Biblio

By demolishing the myth that feminism originated in the West, Kumari Jayawardena presents feminism as it originated in the Third World, erupting from the specific struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality. Gives particular attention to Afghanistan, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Vietnam. To look at a brief extract of the book see also https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4018-feminism-and-nationalism-in-the-third-world

Explores the divisions in the feminist movement in Pakistan and how feminists see or silence the intersections between sexuality, religion, race and class in the struggle for equality in Pakistan. It contextualises the analysis within the legacies of colonial relations, nationalist reformation, development policies and neoliberal economies, including new forms of militarism introduced with the global war on terror, and the transformations of the political space across Pakistan’s political history.

Critically assesses the qualities that a nuclear disarmament movement needs to develop in the current era. By comparing Black Lives Matter, ICAN and the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s, Baker explains why a new anti-nuclear weapons movement should be intersectional, digital and confrontational.

Since 1945 European states have achieved increasing levels of economic integration, but their social policy have varied. This is particularly true for contentious issues such as abortion, where different political and religious institutions and social movements have produced very different policies. This book provides an interdisciplinary survey of the struggles over abortion rights. Drawing on national case studies from across the continent, it analyses the strategies and discourses of groups seeking to liberalise or restrict reproductive rights, from the immediate postwar era to the austerity politics, resurgent nationalism, and mass migration of today.

In this series of interviews conducted by Frank Barat - activist for human rights and Palestinian rights -, Angela Davis reflects on the importance of Black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles. She discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles and makes connection between the Black Freedom Movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement, as well as between the events in Ferguson and Palestine. The core message of the book is the emphasis on the importance of establishing transnational networks of solidarity and activism. Angela Y. Davis is a political activist (who supported the Black Panthers in the late 1960s and became widely known in 1971 when arrested on false charges), scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine.

In this analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor offers a concise history of the Black Lives Matter movement, and an account of how the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency led to a state of uprising against the constant killing of Black people. Writing from a Black radical, feminist and socialist perspective, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues against persisting forms of structural racism, such as mass incarceration, Black unemployment and police violence. While connecting the fight against cultural and structural racism to a broader anti-capitalist project, she provides a rationale that depicts how this scenario has the potential to reignite the advancement for Black liberation.

Nonviolent resistance is a mass phenomenon that can challenge corrupt and autocratic regimes.  This form of resistance and  its symbiotic relationship to cities is not at all new: the plebeians in the Roman Republic used this kind of struggle when they abandoned the city until their demands were met.  But how do modern cities as conflict spaces favour  nonviolent resistance?  The authors systematically analyse the relationship between the urban sphere and nonviolent resistance.

It considers past, present and future prospects of female activism in China and how it is thriving despite the current political leadership in the country, predominantly patriarchal and directed at maintaining social stability, thus suppressing all forms of activism.

The book tells the story of how ten women disarmed a Hawk jet at the British Aerospace Warton site near Preston, in England in 1996, which was bound for genocide in East Timor and were acquitted. 

Tamlit writes as one of the 13 activists, giving a brief account of the occupation of a runway at Heathrow using locks and chains, and of the trial where the defendants pleaded 'necessity' to prevent local harm and harm caused by climate change. He also provides a summary history of the development of a broad anti-aviation campaign from 2000 against, the creation of Plane Stupid in 2005, which became a direct action network, and the Climate Camp at Heathrow. See also: Mortimer, Caroline, 'Plane Stupid Climate Change Activists Block Heathrow Runway in Protest at Airport Expansion', Independent, 13 July 2015 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/heathrow-protest-live-plane-stupid-climate-change-activists-block-runway-in-protest-at-airport-10384280.html

Tamlit writes as one of the 13 activists, giving a brief account of the occupation of a runway at Heathrow using locks and chains, and of the trial where the defendants pleaded 'necessity' to prevent local harm and harm caused by climate change. He also provides a summary history of the development of a broad anti-aviation campaign from 2000 against, the creation of Plane Stupid in 2005 which became a direct action network, and the Climate Camp at Heathrow. See also: Mortimer, Caroline, 'Plane Stupid Climate Change Activists Block Heathrow Runway in Protest at Airport Expansion', Independent, 13 July 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/heathrow-protest-live-plane-stupid-climate-change-activists-block-runway-in-protest-at-airport-10384280.html

The Director of the Brookings Institution's Center on East Asian Policy Studies examines the conflict between the Chinese government and the protesters over the role of popular control in Hong Kong's political system in the context of the 2014 movement. Bush stresses the popular resentment about growing economic inequality and the dominance of the business sector, discusses policies which would promote 'both economic competitiveness and good governance', and examines implications of developments in Honk Kong for the USA.

Well reviewed inside account of the succesfull battle to halt the AIDS epidemic, this is the incredible story of grassroots activists whose work turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a mangeable disease. France gives account of bureaucratic incompetence and political cowardice in a country where in 1982, 42.6 percent of gay men in San Francisco and 26.8 gay men in New York were infected by AIDS. Almost universally ignored, these men and women learned to become their own researchres, lobbysts, and drug smugglers; established their own newspapaers and research journals, and went on to force reform in the nation's disease fighting agencies. 

The end of World War II saw the emergence of a new public arena for imagining a “world society” in which nation-states would cooperate to achieve peace, a dramatic change from the previous world of competitive nation states engaging in multiple wars and imperial expansions. But, the author argues, this call for “world peace”—a renewed political imaginary after the failed attempt of the League of Nations and the Kellogg–Briand Pact—was not simply empty political rhetoric or a naive utopia. Its (re-)creation led to vigorous debate that resulted in various transnational political institutions and forms of transnational activism in the aftermath of the war.

The book discusses what factors encourage or undermine nonviolent discipline, including the reactions of the government and the way the movement is itself organised. 

This study covers both international and local media, as well as the role of conventional as well as digital media, in both publicizing and mobilizing the Hong Kong protests. It discusses, for example, the impact of TV, but also deliberate social media strategies. The editor is a Professor in the School of Journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

An examination of how the anti-Iraq War movement in the UK tried to secure press coverage as part of their campaign. The focus is on local anti-war groups and their relationship with the local press and examines such questions as the influence of the social composition of the movement on their approach to the media. Taylor also assesses how local journalists and media viewed the campaign.

The authors explores the various aspects of Moroccan feminism from a historical, sociological and comparative perspective. They discuss women and politics, women’s NGOs, female identities, women and Sufism, and their role in the 20 February Movement (20 February 2011 – March/April 2012). They also cover women’s role in society in general, from various but inter-related perspectives: secular, Islamic, grassroots, etc. See also Ennaji, Moha (2020) ‘Women’s activism in North Africa: a historical and socio-political approach’ in Darhour, Hanane and Drude Dahlerup (eds) (2020) Double-Edged Politics on Women’s Rights in the MENA Region. Gender and Politics, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 157-178. Analyses women’s activism strategies in Tunisia and Morocco directed at transforming gender roles; pursuing better legal rights and women’s progress in the public sphere; opposing violence and discrimination against women, and trying to consolidate democracy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Focuses on the moderate non-partisan Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALD), examining its origins and scope and its roots in the humanitarian catastrophes of World War Two, especially Hiroshima and Nagasaki. See also: McCurry, Justin, ‘New generation of Japanese anti-war protesters challenge Abe’, The Guardian, 16 September 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/japanese-anti-war-protesters-challenge-shinzo-abe Reports on the reasons given by young SEALD members for joining the movement. See also: Takenaka, Kiyoshi, ‘Huge protest in Tokyo rails against PM Abe's security bills’, Reuters, 30 August 2015. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-politics-protest-idUSKCN0QZ0C320150830

Autobyography of Gloria Steinem, journalist and prominent activist in feminist campaigns in the USA from the 1960s onward, who was also one of the foundersof Ms Magazine. It provides detailed insights into the early feminist ways of orgsanizing and protesting, and the internal politics of the movement. the book also covers Steinem's earlier two years in India and contact with the Gandhian movement, her links with Native American women, and her continued actvism in varied causes. 

African-American Studies scholar and policy analyst Marc Lamont Hill examines the interlocking mechanisms of unregulated capitalism, public policy, and social practice in the US. His work starts recounting one of the most salient event that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement: the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. More precisely, the narration spans different periods of time, starting with the grand jury testimony of Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown, and then looks back at the 1939 World’s Fair and Le Corbusier’s lofty ideas about urban renewal. It moves forward in time again to the development of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing projects in St. Louis, completed in 1955 and demolished twenty years later, with many of the displaced residents having to move to Ferguson and face a climate of socio-cultural deprivation. Hill terminates his narration in Flint, Michigan, where the American city’s population ended up being poisoned by lead in the water. Hill’s work is an account of the systematically disadvantaged identities - “those marked as poor, black, brown, immigrant, queer, or trans” – by a system that treats them as nobody, and makes them disposable, vulnerable and invisible. This work has been praised for enriching the contemporary canon of US civil rights literature not only because it captures the systemic nature of inequality in US society, but also because of his positive conclusion on the transformative power of organising, the most recent version of which lies in the Black Lives Matter movement.

The author draws on existing literature to summarise a wide range of hidden, semi-open and overt nonviolent forms of resistance to Nazism inside Germany itself and in German-occupied Europe. Examples range from hiding and rescuing Jews (on an individual basis inside Germany and elsewhere, but also rescuing almost all the Jewish population in Denmark), graffiti, leaflet distribution, underground newspapers, boycotts, and  the demonstration by non-Jewish wives of Jews against the deportation of their husbands.  Not a scholarly treatise, but a source for important examples of  courageous resistance  (though their effectiveness is sometimes debatable). Paxton argues success would have been most likely if resistance tactics had been adopted at an early stage in the rise of Nazism.

In the early 1980s, there were mass protests across the Western world with varied goals, for example to support different models of economic development, promote anti-militarism and non-violence, or redefine urban and social spaces. Many, however, saw safeguarding the environment as their primary goal and identified nuclear energy as their main target. The authors investigate the movement for as afer environment and how it mobilized large sections of society and provided people with new tools of civic expression.

In this book the journalist Mei Fong explains the context of the one child policy introduced in 1978 to control China’s growing population,and enforced through sterilization, abortion and fines.   The policy was modified in January 2016, when couples were allowed to have two children. See also: Fong, Mei, ‘Sterilization, abortion, fines: How China brutally enforced its 1-child policy’, New York Post, 3 January 2016. https://nypost.com/2016/01/03/how-chinas-pregnancy-police-brutally-enforced-the-one-child-policy/ 

Pearlman provides a summary of the background of civil resistance in overall Palestinian resistance since 1917, and a detailed analysis of why there was no third intifada in 2011. She also examines the protests that did take place. The chapter is extensively referenced.