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Analysis by social anthropologist of campaign against the Alta Hydropower Dam, and its impact in promoting cultural and political rights.

See also: Michael Sibalis, Gay Liberation Comes to France: The Front Homosexuel d’Action Revolutionnaire, The George Rudé Society, 2005 , pp. 12

The University of Auckland hosted a panel in September 2018 on preventing and responding to sexual assault and harassment on university campuses. The panel was organised by the Australian and New Zealand Student Services Association (ANZSSA), and included speakers from the University of Sydney and Universities Australia. Australian universities had launched a coordinated effort to address campus sexual assault and harassment in February 2016, and this panel served as a space for sharing their experiences and for Auckland staff and students to learn from them.

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.

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.

A series of essays on the life of Joseph Rotblat, British physics and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, including his activism for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Argues that while most studies focus on grassroots movements, elites – especially security services – are crucial in determining whether movements reach a ‘tipping point’. Illustrates argument by comparing two ‘failed revolutions’ (Serbia 1996-97 and Ukraine 2001) with two ‘successful revolutions’ (Serbia 2000 and Ukraine 2004-2005). [Compare with Anika Locke Binnendijk, Ivan Marovic, Power and persuasion: Nonviolent strategies to influence state security forces in Serbia (2000) and Ukraine (2004) (D. II.1. Comparative Assessments) above.]

Theodorakis, whose music was banned by the Colonels, was a prominent member of the broad-based Patriotic-Front Movement created in May 1967 to oppose the junta. Like hundreds of other members, he was imprisoned. This book recounts his successive arrests, internment and imprisonment, until external intervention secured his release from a prison hospital in 1970.

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.

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.

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.

Stressing the need to create inter-agency agreements, the 2017 Economic Commission for the Latin America and the Caribbean’s report on femicide shows that Brazil topped the list of femicides (with 1,133 victims confirmed in 2017). In 2016, Honduras recorded 5.8 femicides for every 100,000 women. In Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Bolivia, high rates were also seen in 2017, equal to or above 2 cases for every 100,000 women. In the region, only Panama, Peru and Venezuela have rates below 1.0. In the Caribbean, four countries accounted for a total of 35 femicide victims in 2017: Belize (9 victims), the British Virgin Islands (1), Saint Lucia (4) and Trinidad and Tobago (21). In the same year, Guyana and Jamaica — which only have data on intimate femicides — reported the deaths of 34 and 15 women, respectively, at the hands of their current or former partners. In 2017, the rates of intimate femicides in Latin America ranged between a maximum of 1.98 for every 100,000 women in the Dominican Republic, to a minimum of 0.47 in Chile.