Promoting democracy: Is exporting revolution a constructive strategy?

Author(s): Mark Beissinger

In: Dissent, Vol 53, No 1 (Winter), 2006, pp. 18-24

A critical assessment that notes the role of neoconservatives in endorsing export of democracy, the dangers of compromising the impartiality of human rights bodies, or intensifying internal ethnic and other conflicts, and the danger of ‘packaging, exporting, and spreading democratic revolution like a module across a broad array of settings, irrespective of local circumstances’.

This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century

Author(s): Mark Engler, and Paul Engler

Nation Books, New York, 2016, pp. 368

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.

The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia

Author(s): Mark Galleotti

Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2018, pp. 344

Galleotti, a Russian expert at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, explores how the Russian underworld has evolved under Putin, and how the regime has both exerted control over it and also used it for semi-covert operations, which the government can distance itself from in public. Although the underworld can be used when violence and ruthlessness are required, Galleotti stresses that many criminals now have sophisticated financial and technological skills. 

How 350.org Is (Still) Changing the Climate Justice Movement

Author(s): Mark Hertsgaard

In: The Nation, 2014

Outlines how the organization founded by US climate activist Bill McKibben in 2007 was still promoting climate activism: supporting the indigenous struggle against the Keystone XL oil pipeline, urging universities and other bodies to stop investing in fossil-fuel companies and playing a significant role in organizing hundreds of thousands at the September 2014 People's Climate March in New York city. Hertsgaard also notes 350.org's role in international lobbying and activism in the run up to the UN Paris Climate Conference in 2015. The article was written just as McKibben was standing down as chairman. 

See also: https://www.influencwewatch.org/non-profit/350-org/ for a brief history and assessment, including explanation of the organization's name, which sums up McKibben's belief that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere needs to fall to 350 parts per million, or below.

The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

Author(s): Simon Lewis, and Mark Maslin

Penguin, London , 2018, pp. 480 (pb)

The authors are proponents of the theory that there is a geological epoch, which can be defined by the irreversible impact of human activity. The early stages of human development, from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers, had some environmental impact. But Lewis and Maslin trace the beginnings of a decisive human impact on the planet to the 16th-17th centuries when western colonialism, linked to the rise of global capitalism, began to transform the Americas, followed by the industrial revolution and the growth in population and consumption. The book concludes by calling for a new stage in human development involving radical economic change (away from profit-driven ownership of energy and food supplies), linked to comprehensive technological changes and much closer global cooperation. Two goals they set out are a re-wilding of half the planet and a universal basic income.

Stolen elections: The Case of the Serbian October

Author(s): Mark R. Thompson, and Phillipp Kuntz

In: Journal of Democracy, Vol 15, No 4 (October), 2003, pp. 159-172

(see also Mark R. Thompson, Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe (A. 1.b. Strategic Theory, Dynamics, Methods and Movements) , pp. 84-97).

Analysis of Milosevic regime and reasons for the October 2000 uprising, plus brief reflections on links between stolen elections and the democratic revolutions in the Philippines 1986, Madagascar 2002 and Georgia 2003. Useful references to other literature.

Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe

Author(s): Mark R. Thompson

Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 180

Essays discussing people power in the Philippines, East Germany and Serbia, comparing the strengths and weaknesses of opposition, and the regime in China with Eastern Europe in 1989, to explain different outcomes, and reflecting on issues such as ‘female leadership of democratic revolutions in Asia’.

Earth First! Environmental Apocalypse

Author(s): Martha F. Lee

Syracuse University Press, Syracuse NJ, 1995, pp. 221

Study of the militant US movement founded in 1980, which split between what the author terms ‘millenarian’ and ‘apocalyptic’ wings, the former seeking to educate others and the latter trying to save biodiversity before it is too late.

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