Biblio

This Report describes the situation regarding one of the most serious human rights abuses of women – the practice of coercive sterilisation among Romani women – and the legal, policy and other obstacles in reaching an effective remedy for the victims. See also Van der Zee, Renate, ‘Roma women share stories of forced sterilisation’, Al Jazeera, 19 July 2016. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/07/roma-women-share-stories-forced-sterilisation-160701100731050.html

Policing the Planet examines the policy of 'broken windows policing': prosecuting vigorously minor crimes as a means of preventing major offences. The book argues that this policy is at the heart of a broader neoliberal approach to social order, and examines how the way it is applied enhances the array of punitive and discriminatory measures available to the state. Several chapters compare US policies of domestic control over the 'racialised and criminalised' with the 'war on terror' and use of drones and surveillance abroad.  The book also elaborates on the Black Lives Matter movement's attempts to promote global support and develop links with other struggles, for example with Palestinians under seige in Gaza in 2014.

Peru has had significant economic growth due to extraction of natural resources, but there have also been many protests about this extraction. Noting the weaknesses of many such environmental and indigenous protests, the author draws on fieldwork and interviews to outline the kind of mobilization likely to prevent extraction, and also to have positive social effects. He argues that the movement in Peru has significant implications for other developing countries relying on resource extraction.

Analyzes the current feminist actors, organizations and debates around gender equality and feminist perspectives in order to provide an overview of feminist ideas and actors in India. It shows that feminism today is the constant questioning of the world we perceive and the boundaries we encounter. 

Against the background of the world-wide protests of 2011, the authors discuss the Bulgarian movement in early 2013 and its stronger manifestation during the summer. They aim to draw out aspects of the prolonged protests that are unique to Bulgaria, arguing they represent a 'distinctive struggle for cultural recognition' with links to the earlier 19th century National Awakening movement when Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire.

A detailed history and sympathetic analysis of the development of a new kind of politics in the autonomous administration created rebel held territory in northern Kurdistan in Syria.  Rojava’s ideology (a reaction against the previous Marxist-Leninist beliefs of the Kurdish PKK) rejects centralized state control and emphases local communal organizing and promotion of ecological and feminist goals. Their armed groups, which include women's units, played a major role in opposing ISIS.    See also:  Dirik, Dilar, 'Unbowed" New Internationalist, July/August 2020, pp.22-4. The author notes the 'remarkable progress' made by the Autonomous Administration in Northern and Eastern Syria since July 2012 in promoting women's rights in all spheres. Turkish troops and their proxies occupied parts of Rojava -Afrin in the north in 2018 and the area bordering Turkey in 2019 - expelling hundreds of thousands of Kurds, shutting down all women's organizations and allowing armed groups to terrorize women. Nevertheless, women were continuing to organize more informally and were committed to resist the permanent extinction of their basic rights, and in northern Syria had held protests and rallies.

Exploration of discourses that legitimate violence and importance of challenging them in the practice of nonviolent intervention.  The author focuses on the civil war in Sri Lanka between the Government and the Tamil Tigers, and then analyzes the peacekeeping role of the Nonviolent Peaceforce Sri Lanka in 2008.

Offers variety of workshops from practical organizing skills to action preparation. Although their own writing does not use the term nonviolence, their web page includes material on nonviolence reproduced from Turning the Tide.

Provides global overview of LGB legislation and country-by-country summary of states that still criminalize same-sex acts between consenting adults in private. Published annually since 2006.

The author notes that at first the May 2014 coup looked like a re-run of earlier coups which resulted in short term military rule and an interim government, but the strength of repression and reorganization of  power soon indicated a more major shift  towards permanent authoritarianism based on new class alliances.  He explores how this new phase has its roots in the earlier development of Thai politics in the 20th century.

The book examines how contemporary movements are using strategic nonviolent action to promote social change, covering a range of protests including climate change, immigrant rights, gay rights, Occupy and Black Lives Matter. The authors argue that nonviolent uprisings are becoming more common than violent rebellion, and look back to twentieth century antecedents in the Indian Independence and US Civil Rights movements, examine the nature of effective strategy and discuss organizational discipline. Their analysis includes the Arab Spring, but notes its discouraging implications.

Outlines the result of a social media campaign against Trump and Pence’s decision to curtail women’s right to abortion that saw thousands of people making private donations to Planned Parenthood in the name of Vice President-elect, Mike Pence.

The number of women in positions of power and authority in Japanese companies has remained small despite the increase in the number of educated women and the laws on gender equality. Kumiko Nemoto challenges claims that the surge in women’s education and employment will logically lead to the decline of gender inequality and eventually improve women’s status in the Japanese workplace. Interviews with diverse groups of workers at three Japanese financial companies and two cosmetics companies in Tokyo reveal the persistence of vertical sex segregation as a cost-saving measure. Women’s progress is impeded by corporate customs such as pay and promotion, track-based hiring of women, long working hours, and the absence of women leaders. Gender equality for common businesses requires that Japan fundamentally depart from its postwar methods of business management. Comparison with the situation in the United States makes the author’s analysis of the Japanese case relevant for understanding the dynamics of the glass ceiling in U.S. workplaces as well.

Discusses how NATO has come under pressure over the last fifteen years from coalitions of states and nongovernmental organizations to change its nuclear weapons policy. The coalitions discussed are the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the Middle Powers Initiative and its article Article VI Forum, the New Agenda Coalition, the Non-Aligned Movement, and Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament.

The publishers claim it is the first detailed account in English of the movement. Ng, who is a lawyer and newspaper columnist, includes direct reporting from the protest, a timeline, a Who's Who of Hong Kong politics, maps and photographs. The book is reviewed positively by the independent Hong Kong Free Press.

Ko explores the US policy of coerced sterilization in the 20^th century, implemented through federal funding in 32 states.  Sterilization was used to control ‘undesirable’ groups such as immigrants, people of colour, the poor, disabled or mentally ill and unmarried mothers. See also: DenHoed, Andrea, ‘The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement’, The New Yorker, 27 April 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-lessons-of-the-american-eugenics-movement See also: Pandit, Eesha, ‘America's secret history of forced sterilization: Remembering a disturbing and not-so-distant past, Salon, 30 January 2016. https://www.salon.com/2016/01/29/americas_secret_history_of_forced_sterilization_remembering_a_disturbing_and_not_so_distant_past/

The authors examine how far peace movements can stop wars, summarizing a number of attempts to do so in the past – for example in the 1905 conflict between Norway and Sweden – as well as more recent better known movements: against the Vietnam War, and against the Iraq wars of both 1991 and 2003. Their case studies include the movement to resist US support for the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and the Women in White in Liberia 2002-2003.

Despite laws intended to protect women, Guatemala has one of the highest levels of killings of women and impunity for violence against women in the world. This article examines obstacles in the justice system to processing cases of feminicide comparing two cases. It argues that the sociopolitical context of structural violence, widespread poverty, inequality, corruption, and normalization of gender violence against women, generates penalties, or “legal tolls” on victims' families. These tolls of fear and time (the need to overcome fear of retaliation and the extraordinary time and effort it takes to do so in a corrupt and broken system) undermine efforts by victims to find a way through the justice system. See also https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2017/gender-violence-in-guatemala/index.html

White Rage, by Professor of African American Studies Carol Anderson, centres on a discussion on race, more specifically on the foregrounding of whiteness and the continuing threat that structural racism poses to US democratic aspirations. She provides an historical account of landmark moments in US history, namely the end of the Civil War and the Reconstruction; the reaction to the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the disenfranchisement of Black communities in the aftermath of Reagan’s War on Drugs; and the mass protests in Ferguson, Missouri, triggered by the shooting of Mike Brown in 2014. Through her analysis, Anderson argues that white rage erupts as a backlash at a moment of Black progress and therefore needs to be placed at the centre of US’s national history. In this light, White Rage is an attempt to illustrate how whiteness is positioned at the core of state power, and how it permits the reinforcement of a system that systematically disadvantages African Americans.

Economist Nicholas Stern led research for the British government on the economic costs of tackling climate change and implications for the global economy and compared these costs with those resulting from unchecked global carbon emissions. His 700 page highly technical report of 2006 concluded that cutting carbon emissions would be very significantly less economically harmful than the impact of unchecked emissions. This book, published 10 years later, warns that the risks and costs of global warming are more serious than he estimated in 2006, and argues strongly for a comprehensive low-carbon transition.  See also: Kahn, Brian '10 Years on, Climate Economists Reflect on Stern Review', Climate CO Central, 28 October 2016 (Climate Central describes itself as an independent body of scientists and journalists focusing on climate change).

The book focuses on 'year' August 1969-1970, and explores the roots of the movement against the Vietnam War in the Civil Rights Movement, citing testimony of those involved.

The purpose of the Women’s Major Group is to make sure women’s NGOs have a voice at the UN in framing policy on sustainable development and environmental issues. This articles focuses on the Group’s role in negotiations for the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and assesses the effectiveness of civil society involvement.

Using interviews and a range of documentary sources, this book examines how the apartheid state sought to control women’s and girls’ bodies and reproductive choices, both through the enforcement of restrictive abortion laws and the promotion of a patriarchal Christian Afrikaner culture. It also explores the ways in which women and girls defied these restrictions. For a comprehensive review of this book, please see Hepburn, Sacha (2018) ‘A History of Abortion in Apartheid South Africa’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 44, issue 1, pp. 190-192.

Historian Vincent Intondi describes the long but little-known history of Black Americans in the Nuclear Disarmament Movement from 1945, when some protested against the A- bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to today. He shows how those black activists who fought for nuclear disarmament connected the nuclear issue with the fight for racial equality. Intondi also shows that from early on, blacks in America saw the use of atomic bombs as a racial issue, asking why such enormous resources were being spent building nuclear arms instead of being used to improve impoverished communities.

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