the monograph challenges the social constructivist perspectives that has come to dominate studies of international political economy by developing the political theory of Antonio Gramsci. The book illustrates the utility of thinking in a Gramscian way through analysing WTO’s strategies to address the demands of protesters and its legitimacy crisis. Empirically, via document analysis and interviews the book makes two contributions. Firstly it illustrates that the shift from the GATT to the WTO can be explained with reference to the influence and policies of fractions of transnational capital (liberalisation) in relation to the fractions of national capital (protectionism) already dominant in the GATT. In addition the book identifies and evaluates the strategies employed by fractions of resistance to initiate change and the WTO. The book proposes that the strategies employed by the fractions of capital within the WTO are best explained through Gramsci’s concepts of passive revolution and trasformismo.

"This paper uses more than 850 equity court cases from across 16th-century England to examine the range of strategies available to those negotiating enclosure and common rights. It pays particular attention to those self help strategies other than hedge-breaking – animal grazing, mass trespasses, ploughing up pasture – by which enclosure could be resisted. It thus explores enclosure as ongoing process and contested practice through which local communities played a key role in the making of modern property relations.

Published paper available at http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/76/1/32.short?rss=1 or email b.mcdonagh@hull.ac.uk"

A study of post-9/11 anti-war organizations in the United States and their role in domestic foreign policy debates.  This book celebrates the political acts of individuals committed to changing the dominant politics of the Bush era. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with the leaders of prominent anti-war organizations including Code Pink and Iraq Veterans Against the War, the book employs Performance Theory to evaluate the capacity of protest to effect lasting social change.

Despite increased scholarly interest in how activists use visuals in claim-making and mobilization, little is known about how mainstream news media visually represent social movements and their causes over time. Given the number of studies that argue that journalistic routines, norms, and conventions create hegemonic discourse around political issues, this gap is surprising. In this article, the authors examine whether the images used to visually represent the abortion issue are homogenized. Drawing on an analysis of 2,093 print and electronic news images associated with the abortion debate, the authors find that the visuals used in media coverage are very similar. Likewise, the authors find that the most frequently shown visual landscapes for the abortion issue are relatively stable across six different kinds of events including commemorations, incidents of clinic violence, legislation, Supreme Court decisions, presidential elections, and executive nominations. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of this work for the study of social movements and call for more research on how visual landscapes influence audience understanding of both new and enduring issues.

Zygmunt Bauman (1997:221) has observed that from time to time ‘the outcasts of the consumer society’ go on the rampage, ‘committing acts which are immediately represented as riots and thus supply a further proof, if a further proof was needed, that the question of the underclass is -- first and foremost, perhaps even solely -- the problem of law and order.’ In this paper we consider the ways in which the perpetrators of public disorder have been styled by politicians and social commentators as ‘underclass’ characters and what this means for the public understanding of social class and social inequality in the current moment. In order to pursue this we focus on the media coverage of the Summer 2011 riots and their concern with the ‘feral underclass’ as characterised, in Ian Duncan Smith’s (2011) words, by ‘chaos and dysfunctionality’ and governed by a ‘perverse set of values’ . We consider how commentators at the time (including Conservative politicians) explicitly contrasted the ‘politicised’ riots of 1980-81 with the ‘apolitical’, ‘greedy’, consumer-based troubles of 2011 to the inevitable detriment of the latter. We argue in the light of this analysis that if ever the ‘underclass’ could be read in public discourse as a class fraction or their trouble-making actions understood as symptomatic of a class struggle then those times have now long gone. In the light of the English Riots, in which getting-without-paying and shopping with violence seemed to be the order of the day, the ‘underclass’ is being interpreted differently and even more disparagingly; instead of being read as marginalised, potentially radical actors they are now styled as apolitical, aberrant consumers whose numbers need to be ‘diminished’ (Kenneth Clarke 2011).

This study extends and refines earlier hypotheses about the constructive potential of influences "from below" on questions of democratization and unification in Korea. It carefully distinguishes "direct action" from other forms of political action and suggests that nonviolent direct action, fomented in the discourse of civil society, offers greater potential for constructive change than does "routine" political action, which operates within a more circumscribed institutional framework and yields more predictable and more limited results.