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We are in a struggle for the very soul of democracy, and all that we hold dear - interdependence, reason, compassion, respect for all human beings, and stewardship of the natural world that sustains us,– is under direct, unabashed assault. This book is meant for those who are concerned about dangers to our democracy, and to our social health as a nation. It is for those who desire to work for social justice, and to respond to essential protests by enacting progressive change. The stories offered in this book provide examples of the critical work being done to create generative interdependence: a community that fully values diversity and connection, that nurtures creativity and scientific rigor, and that embodies responsibility for others and the freedom to find new and better ways of living out, and creating, expansive human communities of connection, respect and cooperation. In this book, we will explore the worlds of social enterprise, impact investing, and other attempts to create economic systems that are environmentally sound and economically just. And we will study the way in which universities and colleges are educating students to be critical participants in creating a truly just and sustainable social order. In each of these instances, activists are working from positions of power to transform institutional practices and structures to foster justice and equality. Their work, “after the protests are heard,” aims at actually enacting social change once injustices are brought to light.

Electoral democracy combines the ideas and practices of warfare and welfare, where both work in tandem as near synonyms. India’s robust electoral democracy exemplifies this combination in diverse forms. Critically analysing the 2014 Parliamentary elections beyond the seduction of immediacy and bare cold statistics, this book puts human subjectivity at the centre of election studies and, through an anthropological–sociological approach, makes lives—human and non-human, lived and unlived or unlivable—central to any understanding of elections and democracy. Crafting a new, comprehensive approach, this volume looks at the 2014 elections in relation to the changing nature and forms of elections and democracy globally. Coming from multidisciplinary backgrounds, the contributors to this volume use ethnographic observations to open up a space for new theoretical and methodological reflections on the role of media in Indian elections, the shift to the right in 2014 and its consequences, the significance of traditional Hindu spaces such as the river Ganga in BJP’s victory, the role of gurus like Baba Ramdev, and the electoral choices available to and exercised by the minorities, among others.

For decades, Algeria has been depicted as an inaccessible, opaque, rentier state and under the control of secret intelligence agencies and inaccessible “cartels” and “clans”. While that analysis is partly true, this book contends that the analytical emphasis on opacity risks missing how much the country has changed since the 1990s: the new transparency of the interest groups that govern the country; the competing notions of economic development within key financial institutions; the impact of non-revolutionary contentious politics; the micro-politics of the changing attitudes of the country’s urban youth; the growth of moderate Islamist party politics; the changing notions of security held by the armed forces; and the dislocation of rebellion towards the South. Across ten chapters, the book demonstrates that Algeria under Abdelaziz Bouteflika remains complex and challenging to understand, but that it is no longer opaque and inaccessible.

This book is about how Donald Trump, who had no prior public service, became president of the United States. It argues that Trump capitalized on a wave of increasing public discontent that stemmed from the demise of the country’s Golden Age of prosperity. This involved decades-long trends in the American economy, race relations, ideology, and political polarization, all of which fueled rising discontent across America. It reached a tipping point by the time Barack Obama was elected president. When the 2008 financial crisis hit and Obama was elected the first African American president, he tried to resolve the crisis and fix the nation’s ailing health care system. But in doing so he pushed rising discontent over the edge. Political gridlock in Washington resulted. Discontent skyrocketed. Americans were fed up and looked for a savior. Trump was lucky to be in the right place at the right time and rode that wave of discontent all the way to the White House.

The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation sets the stage for the radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. This book is the first major study of the concept of anarchist geographies. It realigns radical geography away from Marxism and back to its original trajectory of anarchism. It ultimately encourages a relational understanding of space, wherein anarchism is recognized as a holistic and everyday form of emancipationfrom statistic, capitalistic, homophobic, racist, sexist, and imperialistic ideas.

Arab New York is an ethnographic exploration of how everyday life and politics intersect in the diverse and complex Arab communities of New York City. The book argues that politics and contention move into everyday social spaces in order to circumvent many of the most challenging barriers to Arab American political participation. To show this, it studies Arab communities in practice, places where Arab Americans identify together as Arab and engage in collective work: in particular, community organizations providing services to newly immigrated Arabs and social movement organizations advocating on behalf of freedom and justice in their countries of origin. The book covers issues of forming community in diaspora, young women’s political engagement, differences between different approaches to pro-Palestine activism, and the challenges and possibilities of organizing on behalf of the Arab spring revolutions. Through detailed portraits of community organizations and activist groups, Arab New York helps explain why politics is everywhere for Arab Americans, and how their experiences of contestation, exclusion and acceptance shape their lives.

Yellowstone holds a special place in America's heart. As the world's first national park, it is globally recognized as the crown jewel of modern environmental preservation. But the park and its surrounding regions have recently become a lightning rod for environmental conflict, plagued by intense and intractable political struggles among the federal government, National Park Service, environmentalists, industry, local residents, and elected officials. This book asks why it is that, with the flood of expert scientific, economic, and legal efforts to resolve disagreements over Yellowstone, there is no improvement? Why do even seemingly minor issues erupt into impassioned disputes? What can Yellowstone teach us about the worsening environmental conflicts worldwide? The book argues that the battle for Yellowstone has deep moral, cultural, and spiritual roots that until now have been obscured by the supposedly rational and technical nature of the conflict. Tracing in detail the moral causes and consequences of large-scale social change in the American West, the book describes how a “new-west” social order has emerged that has devalued traditional American beliefs about manifest destiny and rugged individualism, and how morality and spirituality have influenced the most polarizing and techno-centric conflicts in Yellowstone's history. The book shows how the unprecedented conflict over Yellowstone is not all about science, law, or economic interests, but more surprisingly, is about cultural upheaval and the construction of new moral and spiritual boundaries in the American West.

This book crafts an insider's look at international trade disputes at one of the most important institutions in the global economy: the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO regulates the global rules for trade, and—unique among international organizations—provides a legalized process for litigation between countries over trade grievances. Drawing on interviews with trade lawyers, ambassadors, trade delegations, and trade jurists, this book details how trade has become increasingly legalized and the implications of that for power relations between rich and poor countries. The author looks closely at who uses the system to initiate and pursue disputes, who settles and on what terms, and the relative disconnect between pursuing a dispute and what a country gains through efforts to gain compliance with WTO dictates. Through this inside look at the process of disputing, the author provides fresh perspective on how and why the law authorizes the use of specific resources and tactics in the ever-unfolding struggle for control in the global economy.

At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. This book examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, the book draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. The book identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today.

Through its 14 chapters, this book presents a first view of the different perspectives within the fragmented field of behaviour change. The first part presents a series of perspectives of behaviour change as it is currently researched and implemented. This includes an overview of theories of behaviour, of evaluation and intervention design, the various approaches to behaviour change policy and a review of both behavioural economics and social marketing. The second part presents a series of approaches which are more concerned with questioning underlying conditions in which problematic behaviours occur. The activities of commercial marketers are scrutinised, the ethics and efficacy of participatory approaches – without systemic change - are questioned, and theories of practice and whole-system approaches are offered as perspectives which lead to a more complete picture of ‘problem’ behaviours and how to change them. The book paints a picture of a field that is undoubtedly fragmented and subject to a series of forces, both internally and externally. It highlights the breadth of perspectives and does not seek to hide the conflicts between them. Rather, the book seeks to suggest the potential of transdisciplinary behaviour change and to pave the way for further innovative discussions across the field and the setting of a firm agenda for its future.

This book examines the radical Left in Puerto Rico from the final years of Spanish colonial rule into the 1920s. Positioning Puerto Rico within the context of a regional anarchist network that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Tampa, Florida, and New York City, the book illustrates how anarchists linked their struggle to the broader international anarchist struggles against religion, governments, and industrial capitalism. Their groups, plays, fiction, speeches, and press accounts—as well as the newspapers that they published—were central in helping to develop an anarchist vision for Puerto Ricans at a time when the island was a political no-man's-land, neither an official U.S. colony or state nor an independent country. Anarchism in Puerto Rico was a unique entity in the movement's history. The anarchists expressed their concerns and visions through their own brand of cultural politics, which was directed against Puerto Rican and U.S. colonial rulers in order to promote an antiauthoritarian spirit and countercultural struggle over how the island was being run and the future directions that it should pursue. Alongside this was anticlericalism against the Roman Catholic Church.

Anarchism may be the most misunderstood political ideology of the modern era—it’s surely one of the least studied social movements by English-speaking scholars. Black Flags and Social Movements addresses this deficit with an in-depth analysis of contemporary anarchist movements, as interpreted by social movement theories and the analytical tools of political sociologists. Using unique datasets—gathered by anarchists themselves—the book presents longitudinal and international analyses that focus upon who anarchists are (similar, yet, different from classic anarchists) and where they may be found (most countries in the world, but especially in European and North American cities). Even though scholars have studiously avoided the contradictions and complications that anti-state movements present for their theories, numerous social movement ideas, including political opportunity, new social movements, and social capital theory, are relevant and adaptable to understanding anarchist movements. Due to their sometimes limited numbers and due to their identities as radical anti-authoritarians, anarchists often find themselves collaborating with numerous other social movements, bringing along their values, ideas, and tactics.

This book offers a timely analysis of the impact of rapidly advancing knowledge about the brain, mind and behaviour on contemporary public policy and practice. Drawing on in-depth interviews with professionals in a range of social spheres including architecture and urban design, education, and the workplace, the book examines the global spread of policy strategies, UK based policy experiments and everyday practice informed by ‘brain culture’. It explores how neuroscientific, behavioural and psychological explanation have become increasingly influential in such fields, and examines their repercussions for governing citizens. Analysis of a neural turn in research, policy and practice is offered through the development of a geographical focus on behaviour, including the role of context, scale and situatedness in re-shaping political agency. The book provides a grounded critical commentary on the burgeoning field of social, cultural and political aspects of brain culture. It offers an alternative set of explanations for what matters in explaining why people behave in certain ways and how citizens’ behaviour could and should be governed.

This is the first comprehensive history of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), from its founding in 1838. The Society, set up by Quaker Joseph Sturge and Lord Henry Brougham after the abolition of slavery in the Empire, married the campaigning anti-slavery movement with the British mission to civilize the world. The BFASS took up the cause of slavery practiced by other countries, often rivals, like the United States, France, Spain and Portugal, creating a new model of human rights diplomacy. Championing British rule, though often being critical of government policy, put the society into difficult controversies. The BFASS was so hostile to America that it initially welcomed the secession and then later took up the cause of Morant Bay rebels in Jamaica, pressing for Governor Eyre’s prosecution. With the closing of the Atlantic slave trade the Society turned to East Africa and the Arab slave traders working out of Zanzibar. It was a turn that led the BFASS to lobby for colonial rule in Africa as a remedy to slave-trading, so that the Society helped to prepare for, and publicize the 1890 Brussels Conference that carved up Africa. Allied with the colonial project, the Society was severely tested in its humanitarian goals, by the growing knowledge of atrocities committed against native peoples in the colonies.

There are people dedicated to improving the way we eat, and people dedicated to improving the way we give birth. A Bun in the Oven is the first comparison of these two social movements. In this book Barbara Katz Rothman traces the food and the birth movements through three major phases over the course of the 20th century in the United States: from the early-20th-century era of scientific management; through to the consumerism of post–World War II with its “turn to the French” in making things gracious; to the late-20th-century counterculture midwives and countercuisine cooks. Katz Rothman then looks at today’s world of risk management in both arenas. The book explores the tension throughout all of these eras between the industrial demands of mass management and profit making, and the social movements—composed largely of women coming together from very different feminist sensibilities—that are working to expose the harmful consequences of industrialization, and make birth and food both meaningful and healthy. In both movements, issues of the natural, the authentic, and the importance of “meaningful” and “personal” experiences get balanced against discussions of what is sensible, convenient, and safe, operating in a context of commercial and corporate interests that place profit and efficiency above individual experiences and outcomes. A Bun in the Oven brings new insight into the relationship between our most intimate, embodied personal experiences, the industries that control them, and the social movements that resist the industrialization of life and seek to birth change.

Aging populations and changes in health care, household structure, and women’s labor force participation over the last half century have created a “crisis in care”: demand for care of the old and infirm is rapidly growing, while the supply of private care within the family is substantially contracting. And yet despite the adverse effects of the long-term care crisis on the economic security of families and the health of family caregivers, American families have demonstrated little inclination for translating their private care problems into political demands for social policy reform. Caring for Our Own inverts an enduring question of social welfare politics. Rather than asking why the American state, a known laggard in all matters involving social welfare, hasn’t responded to unmet needs by expanding social entitlements, this book asks: Why don’t American families view unmet needs as the basis for demands for new state entitlements? How do traditional beliefs in family responsibility for social welfare persist even in the face of unmet need? The answer, this book argues, lies in a better understanding of how individuals imagine solutions to their social welfare problems and what prevents politicized understandings of social welfare provision from developing into political demand for reform. This book considers the ways in which existing social policies shape the political imagination, reinforcing longstanding values about family responsibility, subverting grievances grounded in notions of social responsibility, and in some rare cases, constructing new models of social provision that transcend existing ideological divisions in American politics.

Choice pervades our society: it is founded on political rights to choose and our economy of market choices, but we have now reached the point where choice is extended almost everywhere. This book provides a critique of choice in contemporary society and policy, arguing that we can have too much of a good thing. And there are alternatives. In the first part, the book shows how choice works at a personal level, its demands, and how it can fail. By examining healthcare, education and pensions, it then explores the alternatives, such as provision. In the second part of the text the book reviews the impact of choice through the life cycle, in areas such as careers, relationships, fertility, retirement and death. The book considers whether this enhances or burdens our lives, and questions the assumption that more choice is always for the better.

The relationship between citizens and local decision makers is a long-standing policy pre-occupation and has often been the subject of debate by politicians across parties. Recent governments have sought to empower, activate, and give responsibility to some citizens, while other groups have been abandoned or ignored. Drawing on extensive up-to-date empirical work by leading researchers in the field, this book aims to explain what debates about local governance mean for local people. Questions addressed include: what new demands are being made on citizens and why? Which citizens are affected and how have they responded? What difference do changing forms of local governance make to people's lives? The book explores governance and citizenship in relation to multiculturalism, economic migration, community cohesion, housing markets, neighbourhoods, faith organisations, behaviour change, and e-democracy, in order to establish a differentiated, contemporary view of the ways that citizens are constituted at the local level today.

Although media coverage often portrays young people in urban areas as politically apathetic or disruptive, this book provides an antidote to such views through narratives of dedicated youth civic engagement and leadership in Chicago, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro. This innovative comparative study provides nuanced accounts of the personal experiences of young people who care deeply about their communities and are actively engaged in a variety of public issues. Drawing from extensive interviews and personal narratives from the youth activists themselves, this book provides a vibrant portrait of a new, politically involved generation. The book examines youth civic engagement in Chicago, with particular emphasis on young people's attitudes regarding democracy. It considers the context of young people's civic engagement in Brazil, and the demographics of youth activists in Rio, the activities and organizations they are involved in, and their motivations for engagement. It also examines new paradigms of civic participation among Mexico City's youth.

The book asks to what extent Himalayan farmers and their institutions are prepared to face a future when external production conditions change. Because farming is particularly sensitive to climate, the main aim here is to relate present farming practices to projected future climate changes. Intensive, coordinated studies of six farming communities along the Himalayan range, from China in the east to Pakistan in the west, focus on their potentiality to adapt to climate changes that are projected for 2030, 2050, and 2100. But since climate projections are just projections, and since the context of farming is wider than just climate, the book also asks about farmers’ capacity to adapt to uncertainty in general. For that purpose, theories of ‘flexibility’ that have been applied in ecology, economics, and management science are accommodated to the present topic of farming systems. The assertion is that farmers and farming systems that are flexible are best prepared to face a future of climate change and other uncertainties.