How South Africa Forced Gandhi to Reckon with Racism and Imperialism

Author(s): Mary King

In: Waging Nonviolence, 2019

At a time when Gandhi is being widely criticized (for very different reasons) in India, South Africa and the UK, Mary King sets Gandhi in his historical context and also stresses Gandhi's own willingness to confront his assumptions and prejudices.

See also https://jameslawsoninstitute.org/2019/10/07/can-we-celebrate-gandhis-achievements-while-also-learning-from-his-errors/

Available online at:

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/10/south-africa-forced-gandhi-reckon-with-racism-imperialism/

Vietnam

Author(s): Mary McCarthy

Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 119

Influential account by US novelist of her visit to Vietnam, in which she argued that the US was fighting a war it could not win, and called for withdrawal.

Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present

Author(s): Mary Ziegler

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020, pp. 326

Since the Supreme Court seems likely to reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion decision, American debate appears fixated on clashing rights. This work draws attention to an entirely different and unexpected shift in the terms of debate: instead of simply championing their own rights, those on opposing sides debated about the policy costs and benefits of abortion vs. the laws restricting it. This mostly unrecognized development deepened polarization. Whilst maintaining their constitutional demands, pro-choice and pro-life advocates increasingly disagreed about the basic facts. Drawing on unexplored records and interviews with key participants, Ziegler challenges the view that the Supreme Court is primarily responsible for the escalation of the conflict and charts social-movements divides and crucial legal strategies.

Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Battle for Privacy

Author(s): Mary Ziegler

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts , 2018, pp. 400

Mary Ziegler examines how Roe influenced a wide range of issues, including sexual liberty and the right to refuse medical treatment. The author explores a much wider range of political protest than simply abortion, and describes how social movements debated the meaning of privacy and struggled to use this concept to pursue political ends.

After Roe. The Long History Of The Abortion Debate

Author(s): Mary Ziegler

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015, pp. 400

Charts the cultural and political responses to Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental "right to privacy" that protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose whether or not to have an abortion. Drawing on archives and more than 100 interviews with key participants, Ziegler argues that abortion rights proponents were insensitive to larger questions of racial and class injustice. She also contests the idea that abortion opponents were inherently anti-feminist. She demonstrates that the grassroots activists who shaped the discussion after Roe were far more fluid and diverse than the partisans dominating the debate today.

For an overview on the status of abortion laws in the U.S.A. up to May 2019, see the following links:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/abortion-laws-states.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/us/anti-abortion-laws.html?login=smartlock&auth=login-smartlock

https://www.businessinsider.com/state-abortion-laws-reoding-roe-v-wade-reproductive-rights-2018-7?r=US&IR=T

https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/timeline-the-200-year-fight-for-abortion-access.html

Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

Author(s): Masha Gessen

Riverhead Books2014, pp. 308

Discusses roots of the group founded in 2011 and their international support, especially among musical celebrities, after their 2012 demonstration in Moscow Cathedral, leading to imprisonment of the three involved. See also:  Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot!: A Punk Prayer For Freedom, London, Feminist Press, 2013 , pp. 152 , including letters from prison, court statements, poems and tributes by international admirers.

The potential stigmatizing effect of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

Author(s): Tom Sauer, and Mathias Reveraert

In: The Nonproliferation Review, Vol 25, No 5-6, 2018, pp. 437-455

Advocates of the TPNW know that it will not automatically lead to a world without nuclear weapons. The treaty’s main goal, the authors argue, is to stimulate a societal and political debate inside the nuclear-armed states and their allies, by strengthening the antinuclear norm and by stigmatising nuclear weapons and their possessors. This article assesses to what extent this process of stigmatisation might take place. It concludes by looking at different stigma-management approaches that could be used by the nuclear-armed states and their allies.

I Can't Breathe: The Killing That Started a Movement

Author(s): Matt Taibbi

WH Allen, London, 2017, pp. 336

Matt Taibbi discusses Eric Garner’s life and work as a cigarettes dealer, and his subsequent killing by the police of New York that strengthened the Black Lives Matter movement and protest. He reports on how he become targeted by the police, and allegedly mistaken by police officers on the day of his death. He touches upon his problematic personal and health conditions, within the wider context of the criminalisation of drugs policies in the United States of America. The work expands on Garner’s life and killing, contextualising its narration on the 2008 Bloomberg’s policy of tax increase on cigarettes of 400% per pack, which – Taibbi argues – motivated Eric Garner to sell cigarettes to people who couldn’t afford them. Additional contextualising elements to the analysis that Taibbi offers are the ‘broken windows’ policing, computerised policing and statistical analyses on crime rate and the inherently racialized imposition of order that stems from them.

The nuclear taboo and the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons

Author(s): Matthew Bolton

In: Revista de Direito Brasileira (Brazilian Journal of Law), Vol 22, No 9, 2019, pp. 318-325

This article explores the development of the ‘nuclear taboo’ and ICAN’s creative manipulation of discourses of nuclear pollution. ICAN placed people who had long been marginalized by nuclear diplomacy – Atomic Bomb survivors, women, indigenous people, civilians, representatives of small states – at the centre of the debate about conversation about nuclear weapons. In doing so, ICAN deconstructed discourses legitimating nuclear weapons, revealing the ambivalence and fear underneath diplomatic euphemism. ICAN also turned the stigma associated with nuclear weapons onto those who defended them.

How to Resist: Turn Protest to Power

Author(s): Matthew Bolton

Bloomsbury, Verso, 2017, pp. 178

Bolton, focuses on his experience with the Living Wage campaign in the UK since 2001 and how the campaign has through varied tactics significantly increased the wages of over 150,000 cleaners and other low paid workers.

The Nuclear Taboo and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Author(s): Matthew Bolton

In: E-International Relations, 2018

Analysis of how ICAN, by choosing a precise discursive strategy to establish a categorical prohibition, helped to build the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, placing nuclear weapons in the same legal category as other pariah weapons. The article uses Mary Douglas’ landmark theorization of ‘purity’ and ‘danger’ to explore the development of the ‘nuclear taboo’ and ICAN’s creative manipulation of discourses of nuclear pollution.

Available online at:

https://www.e-ir.info/2018/05/02/the-nuclear-taboo-and-the-international-campaign-to-abolish-nuclear-weapons/

Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War

Author(s): Matthew Evangelista

Columbia University Press, Ithaca NY, 1999, pp. 406

Well-documented examination of the role of transnational civil movements in contributing to arms control and the ending of the Cold War. Includes assessment of the Pugwash Conference which brought together scientists from East and West, and also the wider anti-war movement.

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