Social Movements

"This (very provisional) paper draws on the Irish experience of counter cultures to think about the shape and direction of movements from below at the end of the century and to find ways of asking "where do we go from here?" It starts by trying to make sense of the existing directions of counter cultural movement projects, which it sees as organic challenges to everyday social routines ("ordinary life") that are extended to the point of challenging large-scale power structures ("politics"). It does this by looking at some of the political tensions in the Irish versions of these projects: between strategies of mainstreaming and ghettoising, of consensus and disruption, of populism and elitism, and trying to identify the internal divisions of interest and rationality that underlie these tensions.

If we want to be able to choose our directions well and to bring others along with us, we need to find ways of evaluating these choices that are neither arbitrary nor automatic. This paper suggests that it is possible to develop an immanent critique which asks how adequate different strategies are to the counter cultural project as a whole. This might mean, for example, using comprehensiveness rather than one-sidedness, scope rather than limits, or compatibility rather than contradiction as yardsticks to judge the relationship between a political strategy and a movement. On this basis it suggests that a strategy oriented to the development of counter-hegemony, conflict and popular mobilisation might come closest to being adequate to the existing movement."

Mobilizations over the last year – especially those supporting internet freedom and those challenging inequality -- invite change in the electorally engaged left’s articulation of the world’s transformations. By conceiving the Next Left as a field of affinities rather than exclusively through the lens of particular political parties, mobilizations in opposition to ACTA across Europe in 2012 alongside Occupy Wall Street and its movement kin become critical allies in both policy and politics. These and other movements help to channel the politics of affect in progressive fashion, by refashioning a proper sense of property and accountability for the 21st century on the one hand, and by elevating the importance of publics in politics, on the other.

The Quit India speech is a speech made by Mahatma Gandhi on August 8, 1942, on the eve of the Quit India movement. He called for determined, but passive resistance that signified the certitude that Gandhi foresaw for the movement is best described by his call to Do or Die. His speech was issued at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay (now Mumbai), since renamed August Kranti Maidan (August Revolution Ground). However, almost the entire Congress leadership, and not merely at the national level, was put into confinement less than twenty-four hours after Gandhi's speech, and the greater number of the Congress leaders were to spend the rest of the war in jail. Many years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., would mimic Gandhi in his "I Have A Dream" speech that promoted nonviolence and equality of races. Gandhi made this speech to help India gain Independence.

Recently, there has been much debate about the rise of an Evangelical Left in the United States. This debate has focused on the emergence of influential evangelical leaders breaking away from the Republican Party, such as Rick Warren. This debate mistakes a hegemonic crisis of (neo-)conservatism with a hegemonic crisis of neoliberalism. Instead, the evangelical movement in the United States needs to be analyzed in the context of neoliberalism and the decline of class-based forms of solidarity, which it replaced. Throughout their ascent, the evangelical institutions have inscribed themselves into and become a part of the neoliberal state. At the same time, the depth of the economic crisis, the remaining class character of the evangelical movement, the importance of evangelical churches as arenas of hegemonic struggles and, finally, the existing shift in national discourse in terms of the ecological question, the social question and the rehabilitation of the state vis-à-vis the market mark an opening of the political situation in the US that may eventually lead to a replacement of the current evangelical centrism by the actual Evangelical Left as part of a counter-hegemonic post-neoliberal historic bloc.

This article examines the state of legal control of social movements since the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protest in Seattle, Washington. The authors argue that state control has changed significantly in recent years. As a result, the article outlines a general framework for the study of the social control of dissent, but focusing specifically on understanding how legal mechanisms are deployed to control protest. The second part of the article shows how activists responded to these control tactics.

""A glance at the recent (1997) edition of The Macquarie Dictionary
reveals ‘feral’ to have attracted a curious raft of meanings. Indeed, this signifier has itself gone positively feral — a bewildering semiotic circumstance in which, it is certain, the media has conspired. In daily newspapers youth, politicians, artists, businessmen, academics, even towns, are reported to be
going or to have ‘gone feral’. What are we to make of this popular
metaphorical blitzkrieg? Since there is an explicit association with wildness, I think it reasonable to assume insinuations of ‘marginal’, ‘erratic’ and ‘unpredictable’. Yet, differential evaluation of such states has given rise to a most complex adjective, one mobilised for different purposes. For one thing, ‘feral’ may signify ‘promiscuous’, ‘provocative’, ‘aggressive’, ‘hostile’, ‘dangerous’. It may even be used to indicate moral recession, the dissolution
of civilisation, culture, or the ‘natural order’. For example, in response to the disappearance of Moe infant, Jaidyn Leskie in June 1997, The Age ran a front page feature on this La Trobe Valley town which had apparently ‘lost almost everything that gave its life cohesion; which connected it to its past and the workaday world governed by social norms and taboos ... [D]eeds are taking
place that seem unhinged, bizarre, verging on the feral. The natural order has been upset’. Yet quite infuriatingly, in other contexts the same word means ‘charismatic’, ‘eccentric’, ‘enigmatic’, ‘excellent’. A truly protean repository of meaning, colloquially, feral has thus come to designate social phenomena which may be sources of fear or subjects of desire — not an altogether inappropriate label for Australia’s recent and most ambivalent self-marginals,
who have ‘cut loose from common or garden varieties of human’ and ‘fled the suburbs for a life of grime in the forests’.""

"Neoliberal economics have emerged in the post-Cold War era as the predominant ideological tenet applied to the development of countries in the global south. For much of the global south, however, the promise that markets will bring increased standards of living and emancipation from tyranny has been an empty one. Instead, neoliberalisation has increased the gap between rich and poor and unleashed a firestorm of social ills.

This book deals with the post-conflict geographies of violence and neoliberalisation in Cambodia. Applying a geographical analysis to contemporary Cambodian politics, the author employs notions of neoliberalism, public space, and radical democracy as the most substantive components of its theoretical edifice. He argues that the promotion of unfettered marketisation is the foremost causal factor in the country’s inability to consolidate democracy following a United Nations sponsored transition. The book demonstrates Cambodian perspectives on the role of public space in Cambodia's process of democratic development and explains the implications of violence and its relationship with neoliberalism.

Taking into account the transition from war to peace, authoritarianism to democracy, and command economy to a free market, this book offers a critical appraisal of the political economy in Cambodia.
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Reviews:

Gunn, G. C. 2013. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 43.1: 188-191.

Brickell, K. 2011. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 52.3: 372-374.

Percival, T. 2011. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 32.2: 270-272.

Christie, R. 2010. South East Asia Research, 19.2: 349-372.

Ordóñez de Pablos, P. 2010. International Journal of Asian Business and Information Management, 1.4: 65-66."