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In Chapter 2, I address the entrenched powers in a community or organization that erect obstacles to enduring change and their relationship to the second, and in many ways, most critical strategy for social change: identifying the power base—who holds the power and who the critical stakeholders may be. In this chapter, we will show that this power is not surmountable and can be confronted. However, it takes time, patience, and perseverance. I chronicle a 20-year effort to convince the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change their perceptions of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, an ailment I experienced personally, and learned first-hand how harmful misperceptions and bureaucratic inaction can be. Certainly, we expect our efforts to be met with resistance in some form of another. For this reason, any agent for change attempting to reform a system must be armed with a keen knowledge of that system, as well as an awareness of all of the principle players and environments involved.

In Chapter 3, I provide an overview of the complex network of health care systems, and why working with community-based coalitions is critical. This is our next principle for social change: the importance of working with or creating like-minded groups who are affected by the current situation. I begin with a reflection on the closure of mental hospitals in the 1960s, which many heralded as a serious effort to bring patients back to the community. Unfortunately, this was a case of the best intentions with unintended consequences years later. It wasn’t until years afterward that researchers realized that the number of patients with mental disorders had not decreased. Worse, they were now either in prison, in nursing homes, or homeless. In this chapter, I provide a glimpse into the Oxford House coalition of recovery homes to demonstrate the potential for giving people who are disenfranchised through drugs, prison records, or mental illness the chance to take decision-making responsibilities and authority into their own hands.

This chapter follows the stories of Latinas/os who joined the Mennonite Church during the middle part of the twentieth century. While a relatively small Protestant denomination, the Mennonite Church is especially strong across the Midwest, from the Central Plains to the Great Lakes region. This chapter argues that religion served as an important platform for Latina/o civil rights movements in the Midwest. Religious activism in particular was an important part of the larger project of community formation for Latina/o migrants who were making the Midwest their new home. The quest for civil rights included building an interethnic alliance between Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans, which organized in 1968 and called itself the Minority Ministries Council (MMC). This group helped organize a K-12 educational program that created a pathway for black and brown youth to attend Mennonite schools. While these movements were for the most part dominated by Latino men, Latinas created their own spaces by organizing conferences that brought together women from across the country. This flurry of activity led to an unprecedented rise of Latinas/os within the Mennonite Church. In a span of about ten years, Latinas/os went from zero representation on national Mennonite Church boards to having Latinos and Latinas on every major church board from the East Coast to the Midwest.

Republican freedom is freedom from domination, whereas negative freedom is freedom from interference. Proponents argue that republican freedom is superior, since it highlights that individuals can lose freedoms even when they are not subject to interference, and claim republican freedom is more ‘resilient’. I examine the debate through the ‘coalition problem’ for republican freedom. Ssince there is always a coalition of others who could dominate any agent in any sphere, all agents are subject to domination, and hence no one can ever have republican freedom. Pettit’s simple solution to this reductio ad absurdum distinguishes potential from actual coalitions: individuals are only dominated by actual not potential coalitions. The simple solution highlights moralization problems as it demonstrates that domination cannot be purely institutionally defined, but requires consideration of dispositions and expectations about others’ behaviour. I argue that the differences between the ‘free man’ and ‘unfree person’ paradigmatic to republican arguments are best captured not by the difference between domination and interference but, rather, from familiar distinctions between different types of rights and freedoms. Resilience is a practical matter that might track some of these familiar distinctions.

Upon its arrival in office in 1997, the New Labour government opened a national consultation on airport capacity. This chapter analyses the politics of this consultation process leading to the publication of New Labour's White Paper in 2003. It argues that the government's efforts to broker a long-term settlement between rival stakeholders backfired. Rather than resolving the heightened tensions and sharpening contradictions, the consultation process created the conditions for the development of two antagonistic discourse coalitions: the pro-expansionist Freedom to Fly and the pro-regulation AirportWatch. This chapter explores the emergence and formation of these coalitions, analysing their strategies and impact on the UK aviation industry. It concludes that Freedom to Fly's rhetorical redescription of the aviation industry as proponents of ‘responsible growth’ and ‘sustainable aviation’ provided New Labour with the requisite ideological cover for supporting a policy of airport expansion.

Chapter five is the book's final empirical chapter exploring Britain's foreign policy in the context of the prelude to the war in Iraq, from 2001-2003. The chapter begins by examining the changing world order at that time, arguing that, as the war in Iraq developed, for the first time in the post-Cold War era the US and British governments attempted to redefine what it meant to be allies. It highlights how, in attempting this, two competing ideas emerged: the British government's ‘doctrine of international community’ and the US administration's idea for creating ‘coalitions of the willing’. The Blair government's doctrine of international community enabled his government to replay the same geopolitical role in the special relationship that those of Churchill and Macmillan had done previously. In contrast, the US idea of establishing coalitions of willing had the potential to de-centre the importance of the special relationship (and the British government) within US foreign policy making. Rebalancing much of the media's focus on contemporary decision making and events during the Iraq war, the chapter concludes that these differing visions for the future of the special relationship were the underlying cause of British foreign policy failure in the prelude to the war in Iraq.

In this chapter, it will be examined whether vote choices in the German multi-party system are guided not only by party and leader evaluations but also by coalition evaluations. It is argued that coalitions are meaningful political objects for voters in multi-party systems that can have effects on vote choices independent from party and leader evaluations—not only for sophisticated voters. With a growing number of parties and an increasingly complex party system over time, coalition considerations might have become even more important—as political objects and as cues for voting behavior.

The New Sanctuary Movement began as a coalition of immigrants and native-born people seeking to create a diverse partnership that included immigrant leadership. Instead, New Sanctuary struggled to attract immigrant congregations following its earliest stages, growing to include mostly native-born religious communities. This chapter shows how New Sanctuary's multiple targets, particularly its religious goals and the associated choice of sanctuary, alienated immigrants. Sanctuary did not hold the same symbolic power for many immigrants that it did for native-born religious progressives involved in the 1980s Sanctuary Movement. Also, the risks associated with public sanctuary made it less attractive to immigrants compared to more anonymous activities like immigrant rights marches. Finally, immigrant congregations were typically already transnationally minded, making New Sanctuary's goals of conversion to religious globalism less relevant for them. Immigrant congregations not only had more to lose from New Sanctuary involvement, they had less to gain compared to native-born congregations.

Using language is ‘doing things with words’, but the action takes place not within physical reality (the world of brute facts) but exclusively within virtual reality (the world of institutional facts). Therefore, in order to explain how language evolved, we must first explain how virtual reality might have emerged. This chapter surveys currently circulating theories of the origin of language in the light of this requirement.