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When receiving of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 1991 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award, the Dalai Lama advocated total nuclear disarmament as a pre-requisite for the goals of demilitarization and the ending of all national forms of military establishment.
The Indigenous Anti-Nuclear Summit declaration that brought together a network of Indigenous Peoples from different areas that have been negatively impacted by the nuclear chain. This includes Uranium mining in the Grants Mineral Belt; northern Saskatchewan; the areas near the Sequoyah Fuels Uranium Processing Plant, and the Prairie Island Power Plant.
This Open Society Foundations fact sheet provides information on instances of forced sterilization of racial and ethnic minorities, poor women, women living with HIV, and women with disabilities in Chile, Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Hungary, India, Mexico, Namibia, Kenya, Peru, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, the United States and Uzbekistan. It also provides recommendations for governments, medical professionals, UN agencies, and donors on how to end the practice of forced and coerced sterilization.
Provides a basic account of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the censorship that followed, the setting up of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, the birth of the movement led by the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) and the perception of them in the United States
Discusses the anti-nuclear weapons movements in the late 1950s, for example the Committee for Non-Violent Action, and the shift of focus, from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s to the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War by many local and national peace groups in the United States. In the late 1970s and 1980s Europe and the United States experienced a resurgence of concern over nuclear weapons.
Campaign by Veterans For Peace (founded in the US in 1985) to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons for divestment from corporations manufacturing nuclear weapons, and their endorsement of the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017. Their campaigns include: ‘The Golden Rule’ educational project, ‘Disarm Trident’, and ‘Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
Argues that movements sparked by alleged rape accusations could be the most powerful force for equality since women's suffrage' and discusses their impact and challenges in politics and business in the US.
See also more detailed articles on the same issue: ‘#MeToo and politics; Truth and Consequences', pp. 36-37, and 'American business after Weinstein: Behind closed doors', pp. 59-60.
In this special issue on race in the US, Michele Morris recounts how demographic changes across the US are challenging white Americans’ perception of their majority status. She also discusses attempts to re-create a narrative that could reflect more than white Christian ethnicity as the only identity framework of US history. Michael A. Fletcher reports the personal stories of people of colour who had suffered traumatic experiences of stop-and-search by police officers on the basis of their racial profile. Clint Smith examines two major and prestigious colleges that have experienced a recent surge in enrolment of black youth and the rise of new forms of Black activism. Finally, Maurice Bergers reports on the work by photographer Omar Victor Dopi on slave revolts, independence movements, social justice quests. The events represented range from 18th century’s Queen Nanny of the Maroons, known for her ability to lead Jamaican slaves to liberation from British colonialism, to 21st century’s 12 year-old Trayvon Martin, whose shooting by a white neighborhood watch volunteer inspired the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Introductory article by Amy Hall summarises the growth of BLM in the USA, discusses its global potential and spread to other countries, and notes the relevance of BLM in the UK. Jamilah King comments on the US movement, both on its strengths and the divisions within it. Other articles examine how BLM relates to a history of 'a policy of black extermination' in Brazil, and to the struggle by Aboriginal people in Australia.
The survey reports on the worst countries in the world for women in terms of health (e.g. maternal mortality, lack of access to health care facilities, lack of control over reproductive rights); discrimination (e.g. over land rights, job rights, property or inheritance); culture and religion (e.g. acid attacks, FGM, forced marriages); sexual violence (e.g. Rape, rape as a weapon of war, domestic rape or by a stranger); non-sexual violence (e.g. domestic violence); and human trafficking (including domestic servitude, forced labour, sexual slavery and forced marriage). The methodology is outlined and each listed country is fully described in each of the categories explored by the survey.
This issue is focused on the roles of long established environmental NGOs (ENGOs), which often act as lobbying and advocacy groups seeking to influence government policy, and the potential of more radical campaigning groups. The introduction examines the implications of both approaches, as well as possible relations between ENGOs and protest movements. Other articles explore the role, strength and weaknesses of specific organizations, such as Friends of the Earth, and the problems as well as the benefits of transnational mobilization (as at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit). Topics covered include: an assessment of the effectiveness of transferring the US model of using the law to promote public interest environmental concerns to a European setting; the expansion of ENGOs in France; and a discussion of how to avoid conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples (concerned about economic opportunities) and environmental activists in Australia.
This article notes the disproportionate impact on women of climate change in many parts of the world and the recognition of this fact in the UN Paris Agreement, which called for empowerment of women in climate talks. It also points to the prominence of women in the struggle to limit climate change, and selects 15 women from round the world playing varied roles, including Greta Thunberg.
Covers the demonstrations by school children and students in an estimated 185 countries with a photo of a protest in Nairobi, Kenya, and an overview of the protests in their environmental and political context. Coverage also includes brief statements from young activists in Australia, Thailand, India, Afghanistan, South Africa, Ireland and the US; the speech by Greta Thunberg to the UN Climate Action summit in New York; and 10 charts explaining the climate crisis.
See also: Milman, Oliver, 'Crowds Welcome Thunberg to New York after Atlantic Crossing ', The Guardian, 29 Aug. 2019, p.3.
Reports on Thunberg's arrival in New York where she was to address the UN Climate Action summit on reaching zero carbon emissions.
Combines UN reactions with pro-choice local initiatives by social movements and politicians demonstrating against recent bans on abortion in the U.S.
Official website of ‘Back From the Brink’, a grassroots movement that aims to involve local councils and Members of Congress in the U.S. and pressure them to change U.S. nuclear policies. Their demands are:
- Renounce ‘first use’ option;
- End the sole presidential authority to launch a nuclear attack;
- Take U.S. nuclear weapons off ‘hair-trigger’ alert;
- Cancel U.S. plan to replace its entire nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons;
- Pursue total abolition.
See also http://www.nuclearban.us/back-from-the-brink-a-call-to-prevent-nuclear-war/ and https://www.wagingpeace.org/.
On 23 January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock (created in 1947) from two minutes to midnight to 100 seconds to midnight, which is the closest that it has ever been to the prospect of human destruction. This article makes the case for Britain unilaterally dismantling its nuclear weapons programme; firstly, from a legal perspective, and secondly, from a practical perspective.
Six brief commentaries on key issues relating to the resurgence of Black Lives Matter in both the US and Britain. Philip V. McHarris, 'Property damage is not real violence'; Malaika Jaball, 'Police brutality is ingrained in America'; Jericho Brown, 'We need the rage that abolished slavery'; Kojo Koram, 'Systemic racism is a British problem too'; David Olusoga, 'Toppling a slave trader's statue is history being made'; Patricia J. Williams, 'The corrupt language used to describe black pain'.
See also: ‘The Big Story: Black Lives Matter: Do Look Now’, Guardian Weekly, 19 June, pp. 7-14.
Covers protests in the UK against statues honouring slave traders and imperialists; anti-racist demonstrations in Belgium and a petition to remove all statues of King Leopold, who presided over a particularly brutal colonial rule in the Congo; protests against police violence and racism against indigenous and black citizes in Canada; and demonstrations in the Dominican Republic about racist discrimination against those of Haitian descent. There is also an article reflecting on lessons to be learned from how Germany has confronted its Nazi past.
The Guardian spoke to six young indigenous activists from the Ecuadorian Amazon, Chad, Alaska, Sweden, Indonesia and Australia about what they think about COP 26.
In Brazil, which has the second largest Black population in the world, Brazilian police kill at least six times more people annually than the US police, and most of those dying are young Black men. In the video an interdisciplinary panels of Brazilian and US scholars examine the development of Black Brazilian mobilization against police violence, and compare police violence in Brazil with the position in the US and South Africa. The video then focuses on how Black LGBTQ+ Brazilians are affected by police violence.
See also: https://www.thedialogue.org/events/online-event-race-and-policing-in-the-us-and-brazil/
Reports on Inter-American Dialogue event 'Race and Policing in the US and Brazil' examining what recent cases of police violence revealed about systemic racism in both countries.
One of King’s closest associates from 1955 onwards, Abernathy took on greater prominence after King’s assassination.
Analysis of a selection of predominantly nonviolent struggles from Russia 1905 to Serbia 2000, arguing against ‘the mythology of violence’. Some of the case studies are standard in books on civil resistance, others – for example the 1990 movement in Mongolia – less familiar. Each chapter has a useful bibliography. The book arose out of a 1999 US documentary television series ‘A Force More Powerful’, now available on DVD, and therefore includes, in the more recent cases, information from interviews.
Lists range of nonviolent direct action protests by ACT UP since 1987, involving marches, sit-ins, blockades, political funerals, die-ins, disrupting political occasions and speeches, etc. Main targets have been pharmaceutical companies (for profiteering and failure to produce new drugs or provide adequate access to them in Africa), the medical establishment in the US, health insurance companies, the Catholic Church and President Bush Snr and President Clinton and Vice-President Gore.
Although abortion became legal in the USA over 40 years ago, the population remains bitterly divided over its acceptability. Personal religious beliefs and life style have emerged as pivotal in shaping disapproval. However, very little attention has been given to how the local religious context may shape views and abortion access. Using data from the General Social Survey (6922) that has geographical identifiers, the authors examine how the local religious context influences social attitudes. They also examine the different impact of a higher rate of Catholicism or of Conservative Protestantism within the country, both on the attitudes of other residents and on acceptance of abortion clinics.
Describes the movement behind the 2017 election (by 93 per cent of the vote) of Chokwe Antar Lumumba as Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. He is committed to implement the 'Jackson Plan' for participatory democracy, promotion of public services and a local economy based on cooperatives and other forms of popular organization. The Plan, which is promoted by the Jackson People's Assembly and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), represents the kind of participatory local initiatives envisaged in the Black Lives Matter 2016 Platform. A longer version of this article is available in Akuno, Kali and Ajamu Nangwaya, Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination, Daraja Press, 2017, and at: www.mxgm.org
Key work on early period of Gay Liberation in 1960s/70s in the USA, examining different strands of movement and arguing need for struggle for common goals.
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.
Study of black trade union leader who played key role in pressuring presidents Roosevelt and Truman to ban discrimination in federal and defence employment. In 1963 headed the March on Washington.
At a time when international law and the law of war are particularly important and warlike rhetoric is creating new fears and heightening current tensions Falk’s message is particularly relevant. In this collection of essays, Falk examines the global threats to all humanity posed by nuclear weapons. He rejects the adequacy of arms control measures as a managerial stopgap to these threats and seeks no less than to move the world back from the nuclear precipice and towards denuclearization.
Report on a workshop organized by Global Justice Now, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Brussels Office and the Transnational Institute to develop the concept of 'energy democracy' agreed by the German climate justice movement at the 2012 Climate Camp in Lausitz. The aim is to ensure access for all to non-polluting energy, entailing an end to fossil fuel us e, democratizing the means of production and rethinking energy consumption. The workshop noted that since 2012 many communal, municipal, worker and movement initiatives were making the concept a reality: for example in Bristol in S.W. England, with a co-operatively owned solar generation project and a new publicly owned municipal supply company
See also: 'Just Transition and Energy Democracy: a civil service trade union perspective, PCS pamphlet, adopted at PCS conference May 2017. (It was also being promoted in translation by the Portuguese Climate Jobs campaign.)
Argues for public ownership and democratic control of energy supplies, and for the creation of a National Climate Service (proposed by the One Million Climate Jobs campaign, launched by the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group (CACCTU).
See also:
Greener Jobs Alliance: www.greenerjobsalliance.co.uk;
Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) a global trade union community for energy democracy coordinated in New York in cooperation with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York office.
A short report on a rising wave of pressure that is weighing on companies that seek sexual harassment insurance in the US.
A manifesto inspired by the international women's strike, ‘NiUnaMenos’ in Argentina and other radical feminist actions. It argues for a linkage between feminism and LGBTQ+ rights and the struggle against neoliberal capitalism, and rejects the kind of liberal feminism (exemplified by Hillary Clinton) that seeks equal opportunities for women within an inherently oppressive system.
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.
This now famous work contains two essays written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation - "My Dungeon Shook. Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation," and "Down At The Cross. Letter from a Region of My Mind". It provides a three-point dissection on "The Negro Problem", an expression not owned by Baldwin that he refers to while discussing the roots of racial tensions of his time and how to overcome them. (To know more about the use of and debate on this expression by Baldwin himself, please see: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,830326,00.html and https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2934484.pdf).
In the first essay, Baldwin focuses on the central role of race in American history, and specifically addresses himself to his 14 year-old nephew who was confronted with anger and outrage. Through his nephew, Baldwin aims to address any Black young Afro-American.
In the second essay, Baldwin discusses relations between race and religion. He addresses Christianity with particular regard to its meaning for US society and to its use for the oppression of Black people.
A common thread to the whole book is Baldwin’s call to both Whites and Blacks to use compassion, communication and mutual understanding to transcend tensions and overcome the legacy of racism.
James Balwin was an iconic essayist, novelist, playwright and critic, who worked primarily about the Black American experience, racial tension, homosexuality and religion. He was active in the Civil Rights Movement, but spent his last years in the more congenial society of France.
Narratives and assessments by 30 activists and researchers of struggle by indigenous peoples and environmentalists to prevent proposed exploitation of oil, gas and coal in Arctic Alaska.
Account of the activism by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, an NGO based in Santa Fe, New Mexico that led President Obama and the Department of Energy to abandon the proposed Nuclear Facility as part of the Chemistry & Metallurgy Research Replacement Project (CMRR) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
Discusses the ‘Justice for Janitors’ campaign in Los Angeles from 1986-1990 and success in reaching out to the immigrant community.
Explores the conflict between law and morality, and case for civil disobedience, with reference mainly to six well known prosecutions, including: the Fort Hood Three (GIs who refused to be posted to Vietnam); Dr Spock and others in 1967-68 charged with conspiracy to violate draft laws; and Daniel and Philip Berrigan and five other who burnt draft files at Catonsville in 1968.
Very detailed account and analysis by former civil rights activist who also worked in the fields for six seasons 1971 and 1979, charting contradictions within the movement and the role of Chavez, based on hundreds of field reports and first hand experience.
This brief, but informative, article focuses on the campaign by the Marshall Islands to arraign the UK before the International Court of Justice for failure to fulfill its legal and moral obligations under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty: to negotiate for nuclear disarmament. Barron notes that the 70,000 inhabitants of the Marshall Islands suffered the effects of 67 US nuclear weapons tests from 1946-58, and as a UN Trust Territory only achieved independence from the US in 1990.
This book provides a study of the genesis, growth, gains, and dilemmas of women's movements in countries throughout the world. Its focus is on Brazil, China, India, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, USA, as well as more generally covering Europe and Latina America. The authors argue that women's movements have engaged in complex negotiations with national and international forces, and challenge widely held assumptions about the Western origins and character of local feminisms. They locate women's movements within their context by exploring their relationships with the state, civil society, and other social movements.
Account of 1973 decision by American Psychiatric Association to stop listing homosexuality as a mental disorder and attempts by some psychiatrists to overturn this decision.
Account by participants of transnational team which went to Iraq to try to intervene between the two sides in the 1991 Gulf War. (See also Robert J. Burrowes, ‘The Persian Gulf War and the Gulf Peace Team’ in Moser-Puangsuwan and Weber, Nonviolent Intervention Across Borders, pp. 305-18 – 209 below.)
A year after the eruption of the #MeToo movement, historian Mary Beard traces the roots of misogyny in the West to Athens and Rome and explores the relationships between women and power and how this intersects with issues of rape and consent.
The televising of Margaret Attwood's dystopian feminist novel The Handmaid's Tale has inspired activists in Argentina, Northern Ireland, the USA and London to wear the distinctive scarlet cloaks and white bonnets to protest for abortion rights and contraceptive rights and against President Trump. The article discusses with Attwood and others how the costume signifies subjection of women and works for protests.
Highlights the content and possible consequences of Trump’s decision to bar organisations that provide abortion referrals from receiving federal family planning funds.
See also on the same issue:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/26/trump-administration-title-x-abortion-funding
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/22/planned-parenthood-funding-trump-1164038
https://www.vox.com/2018/5/18/17367964/trump-abortion-planned-parenthood-defund
https://theintercept.com/2018/05/24/domestic-gag-rule-title-x-abortion-birth-control/
For a further explanation on the ‘global gag rule’ that aims to ban family planning clinics that get aid money from the United States and refer patients for abortions see
https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/blog/what-is-the-domestic-gag-rule
https://www.vox.com/2018/5/18/17367964/trump-abortion-planned-parenthood-defund
Includes CO revolts in camps and prisons in World War Two against racial segregation, and role of League members in helping to found the Congress of Racial Equality and its nonviolent direct action strategy. Also covers relations of secular and radical WRL with other pacifist bodies, such as Christian Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Bennis, a Fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and expert on Middle East and US foreign policy, examines critically the US doctrine of pre-emptive war and willingness to bypass the UN in the context of the global mobilization against the US-led 2003 attack on Iraq.
See also: Bennis, Phyllis, 'February 15, 2003, The Day the World Said No to War', Institute for Policy Studies, 15 Feb 2013.
https://ips-dc.org/february_15_2003_the_day_the_world_said_no_to_war/
Celebrates the mass global protests, but focuses in particular how opposition of Germany and France to the war enabled the 'Uncommitted Six' in the UN Security Council - Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico and Pakistan - to resist pressure from the US and UK and to refuse to endorse the war.
There have been significant campaigns to protect and promote LGBT rights in the USA, including a series of National Marches on Washington in 1979, 1987, 1993 and 2000, but also in many other western countries, which are not so well covered in English publications. The political, legal , religious and cultural contexts vary, however, between countries, so LGBT communities can face somewhat different problems. (For the UK see G.2.b.)
A report on the initiative by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to create the first legally binding international treaty on violence and harassment in the field of work. The Convention – whose proposed title is ‘Convention and Recommendations Concerning the Elimination of Violence and Harassment in the World of Work’ – has so far received support from ILO member governments, various NGOs and employers and it was scheduled to be discussed in the Summer 2019. It will aim at addressing normative gaps in law and policy in countries or situations where there is no legal provision on sexual harassment in employment. The aim is that ratifying countries will prevent and address harassment through strengthening enforcing mechanisms and ensuring remedies for victims, and by acknowledging the costs of violence and harassment in the workplace. An important step is that the Convention focuses on addressing the needs of all women, including average-wage and low-wage workers.
In the aftermath of the series of sexual allegations faced by Harvey Weinstein, one of the most powerful faces of Hollywood, the #MeToo movement went viral in social media. This movement was initially launched in 2006 by Tarana Burke aimed at helping survivors of sexual harassment. Taking examples from different countries, this commentary attempts to analyse the #MeToo movement and answer the question of why most victims of sexual harassment chose to remain silent.
Report on the signing of the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment (WEEE) Act by President Trump in the midst of the US Government shutdown, which aims at promoting opportunities for female entrepreneurs worldwide.
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 article starts with protests about police killing of an Afro-Columbian man in Bogota the same week George Floyd was killed, noting the general impact of the BLM movement on anti-racist and Afro-Latino organizations. The author also sketches in the historical background of the Spanish colonies enslaving millions of Africans, and subsequent treatment of racial issues, including the 'myth' of multiculturalism.
See also:
Valencia, Jorge, 'Black Lives Matter Protests Renew Parallel Debates in Brazil, Columbia', The World, 15 June 2020
Across the Americas police violence disproportionally targets young Black men. The protests sparked by Floyd's death in Minneapolis shone a light on police brutality in South America and led to demonstrations in Brazil and other countries.
Blain traces the vital role women played in shaping Black nationalist politics between the 1920s and 1960s. It is addressed to anyone wanting to better understand the history of race, empire, and imperialism in the twentieth century.
See also https://www.aaihs.org/feminism-gender-politics-and-black-nationalist-women/; https://africanarguments.org/2017/03/08/how-african-feminism-changed-the-world/;
https://iycoalition.org/what-is-african-feminism-an-introduction/; https://thedailyaztec.com/90741/opinion/african-feminism-is-on-the-rise/ and https://www.msafropolitan.com/2017/12/what-is-african-feminism-actually.html
The authors comment on the impressive revival of Black LivesMatter in May/June 2020, reforms to policing already agreed in some cities and the new prominence of the demand to ‘defund the police’. They also discuss the importance of combining a range of approaches and tactics to complement direct action: doing research; making the ‘invisible visible’; using symbolic ritual (for example turning the fence around the White House into a shrine); and encouraging artistic creativity to promote joy and healing.
This book uses case studies from a range of countries to provide a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of trends in abortion politics, and considers how religion, nationalism, and culture impact on abortion law and access. It also explores the impact of international human rights norms and the role of activists on law reform and access to abortion. Finally the authors examine the future of abortion politics through the more holistic lens of ‘reproductive justice’. The countries included are: Argentina, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, South Africa, Uruguay and the US.
Collection of brief accounts of events at Zuccotti Park encampment and initial assessments by writers from leftist New York media, plus extracts from speeches of visiting intellectuals and activists – Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Angela Davis and Rebecca Solnit.
Diary of a participant in this defiance of the US prohibition on taking supplies to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
Compares struggles over water in Andean communities of Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia and Native American communities in S .W. USA, noting the combined goals of cultural justice and socio-economic justice.
Discusses the development of a new wave of feminism in Latin America, with particular regard to the ‘Ni Una Menos’ movement, and notes its main differences from ‘Me Too’ in the US, particularly in the type of testimonies relayed, and the inclusion and diversity within the Latin American movement. Boesten also reports on the harsh backlash against the newly developing feminist movements, provoked by conservative Catholicism and pays tribute to Colombian writer Emma Reyes, who symbolises the hidden contribution to literature women in Latin America can offer, providing a different perspective on the pervasive violent misogyny in the country.
This book collects stories related to experience of abortion in the US with the aim of de-stigmatising it. ‘Shout Your Abortion’ is also a media platform and a social movement that promotose pro-choice activism, which can be found at:
https://shoutyourabortion.com/
To read about the creator of #ShoutYourAbortion see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-abortion-usa-stigma/u-s-women-get-creative-in-fighting-abortion-stigma-idUSKCN0YH17E
To look at other pro-choice advocacy campaigns and their media platforms, see https://wetestify.org/ and http://www.1in3campaign.org/about
Traces the course of the feminist movement from its beginnings at a meeting in Seneca Falls, USA, in 1848, through the campaign for voting rights in the early 20th century to the emergence of radical feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Addresses how photography (using photographs taken in the USA and Australia) can illuminate the unimaginable, namely nuclear catastrophe, in order to fuel the imagination in the search for alternatives that lead to a world free of nuclear weapons.
Traces the growth of disillusionment with the war amongst American GIs and the increasingly militant opposition within the US forces. Extracts published as pamphlet ‘GI Revolts: The Breakdown of the US Army in Vietnam’, available online: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/richard-boyle-gi-revolts-the-breakdown-of-the-u-s-army-in-vietnam
Part 1 of the trilogy. Episodes extracted from this readable narrative have been compiled into one volume – Taylor Branch, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, New York, Simon and Schuster, pp. 256.
Part 2 of a trilogy. Episodes extracted from this readable narrative have been compiled into one volume – Taylor Branch, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, New York, Simon and Schuster, pp. 256.
Part 3 of a trilogy. Episodes extracted from this readable narrative have been compiled into one volume – Taylor Branch, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, New York, Simon and Schuster, pp. 256.
Account of resistance to the TransCanada Corporation's Keystone XL oil pipeline to protect ancestral lands and the environment against oil spillage. President Obama halted the project in 2015, but President Trump gave TransCanada the go-ahead in March 2017. In response two Native American communities launched a lawsuit against the Administration in 2018.
See: 'Native American Tribes File Lawsuit Seeking to Invalidate Keystone XL Pipeline Permit', npr, 10 Sept. 2018.
The author is an activist who sees the potential for a global movement to prevent disastrous climate change by forcing corporations and governments to adopt more radical policies, focusing in particular on ending use of fossil fuels. He gives examples of action from many parts of the world. But his primary emphasis is on developing a strategy (including civil disobedience) for activists in the USA, stressing the need to undermine support for fossil fuel industries but also to build parallel institutions such as popular assemblies.
Feminist critic Laura Briggs argues that all politics in the U.S. are effectively reproductive politics. She outlines how politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction — stories of Black “welfare queens” and Latina “breeding machines" — encouraged the government and business disinvestment in families. With decreasing wages, the rise in temporary work and no resources for family care, US households have grown increasingly precarious over the past forty years in race-and class-stratified ways. This crisis, Briggs argues, fuels all others, such as immigration, gay marriage, anti-feminism, the rise of the Tea Party, and the election of Trump.
These two volumes form the book series Solinger, Rickie, Khiara M. Bridges, Zakiya Luna and Ruby Tapia (eds.) Reproductive Justice: A New Vision For The Twenty First Century, Oakland, CA: University of California Press,
Examines community action by the poor; (in Californian Studies of Urbanization and Environment series).
(published in the USA as Rosa Parks, New York, Viking, 2000)
Parks is famous for her role in sparking the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, but had a long history of engaging in the struggle for civil rights.
Anthology of prison memoirs by conscientious objectors from World War One to the Cold War. Contributions from Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the USA.
This wide-ranging collection analyzes the status and progress of women both in a national context and collectively on a global scale, as a powerful social force in a rapidly evolving world. The countries studied―China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Egypt, Cameroon, South Africa, Italy, France, Brazil, Belize, Mexico, and the United States―represent a cross-section of economic conditions, cultural and religious traditions, political realities, and social contexts that shape women’s lives, challenges, and opportunities. Psychological and human rights perspectives highlight worldwide goals for equality and empowerment, with implications for today’s girls as they become the next generation of women. Women’s lived experience is compared and contrasted in such critical areas as: home and work; physical, medical, and psychological issues; safety and violence; sexual and reproductive concerns; political participation and status under the law; impact of technology and globalism; country-specific topics.
As there is an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court, and several states only have one abortion clinic, many reproductive rights activists are on the defensive, hoping to hold on to abortion in a few places and cases. This book explains abortion access in the United States, and makes the argument for building a militant feminist movement to promote reproductive freedom.
Also watch the launching of the book and related conference at this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhZfC0tGBpc
Survey of gay and lesbian rights issues in USA. Part 1 covers period before 1950, Parts 2 and 3 organizational activists and national figures , and Part 4 ‘Other Voices’.
Includes discussion of why the 1% have such a dominant economic position.
Argues Occupy Wall Street was ‘less an organized effective movement’ than a dramatic performance.
This book was published soon after December 1997, when over 120 states (excluding the USA, Russia, China, India and Pakistan) signed the Ottawa Convention to ban production, stockpiling and use of anti-personnel mines. It provides a wide ranging survey of both the global campaign and the diplomatic moves culminating in the 'Ottawa process', which, under Canadian government leadership, resulted in the treaty. There are contributions from leading campaigners, diplomats and academics.
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.
Combines two earlier collections of songs and participant memoirs, We Shall Overcome (1963) and Freedom is a Constant Struggle (1968). Compiled by veterans of the Highlander Folk School (later Center), Tennessee – the adult education centre described as an ‘incubator’ for the Civil Rights movement.
Rustin was an influential adviser to MLK and the coordinator of the 1963 March on Washington. These writings on civil rights and gay politics from 1942 to 1986 include his important 1964 essay ‘From Protest to Politics’ arguing for a policy shift towards mainstream politics through voter registration and involvement with trade unions. Rustin’s later attempts to achieve his goals through the Democratic Party made him a contentious figure in some radical circles.
Makes case for black separatism in the struggle for equality, to enable black people to lead their own organisations and create their own power bases. Describes the attempts to achieve these aims through the Mississippi Freedom Democrats in 1964, and the role of SNCC in voter registration 1965-66. There is also a chapter on the northern ghettoes.
Compares North American Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.
North American initiative, but taken up in Britain and transnationally.
Admired study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) by an activist in the Civil Rights Movement.
Comprises documents, speeches and firsthand accounts of from the black freedom struggle during this period. Published to accompany Eyes on the Prize TV series.
Detailed account of protests that erupted on 28 June 1969 when New York police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village (popular among gays), when many others joined in, and demonstrations spread across the city for several days. The ‘riots’ led to the founding of the Gay Liberation Front and the first Gay Pride marches in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco a year later.
Well known theorist of global networks examines the mass uprisings across the world in 2011, giving account of events in ‘Arab Spring’ and the reaction to the bank collapse and austerity policies in the west in Iceland, Spain, Greece and the USA, and stressing the causal role of the internet.
Largely based on the author’s PhD thesis, this book analyses three historical approaches to civil disobedience, from conservatives and liberal philosophies to the applied theory of disobedience derived from Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Chakrabarti gives an account of gender injustice as a major breach of human rights, comparable to the systematic oppression of apartheid.
Brings together historical and contemporary approaches to nonviolent struggle and theoretical contributions as well as analyses of particular movements. Section 1 on theory includes writings by Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Section 2 covers 'Nonviolence as a Political Strategy' and Section 3 'Nonviolence in Contemporary Movements' including a number of contributions on important recent movements in India: environmental campaigns against the Narmada dams and to preserve forests, Gandhian campaigns after Independence and the role of Jayaprakash Narayan, and the Anna Hazare Movement against corruption. A number of eminent contemporary Indian scholars have contributed.
Based on BBC series of programmes and consisting primarily of interviews with wide range of those involved in first French and then US policy on Vietnam, and individuals prominent in opposition. Covers period 1945-1973. Chapters 7 and 8 discuss protests inside US and the leaking by Daniel Ellsberg of The Pentagon Papers, which revealed in detail secret internal policy making.
Argues radical left never had a cohesive centre and that when movement most confrontational, its liberal wing was working most effectively with the political system. Suggests the movement became associated with social and cultural iconoclasm, which appeal to sections of middle classes, but that the broader public eventually opposed both the war and the antiwar protest, because ‘both seemed to threaten the established social order’.
This paper argues for a conceptualisng denial of abortion as the patriarchal policing of women’s bodies and their sexuality. The authors briefly review international trends regarding abortion politics, including many thousands of abortion related deaths, injuries and loss of fertility, and then analyze women’s access to abortion in two countries, the United States and Bangladesh, which represent two very different contexts: the developed and developing world. They argue that abortion services are being constrained by misogynistic politics that deny women control over their bodies. Finally, the paper reviews recent international efforts to establish abortion rights in the context of human rights. In particular, a recent United Nation’s report describes moves to recriminalise both contraception and abortion in the U.S. and Europe as the deliberate denial of medically available and necessary services and hence a form of “torture.”
This book provides scholarly Japanese and East Asian perspectives on how the September 11 2001 attack on the US changed the prospects for international peace. Other chapters explore pacifism from religious (Christian and Islamic) perspectives and also in relation to Kant's philosophy. Japan's postwar 'constitutional pacifism', and specific ways to promote peace in the 21st century are also discussed.
This book comprises five sections:
- Chomsky’s Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture given to Occupy Boston in Oct.2011;
- an interview with a student in Jan 2012;
- a question and answer session with ‘InterOccupy’;
- a question and answer session partly on foreign policy; and
- Chomsky’s brief appreciation of the life and work of radical historian Howard Zinn.
There is a short introductory note by the editor, Greg Ruggiero.
Sweeping historical and transnational survey from a socialist standpoint, noting industrial action by working women and criticizing class base and focus of second wave American and British feminism.
After giving a brief review of the anti-nuclear weapons movement that developed in the 1980s and the landmark treaties that were signed then, Coburn points to the difficulties campaigners face in the Trump era.
Discusses the possible development of the anti-nuclear weapons movement in the US following the election of President Trump.
Critical assessment of today's 'military industrial complex' and also the role of drones in the US wars in Afghanistan and in targeting 'terrorists'. Cockburn documents the technological failings of drones, often unable to distinguish targeted individuals from others nearby, and the 'trigger-happy' attitudes of some soldiers using them. Both led to numerous mistaken deaths.
See also: Frew, Joanna, 'Drone Wars: the next generation', Peace News , 2618-2619, June-July 2018, p. 4.
Frew summarizes a new report, issued by Drone Wars UK, on development and use of armed drones by a 'second generation' of nine states (including China, Iran and Turkey) and several non-state actors developing and using armed drones. (The first group was the US, UK and Israel.) The report also estimates that a further 11 states would soon be deploying drones, and that China was increasing export of them. Frew stresses the urgent need for international controls, and queries whether existing controls on exports (already being undermined in the US) were adequate.
Includes protest ‘fish-ins’
Highlights the establishment of joint effort between racial justice movements and climate justice movements in the United States in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing.
Compares two contrasting African-American leaders. Initially totally opposed, they moved closer together in the later 1960s, as King came out against the Vietnam War and Malcolm X moved away from black messianic separatism. They also worked with different constituencies: the black communities of the south and the alienated residents of the northern ghettoes.
Reports on three-day demonstration spearheaded by the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies.
Discusses the success of squatter movements by the homeless, addresses issues such as ‘direct action and the law’ and ‘tactics and mobilization’ and includes case studies of squatter settlements and rent strikes.
Discusses nonviolent direct action by US feminists in both early suffrage movement and the 1970s.
Articles presented at 1988 conference.
Analysis of how organization, tactics, political context and ‘framing’ of the issue affect outcomes, based on 15 campaigns in 8 US cities.
Cummins is the founder of the US Organic Consumers Association and involved in international environmental activism. His book focuses primarily on changing agriculture and on a renewable fuel policy.
Highly regarded book on the American Homophile movement by historian and gay activist, including biographical sketches of prominent lesbian and gay figures.
A collection of diverse essays, not a comprehensive survey of LGBT history in the US, but explores the movement’s growth and activities from the 1970s to 1990s, the impact of AIDS in increasing resources and organization in the LGBT community, and the role of several organizations, including the influential National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) founded in 1973 to promote grass roots power and its role in resisting hostile referenda and promoting positive legislation. NB. NGLTF records from 1973-2008 are based in the Cornell University library: http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM07301.html
Ted Daley argues that maintaining the nuclear double standard by which some countries permit themselves reliance on nuclear weapons, while denying them to others is military unnecessary, morally unjustifiable, and politically unsustainable. He insists on the necessity of considering nuclear abolition as an attainable political goal rather than a utopia.
Describes the history of the atom in the US and the UK; the combination of civilian/military use and how people and movement developed an understanding of the risks associated with nuclear power since the 1960s.
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.
Brief exploration of the increasing use of the red cloak as a symbol of advocacy for reproductive rights in Northern Ireland, the US, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Detailed and well researched account. Final chapter by Charles Chatfield analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the movement and influence on US policy. Concludes that anti-war activists contributed to the growth of public disaffection with the war, but could not harness it, but that both Johnson and Nixon Administrations adapted their policies in response to pressure from dissenters.
This project explores the discourse on abortion in the United States, examining the abortion clinic as a ‘space of interaction’ between the pro-choice and pro-life social movements. The author completed four months of participant observation in the fall of 2017 as a clinic escort at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Poughkeepsie, New York. She witnessed firsthand (and participated in) the interactions between the clinic escorts and the anti-abortion protestors who picketed the clinic each week. The study shows that, while the two sides of the debate adopt opposing ideologies, their ‘structure in this space’ does not actually look all that different.
Covers developing activism in the 1960s, the protest caravan of 1972 culminating in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and site occupations, including the 71 day occupation and siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1973.
This thesis scrutinises the conversation about violence against women on social media. The main research question is: ‘Does social media reproduce colonial ideologies such as racism and sexism?’ Indigenous women experience the highest rates of sexual violence in the United States: they are twice as likely to be as all other women. Social media is praised as a tool for activists and marginalized groups to raise awareness. The thesis explores whether this applies to Indigenous women and sexual violence, or whether their voices are generally overlooked.
Abortion by Black women is often blamed on white women and their feminist ideology is seen as an insidious tool to further eradicate Black people in America, a view held by some anti-choice and self-proclaimed anti-racists, as well as some Black anti-choice activists. This article explores the myth of abortion as Black genocide as it pertains to Black women and their reproductive rights and the arguments used to promote this belief. After defining genocide and the stereotypes used by proponents of the abortion as Black genocide myth in Part I, Part II identifies and describes the past and current proponents of the myth. In Part III, the myth is placed within the ‘herstory’ umbrella, while part IV explores the myth in its current form, including examples of outreach and advertisements by its proponents. Finally, Part V showcases Black women's robust response to this myth and highlights their continued participation in the struggle for Black liberation.
After Weinstein accusers were nominated by Time as ‘Person of the Year’, this article explores the legacy left by the movement in the US one year since #MeToo exploded globally.
In El Salvador, hundreds of women marched in the capital San Salvador on this day, to protest for reproductive rights, against violence, and in celebration of the release of three women jailed on abortion charges. The article also discusses the Trump administration’s cut of funding towards programs that support women and the initiative to tackle violence against women that exists in El Salvador.
Downing demonstrates how on 9 November 1983 the USSR put its nuclear forces on high alert in fear of a pre-emptive US nuclear strike, bringing the world close to nuclear war. (Fortunately the US did not react rapidly.) Whereas in 1962 both sides in the Cuba crisis knew it could trigger nuclear war (and tried frantically to avert it), in 1983 the Reagan Administration had no idea that its renewed Cold War anti-communist rhetoric and military build-up (including 'Star Wars' plans) were seen by Moscow as a rationale and strategy for an attack. A NATO exercise and change in codes were therefore interpreted as a prelude to attack. Downing revealed the main lines of this story in a TV documentary in 2008.
Looks at Global Justice Movement in a broad historical framework and relates it to case studies of earlier struggles in the USA, UK, France, South Africa, Algeria, the Philippines and Jamaica.
Comparative study of successes and failures of four environmental movements since 1970, exploring implications of inclusion and exclusion from political process.
Chapters include: ‘Kent State: How the War in Vietnam became a War at Home’; ‘Congress and the Anti-War Movement’; ‘US Presidential Campaigns in the Vietnamese Era’; ‘Opposing the War in Vietnam – the Australian Experience’; ‘Vietnam War Resisters in Quebec’; ‘Anger and After – Britain’s CND and the Vietnam War’.
Shows how Rustin’s gay lifestyle was repeatedly brought up by public enemies intent on discrediting the movement and by political rivals wanting to marginalize him.
This thesis examines the personal, public and professional life of celebrated abortion rights activist, Patricia Goyette Miller. The first section is based on the writer’s own family relationship to Miller and explores larger questions of archival and biographical work. The second section explores Miller’s life, considering how she came to commit herself to abortion rights activism in Colorado and Pennsylvania. The final section looks towards the future, applying lessons and strategies from Miller’s life to consider the best next steps forward in the current US political context.
Discusses ACT-UP in relation to two contrasting approaches in social movement theory: ‘resource mobilization’ and the ‘identity’ paradigm.
Explores theoretical arguments for and against selective objection, together with case studies from US, Britain, Australia, Germany and Israel.
A collection of essays by and about women COs in USA, Europe, Turkey, Israel, Eritrea, Korea, Paraguay and Colombia.
First published on Waging Nonviolence website: www.wagingnonviolence.org
See also: Horton, Adrian, Dream McClinton and Lauren Aratani, 'Adults Failed to take Climate Action. Meet the young activists stepping up', The Guardian, 4 Mar. 2019.
Interviews with young activists in the Sunrise Movement.
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.
Covers environmental/peace/feminist protest in the USA, analysing key ideas and organising methods, as well as evolution of some major campaigns, for example against the Seabrook nuclear energy plant and the Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory.
This book is an account of the prolonged and multi-faceted Sioux resistance to the 1,172 mile Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) which in 2014 was rerouted through their territory, threatening their ancestral burying grounds and archaeological sites. In addition to violation of their rights over the land, the Sioux Nation feared that oil spills would pollute their land, and especially the water supply. The protest began in April 2016 with the setting up of a camp as a centre for direct action and the expression of spiritual resistance, and was supplemented by a social media campaign. Surrounding Native American communities joined in the protest, as did many environmentalists, so that thousands were involved by the summer. The local police were criticised for using unnecessary force against protesters and there were many arrests. The story of Standing Rock is set within the context of the much longer history of indigenous resistance to colonization and struggle to maintain their culture.
See also: Treuer, The Heartbreak of Wounded Knee (under Vol. 2. B.1.d.) which includes an account of Standing Rock at the end of the book.
See also: 'What is Standing Rock and Why are 1.4m 'checking in' there? - BBC News, 2 Nov. 2016. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-37834334
Protesters were worried that they were being individually traced by the police through social media (denied by the local police) and asked for supporters to check-in to the SR Facebook site to overwhelm police efforts to identify protesters that way.
The editors were among the women who launched the campaign Code Pink: Women for Peace in November 2002, which has since undertaken a wide range of nonviolent direct action protests in the United States and forged links with women in many other countries. (For details see: http://www.codepink.org). The book is a collection of essays by peace activists and scholars exploring a range of issues but including an emphasis on dissent and movement building.
Article representing the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe position by its chairman. Notes that the Obama administration refused in late 2016 to grant DAPL a permit to cross the Missouri River upstream of Standing Rock, but that under Trump the pipeline had been built. Faith also reports that his tribe is still engaging in legal challenges to pipeline permits, and that owners of DAPL are trying to double the pipeline capacity, increasing the risk of oil spills.
Falk assesses the nature of the 1989 revolutions, which she delineates as the collapse of communist regimes across Eastern Europe in a context of commitment to nonviolence by key players (with the exception of Romania) and of restraint by both Gorbachev in the USSR and western leaders. Year 1989 appeared to usher in a new concept of peaceful revolution, which could be applied to challenge other repressive regimes. But, Falk argues, these attempts, as in the '2009 Green Revolution' in Iran and the 'Arab Spring' in 2011 in Egypt and elsewhere, have resulted in defeat. The author also notes other factors, which militate against successful nonviolent revolution. These include the greater ruthlessness (compared with the East European Communist regimes of the 1980s) of many of today's dictatorships, the declining respect for the US and for liberal democracy as an ideal, a rise in barbaric violence (represented by ISIS) and the complex role of today's communication technologies, which can mobilize protest but promote lack of leadership capable of formulating negotiable demands. The article references a number of other interesting recent perspectives on revolution today.
The authors critique the theory of nuclear deterrence, and debate the role of civil society in leading to the abolition of nuclear weapons. They also discuss nuclear weapons from a moral and cultural perspective, and the interconnections between nuclear weapons and militarism, energy, international law, and democracy.
See also Richard Falk and David Krieger (2016) ‘A Dialogue on Nuclear Weapons’ in Peace Review, Vol. 28, issue 3, pp. 280-287, DOI: 10.1080/10402659.2016.1201936.
A dialogue on what steps are necessary to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.
This chapter explores how to measure quantitatively women’s social movements. Drawing on previous qualitative and quantitative studies of politically influential social movements addressing women’s rights across developing countries, the authors examine what aspects of women’s collective action can create a meaningful variable. The chapter concludes with a call for new methods to measure women’s movements, to pinpoint the circumstances that lead to mobilization, the intricacies of women’s movements, and the ways women’s collective action leads to women’s political empowerment and gender equality, both in the developing world and a global context.
Central figure in CORE outlines its origins and later campaigns (chapters 9, 10 and 19).
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.
Fazzi explores Eleanor Roosevelt’s involvement in the global campaign for nuclear disarmament during the early years of the Cold War. Based on an extensive research, it assesses her overall contribution and shows how she constantly tried to raise awareness of the real hazards of nuclear testing.
Touches upon the history of the celebration of the International Women’s Day on March 8 and on the particular significance of striking on this day. It also includes mention of the initiatives that have taken place on 8 March 2019 in many cities around the world.
Examines protest camps as key tactic of movements from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street; includes Red Shirts in Thailand and teachers in Oaxaca.
Well documented and illustrated account of movement.
Covers Canada, New Zealand and the USA.
Traces the emergence of (belated) trade union opposition from a November 1967 conference in Chicago, attended by 523 trade unionists from 38 states and 63 international unions, which established the trade union division of the peace organization SANE. Includes a chapter on labour-student alliances.
Useful summary analysis including brief case studies of corporate misuse of water and resistance to them (and further references): Nestle in US, Vivendi and Suez in Mexico, Bechtel in Bolivia and Coca Cola in India.
Memoirs of SNCC Executive Secretary, 1961-65.
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.
Covers women’s political rights across all major regions of the world, focusing both on women’s right to vote and women’s right to run for political office. The countries explored are Afghanistan, Armenia, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Cameroon, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, New Zealand, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Rwanda, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Sweden, South Korea, Slovenia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, the United States, Uganda, Uruguay, and Zimbabwe.
Estelle Freedman highlights the forces that have shaped the definition of rape in the US, namely political power and social privilege. She outlines the history of how the conception of rape has evolved since the 1870s to the 1930s, when both racial segregation and the women’s suffrage movement influenced how rape was understood.
Examines the evolution of second wave feminism in the USA from the early protests.
‘DOB’ was founded in 1955 as a social group in San Francisco, but developed over two decades into a national organization. See also Martin; Lyon, Lesbian/Woman (G.1. The 'Homophile' Movement and Rise of Gay Liberation in the West: 1950s-1970s) .
Uses the struggle of Latino farmworkers in California in the 1960s to illustrate the concept of ‘strategic capacity’ – how strategic resourcefulness can sometimes compensate for lack of resources.
Interview with Patrisse Cullors on the growth and further development of Black Lives Matter Global Network into its two most important complementing movements: #DefundPolice and #InvestInCommunities.
See also: https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-is-a-revolutionary-peace-movement-85449
One of the co-founders of the hashtag Black Lives Matter in 2013, Garza outlines in this book a long term strategy for social change. It is based on her own years of experience in community organizing. She has moved on from the Black Lives Matter organization (although still close to the other co-founders) to create the Black Futures Lab. She has developed a policy platform (based on a major cross-party survey of Black people in the US in 2018) that focuses on central, widely supported demands. These include raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, broadening opportunities for Black home ownership, and removing the police presence from schools that often leads to pupils being jailed. She has campaigned in the 2020 US election on her agenda. Her book also argues the need to abandon outdated models of individual leadership from the Civil Rights Movement, as well as cautioning against over-reliance on celebrity activists and the role of the internet.
See also: Mahdawi, Arwa, ‘Move Fast and Fix Things’, Guardian Weekly, 23 Oct. 2020, pp. 34-7.
An extended interview with Alicia Garza.
Examines campaigns by the Ojibwa Indians against mining and over land tenure and the role of multinationals in Wisconsin.
Comparing the US, British and Swedish movements.
Examines how the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in a Florida town provide a model of how to achieve greater justice for migrant workers in agriculture. when combating major retail corporations and in the context of exploitation and sometimes modern slavery, which CIW exposed. CIW workers are not only paid better as a result of their campaign, but the Fair Food Standards Council they promoted regularly checks working conditions and hold farmers to account. They have also prompted the Fair Food Program which growers join, and enlisted support from across US society - including a range of religious groups, artists and musicians, as well as food writers. The movement is committed to nonviolent protest on the model of the Civil Rights movement.
On July 7, 2017, at the UN General Assembly, 122 states voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the culmination of pressure from a global network of states and grassroots activists. This article traces the history of the ban movement from 2005. It identifies six factors that led to the successful adoption of the treaty: a small group of committed diplomats; an influx of new coalition members; the contribution of civil society; the reframing of the narrative surrounding nuclear weapons; the pursuit of a simple ban treaty; and the context provided by the Barack Obama Administration.
Book by former radical student leader in the 1960s, providing a portrait of the movement.
Uses a very broad definition of the New Left, and examines common features in Civil Rights, peace, anti-war, student, feminist and gay/lesbian movements in the USA.
Analysis of emergence, development and decline of ACT UP, highlighting emotional dimension in movement politics.
A study of community power and regional planning on the environment, based on US case studies.
Reflections on Occupy Wall Street movement and its beginning in the occupation of Zucotti Park, September 2011, from standpoint of an anarchist theorist.
The authors reinterpret the Cold War as an ‘imaginary war’, a conflict that had visions of nuclear devastation as one of its main battlegrounds, and provide and cultural representations of nuclear war. There are chapters and case studies on Western Europe, the USSR, Japan and the USA. Drawing on various strands of intellectual debate and from different media, such as documentary film and debates among physicians, the contributors demonstrate the difficulties in making the unthinkable and unimaginable - nuclear apocalypse - imaginable. The aim is to make nuclear culture relevant to an understanding of the period from 1945 to 1990.
The article examines the linkage between activists concerned about Australia supplying uranium for US and British nuclear weapon programmes, and its close military alliance with the US, and the environmental groups focusing on the dangers of civilian nuclear energy. Green argues that resistance to nuclear energy was weak and isolated before the 1970s, but gained significant, nationally coordinated, support in 1976-77, which swung the Labor Party against uranium mining and exports. The movement highlighted the dangers of uranium mining for Aborigines and workers in the mines, as well as the environmental impact; and it opposed Australia's role in the cold war nuclear confrontation (having US bases and allowing US nuclear warships to visit Australian harbours). It also publicized the secret history of the health impact of British nuclear testing in Australian deserts on Aboriginal people. However, the movement lost momentum in the 1980s and failed to prevent the Labor Party, when in government from 1983, abandoning its strong opposition to uranium mining.
This article, which explores both differences and similarities between the two movements, begins by comparing both internal and external definitions of success within Black Lives Matter and MeToo. It also considers both movements from the standpoint of ‘intersectionality’. The authors then assess how both movements have influenced scholars, teachers, lawyers and community activists, their impacts on law and popular culture and how these external factors influence the movements. Finally they ask what the next steps should be for each movement.
Explores the diverse meanings of community unionism, provides case studies from the UK – the ‘London’s living wage’ campaign, and activism by black and minority workers and migrant workers – and from Japan, Australia and the US.
Investigates this historical tradition of resistance to involvement in armed conflict. In particular, it discusses peacemaking efforts in the United States. It also examines the entirety of American history, from the colonial era to modern times and reveals the multiple religious and secular motivations of peace seekers in the US. Finally, it examines how war and those who oppose war have been portrayed in popular media over the centuries.
Using archival research, explores both how the Civil Rights Movement reacted to the Vietnam War, and also examines relations between black groups opposed to the War and the wider peace movement, and difficulties that arose.
Traces the rise of the anti-Vietnam War movement, including accounts of the ideological and institutional rivalries between organizations, and covers all the major demonstrations and civil disobedience actions from the Students for a Democratic Society March on Washington in 1965 to US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973.
Explores how both pro-choice and pro-life supporters have employed language over abortion rights and shaped its debate.
Draws comparisons between the Trump Administration’s isolationist and disunited foreign policy and its consistent approach, both nationally and internationally, towards restrictive sexual and reproductive rights.
Activist Alicia Garcia discusses the history of the BLM movement and its future in light of the 2020 protests for racial justice in many countries in the world.
The introduction examinesthe dynamics of anti-nucelar activism in the Second Cold War. There is a chapter on mainstream movement building, but the emphasis is on nonviolent approaches and the role of pacifists.
The Introduction examines the dynamics of anti-nuclear activism in the Second Cold War. There is a chapter on mainstream movement building, but the emphasis is on nonviolent approaches and the role of pacifists.
Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) began as the Women's Party for Survival (WPS), founded by Helen Caldicott in Boston in 1980. WPS chapters and affiliates soon formed across the United States, with educational programs, lobbying workshops, and demonstrations - the largest held annually on Mother's Day.
Examines Occupy Oakland, its potential and downside.
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.
Hannah Arendt presented her ideas about civil disobedience at a symposium of the New York Bar Association in 1970, and posed as the central question whether the law was dead. This article explains Arendt's 'republican' philosophy and distinguishes it from the liberal approaches of Rawls and Habermas, and from democrats like Etienne Balibar, before discussing in some detail Arendt's work On Revolution.
Documents emergence of armed self-defence groups in Louisiana and Mississippi in the mid-1960s to counter the Klan and enforce civil rights legislation.
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.
Structured in sections covering key events and key individuals in movement against Vietnam War, and includes a chapter assessing strength and weaknesses of movement. Extensive footnotes and bibliography.
Hobbs explores the tradition of testimony over sexual assault allegations by women of colour – from Harriet Jacobs’ case in 1861 up to now - and how that has facilitated testimony today in the US. She advocates a more inclusive narrative that can overcome the gender-only or race-only approach to telling stories of sexual abuse.
Briefly reports on ex-pats from the Dominican Republic who marched on the streets of Washington Heights, denouncing an epidemic of gender-based killings in their home country, where an average of 200 femicides per year occur. The protest in New York was called “March Against the Plague of Femicide”.
See also https://www.vibe.com/2018/03/new-york-marches-against-dominican-femicide and https://borgenproject.org/challenges-for-women-in-the-dominican-republic/
The article discusses the role of the US National Security spy base at Menwith Hill and notes some of the local protesters, including Lindis Percy (arrested hundreds of times for breaking into bases).
See also:
Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB), 'Synopses of the work of Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases', Peace News, 13 May 2012
https://www.peacenews.info/blog/6785/campaign-accountability-american-bases
Brief but informative summary of the work of the British group CAAB, founded in 1992. It grew out of decades of scrutiny and campaigning related to the Menwith Hill US National Security Agency base, which has been involved in intelligence gathering and had a key role in the development of the US missile defence system. The history and methods of CAAB, coordinated by Lindis Percy and Melanie Ndzinga, are outlined: tactics have ranged from use of the law to challenge the US military presence to nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience.
Account of the growth of the grassroots campaign against legalised abortion in the US. Whilst other socially conservative movements have lost young activists, the pro-life movement has successfully recruited more young people to its cause. Jennifer Holland explores why abortion dominates conservative politics. She studied anti-abortion movements in four US western states since the 1960s and argues that activists made foetal life feel personal to many Americans. Pro-life activists persuaded people to see themselves in the pins, images of embryos, and dolls and made the fight against abortion the primary day-to-day issue for social conservatives. Holland concludes that the success of the pro-life movement derives from the borrowed logic and emotional power of leftist activism.
This book is the outcome of long term research by the Antiracist Research and Action Network of the Americas into rising racial intolerance, but also increasing resistance by both Black and indigenous people throughout the Americas. It covers six Latin American countries - Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico - as well as the US, and discusses the backlash against earlier gains in rights within nation states. The book argues that this nation-based strategy, pursued in a neo-liberal capitalist context, was inadequate and that the focus should now be on resisting ‘racial capitalism’ which bolsters white supremacy. The rise of militant anti-racial activism in the US and around the world in 2020 makes the book especially relevant.
Reports that since US climate activist Bill McKibben and 350.org launched the divestment in fossil fuels campaign in 2012, over 220 institutions such as universities, local authorities and pension funds, have divested from some fossil fuels. So have foundations, notably the Rockefeller Brothers' Fund in 2014. The 'Fossil Free' campaign was launched in the UK in 2013, and grew more rapidly than earlier divestment campaigns against the tobacco industry and apartheid in South Africa. Howard also hails divestment by the World Council of Churches in 2014 and reports that the UN body coordinating agreement on climate change backed divestment in March 2015.
See also: Carlyle, Gabriel, 'Ducks, Direct Action and Investment', Peace News, June-July 2018, p.17.
Account of second Fossil Free UK national gathering, including examples of some campaigning and organizing experiences revealed there. The article also provides background on the rapidly growing global movement and the 880 institutions that had by then committed to some divestment from fossil fuels.
Covers origins and development of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and key events, as well as attempts to recruit Afro-American veterans and the role of women in the organization.
Decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that declined to hear Alabama’s 2019 bid to revive a Republican-backed state law that would have effectively banned the ‘dismemberment abortion’ procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Through this procedure, the woman’s cervix is dilated and the contents of the uterus removed. The decision by the U.S. Supreme Court left in place a lower court ruling that protects woman’s constitutional right to abortion recognized in the landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling.
Discusses the possibility of ‘MeToo’ of becoming a legal movement which could help shape the legislation on sexual harassment.
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.
Following the rise of tensions between the US and Iran during 2019 and the increased of awareness within the public of the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear attack, this article critically discuss the potential for movements to advocate a ‘No First Use’ policy in the US, and the potential embedded within the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Takes up the challenge that ‘most academic theories of social movements are not prepared to explain the full range of protest goals and activities, especially those of privileged rather than oppressed citizens’, specifically drawing on the US environmental, anti-nuclear energy, and animals rights movements.
Views and experiences of US activists and their assessment of how much or little had changed since Stonewall.
Answers by range of peace activists to questions about the future of the movement, including whether it should focus on the arms race or more broadly on US foreign policy, its relationship to electoral politics, the role of civil disobedience and issues related to feminist separatism.
Essays arising out of May 1984 conference at the Christian-Albrechts University, Kiel, on peace movements in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, West Germany, France, Italy, Britain and the US. Focus is on the anti-nuclear movements of the 1980s, though some contributors sketch the earlier history of movements in their countries.
Widely reviewed and recommended account by the two journalists who wrote the New York Times article that exposed and documented Harvey Weinstein’s systematic abuse of women actors and employees over decades. The book reveals the unfolding story they uncovered, exposes in detail the mechanisms of power that silenced many women, and reveals those who resisted these pressures. The second part of the book covers the Senate hearings for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh and Blasey Ford’s accusation against him.
SANE was founded in the US in 1957 to campaign against nuclear tests, but also to draw attention to wider dangers of the arms race. Its emphasis was on public appeals, lobbying in Washington and backing peace candidates in the 1962 primaries, and its support was mainly from intellectuals and some business people; students tended to support more radical groups and nonviolent direct action against tests and bases was carried out by groups like the Committee for Nonviolent Action.
Examination of major protests and movements in the USA from the anti-Vietnam War mass obstruction of Washington DC in May 1971 to the Occupy movement of 2011. The author discusses the role of feminists and gay activists in launching significant resistance on key public issues: notably the 'Women's Pentagon Action' in 1980 and ACT-UP battling discrimination against AIDS sufferers in the 1980s. The book also examines why some major protests were not well supported by Black activists and how they brought a different focus to others.
Kehinde sees blackness as a unifying factor for people of African descent across different continents. He examines different political approaches adopted in the past, such as pan-Africanism, black nationalism, Marxism and liberalism, and argues for black radicalism as the best strategy today - to resist racism by embracing African descent. The focus of the book is on the UK, but it covers the US, Caribbean and Africa and other parts of the world.
A comprehensive article exploring the legislative advances and what is yet to be accomplished in the US one year after the emergence of the #MeToo movement and #TimeIsUp campaigns.
This article makes comparisons between the pre-digital ‘Riot Girl’ movement of the 1990s, which developed out of feminist punk rock bands in the US, and MeToo. Both have named perpetrators of sexual violence, warned others about predators, and offered support to survivors. But those naming perpetrators have become much more liable to retaliation in the digital age. The author argues that the complex body of law related to whistleblowing provides a framework for MeToo accusers to express their anger and frustration, as the Riot Girl did.
When They Call You A Terrorist is the story of Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. It collects her reflections on humanity, on her life and activism since early age, her brother’s first-hand experience with police brutality, and on the founding of a movement for racial justice and its development during the Trump era.
The author examines, using newspaper reports on corporate boycotts in the US from1990 to 2005, why some corporations that are boycotted are more likely to respond to the demands than others. Brayden concludes that boycotts are more likely to succeed when they attract considerable media attention, and especially if the corporation has previously suffered from attacks on its reputation and from declining sales.
In this book, Coretta Scott King collects a series of extracts on Dr. King’s views on issues such as racism, justice, civil rights, freedom, religion, nonviolence and peace. She also includes some of her husband’s major speeches.
Account of year-long 1955 bus boycott which heralded a new stage of nonviolent direct action against segregation and launched King’s leadership.
Answer to critics during the major campaign to desegregate Birmingham Alabama. President Kennedy intervened to get King released.
Answer to white leaders urging less militant confrontation and greater patience.
Insider account by white woman working in SNCC office. Meticulously detailed, with extensive quotes from key documents.
2nd edition New Delhi, Indian Council for Cultural Relations and Mehta Publishers, 2002, pp. 520.
This article explores how the protests against racial injustice and police violence brought millions to the streets under the banner of Black Lives Matter, giving the international movement significant corporate and political muscle, which US leaders used to launch a nationwide voter mobilization effort. It also briefly explores the initiatives the movement proposed towards police reform.
Wide ranging exploration of campaigns in all parts of the world seen at first hand. Includes coverage of Sem Terra in Brazil, Cochabamba in Bolivia, township resistance to privatization in South Africa, the Zapatistas, opposition to mining in West Papua, and campaigning groups in the USA. See also his: Kingsnorth, Paul , Protest still matters New Statesman, 08/05/2006 , 8 May, 2006, discussing why the Global Justice Movement has dropped out of the news, the turn away from street demonstrations to social forums, and stressing that struggles still continue, especially in the Global South.
Klein enters the current debate about a Green New Deal in the context of the US Presidential and Congressional elections, and deploys her analytical and persuasive skills to argue for its necessity and to examine the policies and approaches required.
Ko explores the US policy of coerced sterilization in the 20th 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.
Kohn discusses the allegations against high-profile perpetrators as a representative sample of the range of accusations raised generally by the #MeToo movement. She also analyzes the current responses available to redress these wrongs and then turns to the potential of restorative justice. This is conceived as a therapeutic form of dispute resolution that has enormous potential for eliciting the outcomes the #MeToo movement seek: true gender-equality, respect, and understanding.
Derives propositions about social movements and political change from detailed analyses of the US Civil Rights Movement compared with movements against nuclear power.
Although originally intended to de-stigmatise abortion, the #ShoutYourAbortion Twitter campaign was hijacked by anti-abortionists who linked the hashtag to hundreds of stigmatising anti-abortion messages. Using a Twitter Search API, the authors collected these messages (1,990 tweets) to identify the discursive features of abortion stigma.
In this long article, L’Abate reflects on Cassola’ s work, La Rivoluzione Disarmista, which focuses on pursuing a nonviolent ‘disarming revolution’ aimed at strengthening fraternity amongst people and abolishing nuclear weapons. Starting from Cassola, L’Abate examines the relevance of nonviolent movements in Italy and worldwide, starting from those whose activity contributed to the adoption of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 by Gorbachev and Reagan. He also sharply analyses the pervasive, global structural violence caused by the huge concentration of natural resources in the hands of a few, and reflects on how nonviolence can contribute to changing the current global financial system. L’Abate cites both Italian and internationally renowned authors on nonviolence, and proposes his solutions for overcoming the current state of affairs.
On struggle in late 1970s by Navajos against proposed uranium and coal mining, stressing dangers of uranium mining.
See also her article
La Duke, Winona , Uranium Mining, Native Resistance and the Greener Path: The impact of uranium mining on indigenous communities Orion Magazine, 2009 , on Navajo resistance in past and new threat from revived stress on nuclear power. (Includes references to Kakadu.)
This is the second volume of the history of the direct action movement launched by radical Catholics in the USA, whose tactics were taken up by Protestants and committed advocates of disarmament in both the US and Europe. Protests have over the years been directed at a range of ICBMs designed to carry nuclear warheads, Trident submarines, and nuclear weapons plants. This volume, which includes individual accounts and information on trials of protesters, covers actions not only in the US, but in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK.
Laffin, a Plowshares activist and member of the radical Catholic Worker organization, gave this talk to 100 supporters of the seven protesters on trial that week for entering the Kings Bay naval submarine base in Georgia in 2018 and symbolically damaging weapons systems. They were found guilty of conspiracy, damaging government property and trespassing. The first Plowshares protest in 1980 involved eight Catholics trespassing on the General Electric Nuclear Missile facility in the King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and taking action that became characteristic of later protests: they damaged nuclear warhead cones and poured blood on files, before publicly announcing their actions and being arrested. Laffin notes that Plowshares (drawing on the biblical injunction 'beat your swords into plowshares') grew out of the Catholic protests at draft offices during the Vietnam War, when draft records were destroyed. The Berrigan brothers took part in both.
See also: Cohen-Joppa, Jack, ‘They Came to Stop a Crime: The Trial of the Kingsbay Plowshares 7’, Peace News, 2636-2637, Dec. 2019-Jan. 2020, p.7.
(Article first published on 10 Nov. 2019, on Beyond Nuclear International: beyondnuclearinternational.org)
The article provides brief background on Plowshares and outlines the testimony by defendants during their trial. It also records the jury decision to convict each of the seven on four counts: trespass, destruction of government property, ‘depredation’ of government property on a military installation; and conspiracy to commit these illegal acts.
Compares movements of objection to the French war in Algeria, the US War in Vietnam and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
Generally critical contributions on the peace movements of the 1980s in various European countries and their impact on the Western alliance. Includes chapter on the US peace movement of the 1980s.
Provides detailed information about the abortion laws in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio.
See also the article by Lawson, Ronald , The Rent Strike in New York City 1904-1980: The End of a Social Movement Strategy Journal of Urban History, 1984, pp. 235-258
Lebron explores the rhetoric and activism that laid the foundations for the Black Lives Matter movement, drawing on earlier Black intellectuals such as Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lourde, James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. His aim is to convey the ideas, demands and emotions of African Americans to illuminate their activism, and to show how the history of Black thought influences resistance to anti-Black law enforcement today.
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.
This online report includes up-to-date links to the status of the legislation on sexual harassment in every state in the US.
Lewis, who was born in Alabama, played a major role in the Freedom Rides and sit-ins, in the 1963 March on Washington and in the March on Selma that led to the Voting Rights Act. He also helped to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
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.
The authors examine President Truman’s motives for authorizing and then defending the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They also discuss the moral concern of many of the scientists that directed the Manhattan Project, and expose the official attempts by historians and the media to suppress or distort the information about it.
A history of resistance to US wars and military policy from the War of Independence to the 21st century, including wars against Native Americans. It also covers mutinies and protests over mistreatment of soldiers, including Jim Crow laws after the Civil War, and abuse of women and gays. The emphasis is on telling stories and assumes knwoledge of US history.
A front-line account of the police killings and the Black, young activism that sparked the birth of the racial justice movement Black Lives Matter. Lowery, a Washington Post reporter, provides the narration of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, and the weeks of protests and rioting that broke out in the aftermath. He also challenges readers with the question of why so little progress has been made on the racial front during Barack Obama’s presidency, despite its promise and potential for such a transformative advancement.
Wesley Lowery became renowned, together with other of his colleagues at The Washington Post, for establishing an informal database that collects information about the shooting of Black people by police officers in 2014 and 2015, in the absence of a comprehensive federal government database.
Lowery, Wesley, 'The Birth of a Movement', Guardian (17 Jan 2017), pp. 23-25.
This Guardian 'Long Read' article is an adapted extract from Lowery's book They Can't Kill Us All, London, Penguin, 2017. The article is available (free) at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/17/black-lives-matter-birth-of-a-movement
Deals with conscientious objection in US during the Vietnam War, 1961-1975.
The 1966 anthology included writings by opponents of slavery, anarchists and ‘progressives’ in the 19th century, and trade unionists, conscientious objectors and peace campaigners in the 20th century, up to the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests. The revised edition covers radical Catholic resistance, nonviolent trade unionism, resistance to US imperialism in Central America in the 1980s and assistance to Central American refugees, opposition to the 1991 Gulf War and environmental protests.
An exploration of how digital tools contribute to mobilizing people to vote in the 2020 U.S. election, particularly in the aftermath of George Floyd killing.
An informative and detailed account of how the proposal for an Arms Trade Treaty to set international standards and controls upon the sale of arms, promoted in the 1990s by NGOs (such as Oxfam and Amnesty International) and by prominent individuals, for example Nobel Peace laureates, gained governmental support. The goal was not to stop all arms exports, but the more limited one of setting international standards for controlling sale of arms to strengthen national rules and to prevent weapons from intensifying conflicts or worsening human rights abuses. The Treaty was agreed at the UN General Assembly in April 2013 by 157 states, including the US under President Obama.
See also: Campaign Against the Arms Trade, 'Issues - Arms Trade Treaty'
https://www.caat.org.uk/issues/att
CAAT notes that the Arms Trade Treaty came into force in December 2014 when ratified by 50 states (including the UK), but explains their scepticism about the concept of a 'responsible' arms trade. CAAT claims the UK approves licenses which contravene the approved guidelines. and it should stop promoting arms sales A number of other sources sceptical about the Treaty are listed.
See also: 'Canada, ‘Canada joins the Arms Trade Treaty while still selling arms to Saudi Arabia’, Oxfam, 16 May 2019
Oxfam comments that whilst Canadian eventual accession to the Treaty is a major victory for civil society, the government has not made moves to cancel its $15 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, despite the Saudi record on human rights (denounced by the Trudeau government) and the Saudi role in the war in Yemen.
See also: Pecquet, Julian, ‘UN Approval of Arms Trade Treaty sets up Obama, Senate Showdown’, The Hill, 2 April 2013
Commentary on the domestic political context of Obama’s decision to back the Arms Trade Treaty, opposed by 53 Senators and the National Rifle Association. In the light of domestic opposition the Obama Administration had delayed support for the UN treaty in the run-up to the November 2012 election. Pecquet also notes that the treaty passed with 154 votes; three countries opposed – North Korea, Syria and Iran – and 23 abstained.
Feminist legal scholar, writer, teacher, and activist Catharine A. MacKinnon discusses the #MeToo movement with Durba Mitra, professor of women, gender and sexualities studies. They discuss the origins of sexual harassment law and the relationship between the law and social movements. Other topics include the particular vulnerabilities faced by women of colour, immigrant women and trans people, and harassment in international law.
Compares Canada and USA from a legal perspective.
When receiving the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 1992 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award in June 1992, peace activist, Mairead Maguire’s spoke about the concept of Peace Community and its relevance to opposing weapons of mass destruction.
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.
Examines struggle for gay rights in USA from 1950s to early 1970s, charting the different political and cultural issues and types of campaigning and the contradictions between political reformism and radical hippy culture. Part III covers the Lesbian Feminist Movement.
This book explores misogyny across the media, from political and editorial cartoons to news and sport. It also covers film, television, social media (especially Twitter), and journalistic organizations that address gender inequities. The authors argue that the conservative populism ushered in by President Donald Trump and the Republicans create the social-cultural and political environment that have prompted the #MeToo Movement and Fourth Wave Feminism in the US as a response. They argue, therefore, that the ‘social contract’ should be reinterpreted to create a just, gender- and race-equitable society.
By two women journalists at forefront of US gay and lesbian rights struggle from the 1950s, founders of Daughters of Bilitis and active in the feminist campaign NOW (National Organization for Women) where they argued that lesbian issues were feminist issues. A couple since the 1950s, they married in San Francisco in February 2004.
Reports on water ceremony in Pittsburgh, conducted by two indigenous tribal faith leaders, followed by march and rally by local and national environmental groups to protest against the development of fracking in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The protests were timed to coincide with a large fracking convention in the city.
Wide-ranging exploration, by BBC economics journalist, of campaigns round the world since 2008, including the Arab uprisings of 2011, but mainly focused on resistance to economic policies and including accounts of protest in UK, USA and Greece. Discusses economic and social causes of unrest and role of new communications.
A detailed study of SNCC’s Mississippi summer project in 1964.
McAdam, a leading social movement theorist, has written widely on various aspects and interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement, including McAdam, Doug , The US Civil Rights Movement: Power from Below and Above, 1945-70 In Roberts; Garton Ash, Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (A. 1.b. Strategic Theory, Dynamics, Methods and Movements)Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 58-74 . His influential article McAdam, Doug , Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency American Sociological Review, 1985, pp. 735-754 (reprinted in McAdam; Snow, Readings on Social Movements: Origins, Dynamics and Outcomes (A. 7. Important Reference Works and Websites) ) highlights how innovative tactics of mass action broke through institutionalised powerlessness.
Examines feminism, pacifism and nonviolence and anti-nuclear protests in the USA.
Notes that the movement for divestment from fossil fuels has grown 'from picket signs and petitions to a multi-trillion dollar crusade involving more than 350 institutions worldwide'. Cites Norway's Sovereign Wealth fund, the Episcopal Church and the British Medical Association as some of the important bodies that have divested, and that investment firms such as Blackrock have begun to withdraw support from climate polluting industries, as have universities and various companies. But also notes that divestment still often initiated by pressure from below.
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.
Highlights the different legal consequences that women might face in Alabama, where a ban on abortion was enacted in May 2019 (likely to be challenged in the courts), and compares them to those then existing in Northern Ireland. Although Northern Ireland passed the Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Bill 2018 that allows abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, women could still face life sentences because the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 remained in place.
See also https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2019/05/alabama-abortion-rights-are-under-threat-northern-ireland-they-never and https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/alabama-abortion-ban-georgia-northern-ireland-dup-theresa-may-a8915141.html
Article discussing the rising number of law suits being brought in the US by cities and states against fossil fuel companies for environmental damage and for hiding information about the dangers of their operations. It also comments on how courts and activists are influencing the board membership of oil companies. But McGreal notes that although there is mounting pressure on the companies, the court process is very slow.
Following President Joe Biden’s initiative to recommit to the Paris Agreement on climate change and the signing of an executive order halting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline project, this article emphasises the role of indigenous people within the climate justice movement.
See also: Ambroiggio, Mia, ‘Why We Need to Center Indigenous Voices in Climate Conversations’, Loyola Phoenix, 3 February 2021.
http://loyolaphoenix.com/2021/02/why-we-need-to-center-indigenous-voices-in-climate-conversations/
Extensive analysis of rise and fall of CORE drawing on interviews with key members and CORE archives. Covers the 1960 sit-ins, 1961 Freedom Ride, mass campaigns in 1963 to desegregate Southern cities, and the impact of black power ideology.
Records how the Teach-In movement began modestly in a mid-West campus in 1965 but spread across the country, engaging many students and professors, and released a vast quantity of material about the Vietnam War. For first teach-in see: ‘History of Education: Selected Moments of the 20th Century: 1965 First ‘Teach-in’ held at University of Michigan: New Tool for Further Education is Born’:
http://schugurensky.faculty.asu.edu/moments/1965teachin.html
Merton explains his theoretical approach, which draws on exponents of nonviolence such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, and in this context discusses the Danish people's resistance against the Nazis, the perils of the nuclear age and racism.
Examines movement of the early 1980s which mobilized huge numbers in the US to protest against the dangers of nuclear weapons and strategies and demanding a US-Soviet agreement for a freeze on testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons, bombers and missiles. The movement gained some support in Congress, organized a mass lobby in Washington and demonstrated throughout the country in 1983, and engaged in electoral activity. This book examines the successes and failures of the Freeze, and broader implications for other movements. See also: Meyer, David S., A Winter of Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics New York, Praeger, , 1990, pp. 320
Conversation with Alfred Brownell, Liberian environmental lawyers recorded by Veronique Mistiaen. Brownell has been involved in a seven year campaign which succeeded in protecting half a million acres of Liberia's tropical rainforest from the Southeast Asia-based Golden Veroleum company, which had been granted the right by the government to clear and use the land to grow palm oil. He took up the cause of the indigenous community in Sinoe County whose forests and cultural sites were being destroyed by the company. The article outlines how the campaign succeeded and Brownell's wider role in creating the Alliance for Rural Democracy throughout Liberia to work for environmental justice. He had been forced by death threats to move with his family to the USA.
This is an account of the origin and early years of the US Plowshares movement launched in 1980 by radical Catholics, and edited by two of the leading figures in this new form of personal ‘witness’ against nuclear weapons. Plowshares took inspiration from the biblical phrase ‘beat your swords into ploughshares’ and physically attacked missiles and associated targets, before publicizing their actions and accepting arrest and often subsequent imprisonment. This book explains their motivation, wider social beliefs, and provides details of early protests.
(reprinted in McAdam; Snow, Readings on Social Movements: Origins, Dynamics and Outcomes (A. 7. Important Reference Works and Websites) )
Describes the expansion of organisational capacity for direct action between 1956 and 1960.
Details continuity with pre-civil rights movement generations of protest, and studies organisational infrastructure of protest in black communities.
In this work, Monique Morris provides a statistical account on the lives of African Americans in the U.S. related to the field of education, environment, sport, health and justice system, military, politics, voting and civic engagement in order to highlight the disparity between racial communities.
Draws on interviews and personal stories to examine how the ideal of the ‘citizen soldier’ encouraged thousands to move towards opposition to the Vietnam war.
Section 1 suggests ‘the secularization of conscience and modern individ-ualism have been the driving force’ in the rise of conscientious objection. Section 2 looks at the historical record in the USA. Section 3 has articles on France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the former Communist states in Eastern Europe, Israel and South Africa.
From his central insight that some movements could not recognise when they were succeeding, Bill Moyer constructed his model MAP - Movement Action Plan - as a tool for strategic analysis for nonviolent movements. The book includes case studies of five US movements: civil rights, anti-nuclear energy, gay and lesbian, breast cancer and anti-globalization.
Analyses the US LGBT movement from 1945-2000 using the model of the Movement Action Plan developed by Moyer.
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.
This book examines the development and evolution of the Plowshares movement from a social science perspective, looking at issues such as ‘tactical legitimation’ and sustainability in relation to the US movement, and also analyzing ‘intermittent resistance’ in the German, Dutch and Australian movements, and ‘internal implosion’ in the Swedish movement. It also assesses the UK movement.
Designed as a textbook, it covers history, theoretical developments and debates about the results of nonviolent movements. It categorizes nine types of nonviolent action, which are illustrated by case studies. A separate chapter explores key issues of why and when sections of the armed services defect from a regime challenged by a nonviolent movement.
Reports on a new app, created by the Sydney-based National Justice Project, that enables Aboriginal people to record police discrimination and violence against them. It is being adopted across Australia. The author sets this Australian initiative in the context of disproportionate jailing of Aborigines and frequent police discrimination, as well as the wider global movement to use film to highlight police injustice, with examples from the USA and Canada.
This long article narrates the birth of the #MeToo movement and its development. It also provides a list of the more than 200 high-profile figures who were accused since 2017, which is constantly updated. (You can access the lost from here as well: https://www.vox.com/a/sexual-harassment-assault-allegations-list).
Examines the evolution of the abortion debate since 1970s; the polarization of Republicans and Democrats, and the grassroots movements that have developed through the years.
See also https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/opinion/abortion-roe-science.html
Reports on the ban that Facebook and Google put on foreign ads from activists in the US, UK and other countries’ and from vloggers, which were directed at influencing an-anti abortion result in the 2018 Irish referendum.
See also https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/the-poisonous-online-campaign-to-defeat-the-abortion-referendum-1.3486236 and https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/overseas-influence-in-abortion-referendum-will-be-hard-to-stop-1.3406610
Drawing on her years of research in El Salvador, legal scholar Michelle Oberman explores the consequences of criminalizing abortion. She then turns her attention to the United States, where the battle over abortion takes place, in her opinion, almost exclusively in legislatures and courtrooms. Focusing on Oklahoma, she interviews current and former legislators and activists, and shows how Americans voice their moral opposition to abortion by supporting laws that would restrict it. She challenges this approach to the law by highlighting the real life impact of laws and policies on motherhood and abortion on women.
After experiencing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, Chinese-ink painter Iri Maruki and oil painter Toshi Maruki began their collaboration on the Hiroshima Panels in 1950. During the Allied occupation of Japan when reporting on the atomic bombing was strictly prohibited, the panels made known the hidden nuclear sufferings through a nationwide tour. In 1953, the panels began a ten-year tour of about 20 countries, mainly in East Asia and Europe, and disseminated the Hiroshima stories in the age of the US-Soviet arms race. The Marukis embarked on a new direction in the 1970s, with their emphasis on complex realities of war in which the victim/perpetrator dichotomy was not clear-cut, and explored other forms of violence such as pollution and discrimination.
The author, who was a member of the Mexican government delegation throughout the negotiations for the Treaty, explains the significance of detailed provisions of the Treaty, and its overall importance as a multilateral arms control treaty. He also notes the close links between the Mexican and US delegations during the talks.
Highlights the impetus that the National Wommen’s Strike on 19 October 2016 gave to the further development of the movement ‘Ni Una Menos’ in Latin America and the links it revealed between the most dramatic forms of violence against women such as femicide, rape and physical violence, to the more normalised forms of exploitation of women’s abilities in the context of neoliberalism.
Thorough study of grass-roots activism in Mississippi, with useful bibliographical essay.
See also commentary by Francesca Polletta in Goodwin; Jasper, Contention in Context: Political Opportunities and the Emergence of Protest (A. 6. Nonviolent Action and Social Movements) , pp. 133-152.
In this long article academics across a range of disciplines assess the factors that currently define the repercussions of and reactions to sexual harassment among survivors, perpetrators and in society in general. It explores the power of narrative in the post-Weinstein era; the waves of feminism that had led to the current movements; the role of culture and power in addressing gender relations and the power dynamics of sexual harassment; the role of formal policies and education in tackling sexual harassment, and the need to reframe masculinity.
Peace, a writer/activist, documents the growth of the peace and justice movement in the US, with particular focus on the 1980s. Areas covered include anti-nuclear campaigning and campaigns for justice in Latin America. Discusses also debates and controversies within the movement.
History of the 8 year anti-Contra campaign, its links in Nicaragua and its impact on deterring the US President from sending troops to oust the left-wing Sandanista government. See also on border monitoring: Griffin-Nolan, Witness for Peace: A Story of Resistance (A. 5. Nonviolent Intervention and Accompaniment) and shorter version in Moser-Puangsuwan; Weber, Nonviolent Intervention Across Borders: A Recurrent Vision (A. 5. Nonviolent Intervention and Accompaniment) , pp. 279-304.
Firsthand account by white activist who participated in both in the 1947 ‘Journey of Reconciliation’ organised jointly by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and CORE, and the 1961 Freedom Ride organised by CORE at the height of the Civil rights Movement.
The author examines the decades of enforced sterilization of Indigenous women in North America in the 20th century and the influence of eugenics ideologies on this policy. Use of sterilization was most common from the 1940s to the 1970s, when the Indigenous populations began (after centuries of decline) to increase in numbers. This trend alarmed both eugenicists anxious to maintain racial ‘purity’, and corporations seeking to exploit resources on indigenous lands.
See also: Howard-Hassmann, Rhoda, ‘Forced sterilizations of Indigenous women: One more act of genocide’, The Conversation, 4 March 2019.
See also: Virdi, Jaipreet, ‘The coerced sterilization of Indigenous women’, New Internationalist, 30 November 2018.
https://newint.org/features/2018/11/29/canadas-shame-coerced-sterilization-indigenous-women
Both links expose the forced sterilization of Canadian Indigenous women for several decades, up to the 2000s.
This book focuses on the role of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the movement for rights for Black Americans. The author contests the standard view that they were rivals, and that Malcolm X was the radical exponent of violence challenging King's more moderate and peaceable approach. The author, a historian at the University of Texas, argues that their view of the United States and their strategies for achieving justice tended to converge over time, as King grew more radical in his later years and Malcolm X moved towards a more nuanced political approach. But they had separate power bases and styles of communication.
Ann Pettifor developed the concept of a Green New Deal as a global and systemic approach with a group of fellow economists in 2008, but environmental issues were overshadowed in the financial crisis. She argues the political and economic case for urgent restructuring of government and the economy to try to save the planet, drawing on the example of Roosevelt's New Deal during the 1930s Great Depression to show how government can constructively tackle the impact of global crises. She also sets out to show what global and national changes are necessary and how they might be brought about.
Compares the efficacy of defiance and disruption with constitutional methods in four US movements.
The period of sustained dissent in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s, associated particularly with the Civil Rights Movement, the rising opposition to the Vietnam War and second wave feminism, also proud forms of radical art. The Getty Research Institute Library, which was active in documenting this art in Los Angeles, helped to define this era. Drawing primarily on the holdings of the Library, such as photobooks, photographs, performance art, and art books, this presentation discusses the visual language of different types of art media used for social activism. It also illustrates the role the Getty Research Institute has played in collecting these primary materials and making them increasingly available to the public, both locally and globally, through collaborative initiatives, exhibitions and publications.
(reprinted in McAdam; Snow, Readings on Social Movements: Origins, Dynamics and Outcomes (A. 7. Important Reference Works and Websites) ).
Discusses the contagious impact of the sit-ins and the spirit they generated among participants.
Popovic, an activist against the Milosevic regime in Serbia in the 1990s, went on to find CANVAS, which has offered advice and nonviolent training to activists in former Soviet states and other parts of the world, including Egypt before Tahrir Square and Syria. The book emphasizes the role of CANVAS (but does not address criticism of its role) and foregrounds the author's own experiences and interpretation of nonviolent action. It covers many varied campaigns with examples of how to mobilize successfully and use humour and imaginative forms of protest. It also addresses how to make oppression 'backfire' and the need to persevere in one's effort after apparent success. Written for activists rather than for scholars of nonviolence.
Detailed analysis by an investigative US reporter of attempts by the George W. Bush Administration and Israel to prove that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. Porter scrutinizes the evidence cited and throws doubt on much of it.
Argues that, although all forms of opposition had some effect, those that involved the greatest self-sacrifice tended to work best. However, these sacrifices had most impact first time or two, before the public came to accept and then ignore them. Concludes that opposition to the war did not cause US failure, but forced the government to recognize this failure.
General analysis of evolution of movement in the US and the groups and organizations involved. Chapter 4 examines direct action groups and their protests.
The article sheds light on the need to include the struggle of women from lower social classes, who suffer harassment and sexual abuse, within the public exposure that the #MeToo movement achieved since 2017. It argues that understanding the dynamic of sexual harassment and sexual assaults in every working context is fundamental to understand how to end it.
A range of recollections from 1955 to MLK’s assassination in 1968.
A professor of community health tells the stories of 80 gay, bisexual and transgender activists and volunteers in Chicago and San Francisco.
Randle was a full time organizer for the Committee of 100, which was created in 1960 to promote mass nonviolent direct action, such as sit-downs and occupations, as a strategy to promote unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. In this article he compares the Committee's experience with the tactics and aims of Extinction Rebellion, noting the greater acceptability of nonviolent direct action today and the differences between the two threats (nuclear war and major climate change). He also notes that the Committee of 100 ceased to exist after eight years, whilst the more conventional CND has lasted over 60 years.
See also articles by Gabriel Carlyle 'Building the Climate Movement We Need', and Mya-Rose Craig, 'The Point of Striking is to Take Control over Our Futures' in Peace News, 2034-2035, Oct.-Nov. 2019 for further debate about strategy and focus. Carlyle makes a comparison with the US Civil Rights Movement and its localised, focused campaigns combining to create a national movement. Craig stresses the need to prioritize the Global South and when setting out alternatives, to advocate only actions that do not harm communities in poorer countries.
Recounts the life and work of black woman activist who played key role in three major organisations: the NAACP, SCLC and SNCC.
Historian and activist, Barbara Ransby, explores the birth of the hashtag and social media platform #BlackLivesMatter by three Black activist women following the shooting of unarmed 17 year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in 2012, and the acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman. Through a series of interviews with its principal organisers, Ransby’s narration contextualizes the origin of the Black Lives Matter movement in prison reform and anti-police violence reform policies, the establishment of Black youth movements, and radical mobilizations across the country dating back for at least a decade.
This is an acadmeic contribution to memory studies, but shows how preserving knowledge and stories of past movements affects present politics, and how nonviolent activists can learn from past campaigns. Examples examined include the suffragettes, Greenham Common, Polish Solidarity, US struggles against racism and Australian aboriginal campaigns. The authors also illustrate how one movement can influence others and stress the need to make archival and other sources (films, music, etc.) available.
The year 2017 began with Trump’s presidency, sparking women’s marches in the U.S. and across the globe. This edited collection of empirical studies of the U.S. women’s movement focuses on sociological and historical data. It includes discussions of digital and social media, gender identity and the reinvigorated anti-rape climate, while also focusing on issues of diversity, inclusion, and unacknowledged privilege in the movement.
The initative of 14 women of capturing the feminist struggles through artistic production within the #VivaNosQueremos campaign. Many cities throughout the world joined the campaign and printmaking appeared in cities like Ciudad Juárez, Oaxaca, Mexico State, Puebla, New York, Chicago, Montreal and Barcelona as well as other countries like Costa Rica, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Italy.
Rich, an essayist and contributor to the New York Times Magazine, focuses on the period 1979 - 1990 and the role of the US, which in 1979 emitted more carbon dioxide per head than any other industrialized country and had the political leverage to bring about international change. He charts efforts by environmentalists and scientists to make climate change a global political issue, and the roles of Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. Bush (who argued for action on climate change in 1988, but, influenced by his sceptical chief scientist and internal pressure, failed to deliver on his promise).
This brief history of opposition to nuclear weapons has a global focus, though from a US perspective, and covers the evolution of the movement up to 1991. It starts in 1944 with the opposition of nuclear scientists. The author argues that the movement included an array of tactics, from radical dissent to public protest to opposition within the government, and succeeded in constraining the arms race and helping to make the use of nuclear weapons politically unacceptable.
Analyses the ‘Nuclear Freeze’ movement, the largest mass movement in the U.S. in the 1980s, that addressed the dangers of the ‘Second Cold War’ between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The book highlights the development of the movement; its social and political impact; and its transformation in the 1990s.
Journalist Lucy Rock briefly explores the history of ‘sexual harrassment’ in the US since 17th century slavery. She then focuses on the 1990s up to the Harvey Weinstein scandal, a moment which she considers revolutionary because of the reforms it can lead to.
Compares Australian and US environmental activism in relation to their political and social context.
This work is collection of articles and essays exploring the roots and development of the fight for racial justice and human rights in Ferguson, USA. Political activist Jamala Rogers narrates the history of systemic racism and police violence in St. Louis and of the development of the Black Lives Matter movement in the region.
Examines lack of a constitutional right or political tolerance for selective refusal to take part in particular wars.
The article examines how far in the US consuming green products is linked to a desire to alter corporate practices that lead to climate change. It finds that concern about global warming and belief in consumer activism does predict ‘green purchasing, behaviour and opinion leadership’. The authors note the role of communications in promoting both concern about global warming and belief in consumer activism.
See also Laurence, Bill, ‘Boycotts are a crucial weapon to fight environment-harming firms’, The Conversation, 6 April 2014. https://theconversation.com/boycotts-are-a-crucial-weapon-to-fight-environment-harming-firms-25267
In the context of rapid growth in consumption of green products in the US, the authors use national survey data to test their hypothesis that people's beliefs about global warming as well as their beliefs about consumer activism, predict their approach to green consumerism.
See also: Del Valle, Gaby, 'Can Consumer choices Ward Off the Worst Effects of Climate Change? An Expert Explains', Vox, 12 Oct. 2018,
Notes that the 2018 UN report on climate change warns less than two decades to limit global warming to 1.5% centigrade, and that in response proposals made for individual actions in response on issues such as meat eating and transport. But the article also notes that the Climate Accountability Institute in its 2017 'Carbon Majors' report traced 70% of greenhouse gas emissions to 100 companies, which suggests individual actions 'futile'. The article notes that individuals can also reduce emissions per household through energy efficiency and altering houses to conserve energy.
Reproductive justice activists have used the concept of ‘intersectionality’ to promote one of the most important shifts in reproductive politics. The Combahee River Collective, twelve Black women working within and outside the pro-choice movement in 1994 coined the term “reproductive justice” to “recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing consciousness, to a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression.” This paper argues that this concept has linked activists and academics stimulating numerous scholarly articles, new forms of organising by women of colour, and the reorganization of philanthropic foundations. It examines how reproductive justice+e is used as an organising and theoretical framework, and discusses Black patriarchal and feminist theoretical discourses through a reproductive justice lens.
Scholar-activists Loretta Ross and Ricki Solinger provide an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender politics and focus on the experiences of women of colour. They use a human rights analysis to show how the discussion around ‘reproductive justice’ differs significantly from the pro-choice/anti-abortion arguments that have long dominated the debate. They argue that reproductive justice is a political movement for reproductive rights and social justice, and highlight the complex web of structural obstacles facing women of different background.
Following the #MeToo movement and #TimeIsUp campaign, Rottenberg argues that the current neoliberal context that reduces everything to market calculation requires that a new wave of feminism should reorient and reclaim itself as a social justice movement.
The authors focus on the ‘discourse’ used in North America to promote disinvestment in fossil fuels, based on statements by activists, mainstream media reports on campaigns and coverage in alternative media. They argue that there are four overlapping narratives. The first ‘of war and enemies’, with fossil fuel companies as the enemies, is most dominant. The others are: ‘morality, economics and justice’.
Study of the reformist groups which were active in Scandinavia, West Germany, France, the UK, Canada and USA, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, which joined in the International Committee for Sexual Equality (1951-1963) founded by the Dutch COC (the first ‘homophile’ group).
After looking at earlier history of US feminism, examines 2nd wave and in particular the mobilization around the Equal Rights Act passed in 1975; also explores ideological divisions within the movement.
Professor of Astronomy, Carl Sagan discusses the roots of the nuclear arms race in the context of receiving the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 1993 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award. His passionate speech was given at a time when the US and the Soviet Union possessed over 60,000 warheads all together, and calls for a shift from a mentality relying on mutual deterrence and ethnic hatred to one on mutual dependence, which are still very relevant in 2019.
Traces emergence of Students for a Democratic Society from 1960-1970, with a major focus on campaigns against the Vietnam War, including the 1965 March on Washington.
Discusses briefly the potential for a significant movement either against new nuclear power plants, especially in the light of the US 2008 deal to assist India's civilian nuclear energy programme, or against India's nuclear weapons policy. Sarkar notes that a number of lively local protest movements had sprung up against the construction of new nuclear reactors. There are also a number of groups, backed by 'prominent citizens', opposed to India's possession of nuclear weapons. But Sarkar is sceptical about the likelihood of an effective national campaign against either the energy programme, or the nuclear weapons policy, capable of influencing the government's commitment to both.
Primarily discusses the US civil rights and the British nuclear disarmament movements.
Social theorist Elaine Scarry recalls the threats to use nuclear weapons by successive US presidents and argues that the power of one leader to obliterate millions people with a nuclear weapon deeply violates the constitutional rights of the citizens in the US. She also argues that it undermines the social contract and is fundamentally at odds with the deliberative principle of democracy. She explores political and constitutional changes that she believes could make it possible to start dismantling the nuclear arsenals.
Recounts Fryer’s anonymous appearance on stage, at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association session on psychiatry and mental illness, to announce his homosexuality. (He spoke anonymously – as he explained later – through fear of being refused tenure at his university.)
The career of Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to political office in the USA – as a councilor in San Francisco – reflects the rise of the gay community in the 1970s. He was assassinated in November 1978. His life is also the subject of a 1984 documentary film, ‘The Times of Harvey Milk’, 1984, directed by Rob Epstein, and a feature film ‘Milk’ 2008, directed by Gus Van Sant.
Documents and statements on conscientious objection, later sections cover COs in two world wars and Vietnam, and case for tax resistance.
On the spot account by pacifist during the occupation, noting the demands of the American Indian Movement protesters, that they had been invited by organizations representing many of the Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation angry about the conduct of the reservation government, and commenting on disparity between the light rifles of the protesters and the full military arsenal being deployed by the FBI.
John Lewis represented the links between the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s-60s and Black Rights Matter in 2020. Elected to Congress in 1986, he continued to campaign in Washington for racial and social justice (including organizing nonviolent direct action) until his death. His last political act was to view a Black Lives Matter mural. His obituaries elaborate on the details of his lifelong political activism. (See also details of his memoir under Vol.1.A.3.)
See also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53454169
Looks back at the 1975 Iceland women's strike at the start of the UN Decade for Women; the 8 March 2000 Global Women's Strike, the 2016 Polish women's strike to resist successfully anti-abortion legislation, the 2017 Argentina women's mass demonstration against the rape and murder of women, and the cooperation between women in Poland and Argentina in 2017 to coordinate the International Women's Strike.
This paper discusses the hegemony of U.S. White middle-class feminism and examines seven limitations that make it inapplicable in non-Western societies, and specifically in Middle Eastern countries. These limitations include (a) ignoring the cultural, historical, and political systems that shape women in the Middle East; (b) misinterpretation of some religious practices; (c) generalizing women's conditions; (d) universalizing Western values; (e) playing the role of the savior; (f) ignoring the influence of Western imperialism; and (g) ignoring women's strengths and actual needs. Finally, this paper included suggestions that can be taken into consideration to reduce the gap between U.S. White middle-class feminism and other types of feminisms in the Middle East.
The authors examine how restrictive policies force women to travel both within and across national borders in order to reach abortion providers, often at great expense, over long distances and with significant safety risks. Contributors, who adopt both historical and contemporary perspectives, examine the situation culturally and politically diverse in regions that include Australia, Canada, Eastern Europe, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Prince Edward Island, Spain, Sweden, Texas, and post-Brexit referendum UK.
History stretching back to origins of the republic, covering key individuals, NGOs and governmental responses.
Sharkey, Professor of AI and robotics at Sheffield University, Chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and also spokesperson for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, sketches in the historical background to the evolution of Autonomous Weapons Systems, and dispels 'five myths about AWS'. He also briefly explains the evolution of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and how it had been keeping the issue 'on the table' at the UN since 2014.
See also: Chan, Melissa, 'Death to the Killer Robots', Guardian Weekly, 19 April 2019, pp. 30-31.
Report on role of Jody Williams and Mary Wareham, two leading activists in the Campaign to Ban Landmines, in promoting the new movement, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which they recognize to be a much harder goal to achieve. Chan notes that Israel is already using advanced autonomous technology, for example to patrol the Gaza border. the US is testing advances in the technology, and Russia wants to create a battalion of killer robots. The campaigners were in Berlin because the German government had indicated concern about the issue, but had not been consistent, so their aim was to put pressure on Germany to act.
Detailed analysis of the evolution of the US war on Cambodia.
Based on extensive Pentagon files on conduct of war and US role, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, then an official in the Pentagon.
Covers campaigns in Argentina, Chicago (USA), France, Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, South Korea and China.
Filmed over seven years, Erika Cohn’s Belly of the Beast exposes state-sanctioned sterilizations in California prisons through the story of Kelli Dillon, who was forcibly sterilized while incarcerated at the Central California women’s facility in Chowchilla, and her lawyer Cynthia Chandler.
Discusses the women’s resistance movement that developed in the context of the incoming Trump’s presidency and the subsequent creation of the ‘Me Too’ movement, with particular regard to the restrictions on abortion and contraception put in place by the forty-fifth’ U.S. Administration.
Reports on how more than 20 other Chinese feminists who live in the United States and belong to the Chinese Feminism Collective, a nongovernmental organization supporting feminists that face sustained political pressure in China, carry on with their activities in support of women in China such as Global Leaders’ Meeting on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in collaboration with the UN; photography exhibition ‘Aboveground: 40 Moments of Transformation’, art performance ‘Our Vaginas, Ourselves’ and others.
See also https://nuvoices.com/2018/11/18/100-attend-nuvoices-nyc-launch-and-discussion-on-chinese-feminism/ for a more recent discussion on Chinese contemporary feminism at a New York City conference.
A personal account which includes a brief summary of the course of the war and statistics on the scale of draft resistance and desertion.
Focus on the presidents and their relationship with the Vietnam Anti-War Movements between 1961 and 1975.
Examines the militant American Indian Movement (AIM). from the seizure of Alcatraz in 1969 to Wounded Knee in 1973, assessing failures as well as successes.
Smucker has spent many years in grass roots community organising and is co-founder of the campaign in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Lancaster Stands Up. He was active in Occupy, but is critical of its failure to move beyond a symbolic impact, and argues for the need to link campaigning to the political electoral process.
For more detail see interview with Smucker, 'Roadmap for Radicals', Red Pepper, Jan-Jul. 2018, pp 35-39.
This issue has several articles on Occupy. See:
- Kerton, Sarah , Tahrir Here? The influence of the Arab Uprisings on the emergence of Occupy Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social Cultural and Political Protest, 2012, pp. 302-308
- Pickerill, Jenny ; Krinksy, John , Why does Occupy matter? Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social Cultural and Political Protest, 2012, pp. 279-287
- Smith, Jackie ; Glidden, Bob , Occupy Pittsburgh and the challenges of participatory democracy Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social Cultural Political Protest, 2012, pp. 288-294
Content overview: http://tandfonline.com/toc/csms20/11/3-4?nav=tocList
Autobiographical account of radical campaigning activities against nuclear tests in Nevada. Author argues that policy of testing nuclear weapons in the American West is rooted in 19th century attitudes and policies towards native American peoples.
A collection of essays by a leading feminist, that responds to the rapid social change resulting from the latest renewal of feminism both in North America and worldwide. It starts with a long new essay ‘Silence is broken’, which explores the many ways in which not only women but other vulnerable groups have been silenced. The author notes that this is a book that ‘deals with men who are ardent feminists as well as men who are rapists’ and that ‘this is a feminist book, yet it is not about women’s experience alone.’
Focuses on the widespread student protests in Britain in 2010, but also extends to Italy, France, Greece and the USA, as well as the beginning of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia. Includes texts from the past and reminders of 1968, as well as coverage of contemporary events, and political and theoretical commentaries from established and new voices.
Case studies from most of Europe (excluding eastern Europe and Greece) covering direct action to create social housing and other community services over 30 year period.
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.
On the development of the ‘Red Power’ movement rejecting white culture.
Uses interviews with Black organisers to discuss disagreements about the best strategy to build on the mobilization resulting from the 2014 Ferguson 'rebellion' triggered by the shooting of Mike Brown. Notes in particular conflict between those working through the electoral process and seeking reform, and those focusing on resistance to the white power structure.
This volume investigates different abortion and reproductive practices across time, space, geography, national boundaries, and cultures. The authors specialise in the reproductive politics of Australia, Bolivia, Cameroon, France, ‘German East Africa,’ Ireland, Japan, Sweden, South Africa, the United States and Zanzibar, and cover the pre-modern era and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the present day. Contributors draw on different theoretical frameworks, including ‘intersectionality’ and ‘reproductive justice’ to explore the very varied conditions in which women have been forced to make these life-altering decisions.
The book notes the long history of pro-choice activism, and explores new limits on abortion in the United States under the Trump/Pence Administration, as well as the global impact of US policy. The author then charts the pro-choice movements led by women in Canada, Ireland, and Poland; the interconnection between diversity and abortion; and the fight against abortion stigma. It also includes testimonies of women who have had abortions.
Examines how LGBT movement responded to over 200 attempts by religious right in US to promote discrimination through anti-gay referenda.
Survey of US Transgender movement from mid 20th century to early 2000s in chronological order.
A grassroots movement exploded on Twitter after actress Alyssa Milano invited users who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to tweet with the hashtag #MeToo. This study examines opinion leadership within the context of social network analysis and explores how users engaged with the campaign and others on Twitter.
Traces how a movement developed in the US out of official debate and television coverage into the formation of thousands of neighbourhood groups, and over a decade the establishment of strong civic organizations tackling different toxic threats.
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.
Includes essays, articles and poems by black opponents of the war, including Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, and (in a section ‘The Black Soldier’) extracts from the diaries of black GIs and the Statement of Aims of ‘GIs United Against the War in Vietnam’. Taylor notes how the advice to African Americans from some leaders to ‘prove themselves worthy’ by taking part in the war in Vietnam became increasingly discredited.
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.
A Special Investigation by Matthew Taylor and Jonathan Watts on the role of fossil fuel companies in promoting the climate crisis. Includes list of the 'top five global polluters': Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia; Chevron, US; Gazprom, Russia; ExxonMobil, US; National Iranian Oil Co.
Account of how a nonviolent fleet of canoes and kayaks blocked Pakistani shipping at East Coast ports of the USA to oppose US support for Pakistan’s repression in East Bengal. Part 2 is a manual for direct action.
Includes assessment of impact of grape pickers’ strike on immigrant labour in other industries.
Examines development of lesbian feminism in the US from the early 1970s and explores its collective identity and engagement in range of actions challenging status quo.
This thesis focuses on the 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament that lasted nine-month and covered 3,325 miles, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The author coins the term ‘endurance activism’ and explores two central questions: What is the relationship between long-distance walking and the politics of social movements? To what extent does ‘endurance’ shape meanings of the March’s related but twin goals: the building of a “prefigurative” community, and a mass movement capable of attaining media coverage and achieving concrete, or “strategic” political outcomes?
A collection of letters following the attack in the US on 11th September 2001 that Terzani published in response to some declarations made by his colleague, Oriana Fallaci, on the same event. In his collection Terzani discusses the need to explore the root causes of violence and extremism within human nature. He also advocates nonviolence as the only creative response to conflict, alongside the necessity to reconstitute the paradigms upon which the idea of Western globalisation rests.
Investigates the history of the forced sterilization of Native American Women as a practice that reflects the history of U.S. colonialism.
See also on forced sterilization of Latino men and women: Novak, Nicole and Natalie Lira, ‘Forced sterilization targeted Americans of color, leaving lasting impact’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 March 2018.
The link to the documentary ‘No Más Bebés’ (No More Babies), which tells the story of immigrant mothers who sued county doctors, the state, and the U.S. government after they were pushed into sterilizations while giving birth at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center during the 1960s and 70s can be found here http://www.nomasbebesmovie.com/
Reports on the legally aggressive strategy over abortion that Republican lawmakers have pursued since 2010 in at least five U.S. states. Provides detailed charts that show typologies of ‘abortion restriction’ state legislatures; examines how states have restricted abortion access, and makes prediction on how the Alabama Supreme Court’s conservative majority might legislate in light of the 2020 elections.
Examines how a small group of radical pacifists (such as Dave Dellinger, A.J. Muste and Bayard Rustin) played a major role in the rebirth of US radicalism and social protest in the 1950s and 1960s, applying nonviolence to social issues and developing an experimental protest style.
Examination of the history of how the US Federal Government mistreated the First Nations since the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, brought right up to date, with an emphasis on the militancy of the 1970s and the subsequent improvements in the condition and role of Native Americans. The book ends with an account of the dramatic Standing Rock protest by a large gathering of different tribes over a proposed pipeline in 2016. This important history by a member of the Ojibwe, who is also a social anthropologist, appeared just after two Native American women were for the first time elected to Congress in 2018.
Examines what can be learned from social movement activists, focusing on community, labour, feminist, gay and lesbian, peace and anti-racist groups in Hartford Connecticut.
Contributors include Naomi Klein, David Korten, Ralph Nader and Rebecca Solnit.
This book focuses on importance of community-based resistance to tackle major national and global issues. It covers diverse groups and campaigns in the USA, for example against racial injustice, coal mining and claiming workers' rights, and is based on the author’s interviews during her extended journey.
Vinthagen develops a new general theory of nonviolent action which embraces Gandhian concepts and commitments, but relates these to modern sociological theory (for example, Haberms's conception of rationality) and reinterprets them within a more contemporary ethos. Four key dimensions explored are: dialogue facilitation; 'power breaking': 'utopian enactment' - Gandhi's constructive programme; and nonviolent training. Theoretical analysis is illustrated by examples drawn from a range of movements such as US Civil Rights, Movimento Sem Terra and radical protests against nuclear weapons.
‘Exchange analysis’ between organizers of two protests against Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) weapons production, the first a 21 month campaign at Fort Detrick from January 1960, the second planting a tree inside the base.
Article and audio defining important moments of the history of the Pilgrim nuclear energy plant, located in Plymouth, Massachusetts, from 1967, when it was built by the Boston Edison Company, up to 2019, when it shut down thanks to year of anti-nuclear activism and legal fighting against re-licensing the plant.
See also https://medium.com/binj-reports/pilgrims-50-years-of-anti-nuclear-mass-an-oral-history-8ea2a4624610
In 1963 medical and dental professionals in the United States and the United Kingdom played an important role in highlighting the health threat posed by atmospheric nuclear tests. Analysis of the deciduous teeth of American children born during the testing years showed the widespread presence of Strontium-90, a radioactive fission product that accumulates in babies’ teeth. The outrage of parents made fallout a central issue, and so put pressure on the US and UK governments to agree to the Partial Test Ban Treaty.
Reports that 14 year old Pedro Mattos Pinto, when playing in the street, was seized and later killed in a botched police operation in a Rio de Janeiro favela, a week before George Floyd’s death. His body was later found dumped. Brazilians demonstrated chanting ‘Black lives matter here too’. Notes that in 2019 police in Brazil killed nearly six times as many as in the US, and most of them were black.
See also: Libardi, Manuella, ‘Racial cleansing in Brazil: a 21st century genocide?’, OpenDemocracy, 27 September 2019.
Investigates the indiscriminate killing of blacks and the poor and argues that it is a historical and institutionalized event in Brazil: the perpetuation of an attempt at racial cleansing engrained in the history of the country.
See also: ‘Brazil: 80% killed by police in Rio de Janeiro in 2019 were Black’, TeleSur, 8 February 2020.
http://civilresistance.info/biblio-item/1998/walking-wind-memoir-movement
The authors begin by documenting the restorative origins of #MeToo, as well as exploring steps taken especially by Time's Up, to amplify and promote the credibility of survivors' voices, seek accountability, change workplace practices, and encourage access to the legal system. They then explore the key components of restorative justice: acknowledgement, responsibility-taking, harm repair, non-repetition, and reintegration. The aim is how these concepts might apply in the context of addressing sexual assault and harassment in the workplace and in the world at large.
This is a book examining what strategy protesters should adopt and critical of some common leftist assumptions, but is based on the author's role in the Occupy movement. He discusses Occupy at length, outlining its origins and reflecting on the tactic of occupation, and the movement's failure to adopt additional approaches and develop a movement capable of promoting wider social change.
Part 1 ‘the Abyss’ examines the socio-economic conditions of many Native Americans in the 1950s, Part 2 the development of a movement, leadership on the reservations and ‘Red Power’, whilst Part 3 explores ‘the Foundations of Self-determination’.
Focuses on legal struggle.
Elucidates the structural oppression of women of colour to which white feminism contributes in the United States. The article highlights the connection between white feminism and liberal and conservative policies and ideologies.
The author analyzes the nature and power of extractive industries, their impact on local people, and how they prompt active resistance in North and Latin America. The book covers a wide range of extractive industries, including logging, hydroelectric dams, mining, and oil and natural gas.
Lively account of peace, racial justice and labour activism in USA from the 1960s to 2000s by author of major study of transnational movement against nuclear weapons from 1945 (442-445 D.3.b).
On the campaign by OUR Walmart against the retail giant in USA in 2012, when non-unionized workers mobilized across the country with support from local communities, using blockades as well as brief strikes.
(Initially published by OR Books New York on print-on-demand and ebook basis.)
Detailed account of daily life at the camp by figures on the left.
See also: Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements New York, Grove Press, , 1966, pp. 226 .
Investigative journalist Beatrice Yeung explores episodes of sexual violence that immigrant workers in the US experience in their workplace at the hands of employers who exploit them. It also gives an account of what type of reactions they face when they decide to denounce the abuses.
The article discusses how the BLM protesters tactics have changed the way the demands of the movement have been put forward, thus shifting the public discourse on the fight against institutional injustice.
See also: Rivas, Josué, The Nation and Magnum Foundation, ‘Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty Are Interconnected’, The Nation, 29 June 2020.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/black-liberation-indigenous-sovereignty/
Rivas, an indigenous film-maker, responds to parallels between the indigenous movement and Black Lives Matter, and offers his photographs as a contribution to the BLM movement
Younge assesses the impact of protests over police shootings on the US presidential election. He makes comparison with the political gains achieved in 1963, following the March on Washington and he also compares 2020 with the 2016 elections.
See also: Tavernise, Sabrina and John Eligon, ‘Voters say Black Lives Matter protests were important. They disagree on why’, The New York Times, 7 November 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/07/us/black-lives-matter-protests.html
See also: Corbould, Clare, ‘What now for Black Lives Matter? Whatever happens under Biden, the role of African American women will be vital’, The Conversation, 11 November 2020.
On US movement.
The New Left became closely associated with opposition to the Vietnam War, and there are frequent references to this opposition in the US and UK, including a critique in chapter 9 ‘Vietnam and Alignment’, of New Left support for North Vietnam, pp. 163-88.
In this ‘Long Read’ article Younge discusses how protests for racial justice in the US from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter have prompted expressions of European solidarity, but argues that the European continent must face its own predominant role in the history of slavery. (Also available on The Guardian, 11 June 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/11/what-black-america-means-to-europe-protests-racism-george-floyd)
For an overview on how the BLM 2020 protests have erupted across the African continent see also: O’Dowd, Peter and Allison Hagan, ‘Black Lives Matter Movement Resonates Across Africa’, WBUR, 12 June 2020
(https://www.thenation.com/article/society/kkk-all-black-baseball-monrovians/) and
Wallace, Julia, ‘Africa Declares Black Lives Matter’, Left Voice, 26 June 2020. (https://www.leftvoice.org/africa-declares-black-lives-matter)
Oral histories from Holmes County, Mississippi, voter registration campaign, which Payne (above) says ‘suggests what we may hope for’ in future historical research, identifying ‘themes important from an organising perspective’ and based on the collective work of teenagers – ‘a powerful reminder of what the movement’s values were’.
Frames gender equality as a social and economic issue, rather than merely a female issue. It also touches upon three campaigns for gender equality: Feminism 1.0 launched by activist Gloria Steinem under the slogan ‘She For She’; Feminism 2.0 led by actress Emma Watson at the UN under the slogan ‘HeForShe’; and Modern FeMENism 3.0 developed under the slogan ‘We For We’ aimed at bringing men and women together to recognise that equality is in everyone’s best interest.
The authors explore some concerns about #MeToo and how feminist have responded to sexual harassment and sexual violence. #MeToo started in the USA a decade ago as activism by Black women who had experienced sexual violence to ‘let other survivors know they are not alone’ and create solidarity with the victims. The #MeToo campaign claims to be doing this now, but the authors query if this is actually what is being accomplished.
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.thecut.com/2017/01/timeline-the-200-year-fight-for-abortion-access.html
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.
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.
A Guide to Civil Resistance
Volume One
Volume Two
The online version of Vol. 1 of the bibliography was made possible due to the generous support of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). ICNC is an independent, non-profit educational foundation that develops and encourages the study and use of civilian-based, nonmilitary strategies aimed at establishing and defending human rights, democratic self-rule and justice worldwide.
For more information about ICNC, please see their website.
The online version of Vol. 2 of the bibliography was made possible due to the generous support of The Network for Social Change. The Network for Social Change is a group of individuals providing funding for progressive social change, particularly in the areas of justice, peace and the environment.
For more information about The Network for Social Change, please visit their website.
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