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Following the November 1957 Vientiane agreement between the RLG and Pathet Lao, Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma traveled to Washington, D.C., to defend his coalition government before skeptical Eisenhower administration officials. To assist conservative Lao candidates in the May 1958 elections, U.S. policymakers put the CIA in charge of a village-aid program called Booster Shot. Like the agency's civic action program, a counter-subversion initiative with an ostensibly humanitarian purpose, Booster Shot is hampered by misunderstandings and poor coordination among U.S. and Lao officials. Central Intelligence Director Allen W. Dulles is profiled, and his emphasis on covert action is discussed. Another focus of the chapter is the toxic relationship between U.S. and French officials, who disagreed sharply over Lao political leadership, military assistance to the kingdom, and other issues.

This chapter describes the experiences of the Marines and corpsmen in the villages. It highlights how the Americans adapted to and eventually overcame many of the social and cultural obstacles that threatened to undermine the overall military success of CAP units. Personal and unit survival for the Americans hinged heavily on creating and maintaining amicable relations with the villagers, which proved to be a daunting task. During the opening weeks of a CAP's existence, mutual distrust between the Americans and villagers minimized social interaction. Performing civic action helped to bridge the wide social and cultural gap. Americans procured materials for local village construction projects, such as man-made ponds, drinking wells, schools, and office buildings. The corpsman, or medic, became the most critical element in fostering social interaction. At a central location in the village, the corpsman provided daily medical services for all villagers, who often lined up by the hundreds to receive treatment for everything from stomachaches to life-threatening injuries. The gradual eradication of Viet Cong influence coupled with increased social interaction led to villagers divulging intelligence about recent and upcoming Viet Cong whereabouts and movements.

This chapter demonstrates the dual process by which President John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress improved President Víctor Paz's efforts to maintain Bolivia's noncommunist orientation. First, civic action programs of the Alliance for Progress fueled a rapid militarization of development. Second, Kennedy's Special Group on Counterinsurgency allocated $100,000 through United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to equip a pro-Paz Indian peasant militia that planned to attack the left-wing miners of Siglo XX, who were mounting a fierce campaign to block mass firings and other labor reforms required by Alliance for Progress development programs. The remainder of the chapter narrates the battle in the village of Irupata between armed miners and Indian peasants and undercover soldiers from Paz's presidential guard regiment.

This chapter examines how champions of entrepreneurial citizenship remake education, proposing that the skills of producing innovation and the skills of taking civic action are one and the same. These educational reforms promise that “every child” can be an entrepreneur. This model appears democratic in that it expands merit or success beyond narrow visions that locate merit at the apex of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or global corporations. At the same time, it naturalizes privilege and resources as leadership and passion. Entrepreneurial citizens appear simultaneously as empathic leaders of entrepreneurs' others and as portraits of what all Indians ought to become. Those who do not lead India, implicitly, should follow. Design in Education, in its optimism and its pitfalls, offers a view into the limits of entrepreneurial citizenship. This form of citizenship promised a model of change, but it also was a new mechanism for development without disturbing existing social orders.

This chapter presents the civic capacity's role in innovative efforts to manage urban growth in Mumbai in India and Salt Lake City in the United States, exemplars of the distinct problems of uneven urban growth being faced by both developed and developing countries. Both of these cases, which highlight the problems of unsustainable, inefficient, and inequitable urbanization, also exemplify the challenges of civic action in rich and poor democracies. Experts are of the opinion that new civic approaches have been adopted and utilized by both cities in solving problems of urbanization through collective civic action. The chapter also describes a model that can be followed by other cities facing similar problems.

This chapter assesses the various obstacles impeding the expansion of the American Century from early 1961 through 1964. Numerous problems, including Laos, Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, and Vietnam brought into question John F. Kennedy’s leadership. His response too often minimized consultation with allies and, across the Third World, increasingly focused on security and stability through civic action programs, overseen by the Office of Public Safety in the Agency for International Development—to the great detriment, for example, of experiments like the Alliance for Progress. Meanwhile, the rise of multinational corporations and deficit-induced flight of gold thwarted Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s economic policies, while weakening America’s hegemony and credibility.

This chapter establishes a baseline for peer relations, meanings of campus space, and social trust at New West High School (NWHS) during the late 1990s. Drawing on ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews, youth-made photos, and youth sketch maps, the first half of the chapter identifies a form of freedom of association and spatial movement on campus that youth call “hangin’ out” and “movin’ around,” or, analytically anchored fluidity. This dynamic refers to youth grounding themselves in meaningful peer relations while engaging in mobility across diverse peer groups and space, including moving on and off interpersonal front- and backstages. Such space includes a variety of outdoor and indoor locales, including empty classrooms used as “sanctuaries” that teachers keep open and supportively monitor at lunch and before and after school. Anchored fluidity is the key social mechanism on campus that links social trust to conciliatory-remedial responses to peer trouble. The second half of this chapter examines the language youth use to articulate trust on campus and then explores the historical underpinnings for trust at NWHS by drawing from a century of archival evidence that points to the role of student organizations in collective civic action on campus.

Many women come to Britain and France because they risk gender-related persecution such as forced marriage, ‘honour’ crimes or female genital mutilation. However, for most of these women, arrival in Britain or France marks the start of a new phase of problems and troubled circumstances, including public hostility and xenophobic attitudes towards asylum seekers and refugees. This book represents the first full-length study to focus not only on refugee migrant women as users of state and voluntary sector services in France and Britain, but also on their involvement in politics, civic action, and political activism and as agents of change. First, it contributes to the literature on the reception and settlement of refugee women in destination societies in the West. It examines asylum-seeking and refugee women's interactions within and with processes and structures related to asylum and immigration (including detention) and those to do with housing, health, education and training and employment. The book also extends the traditionally accepted boundaries of what constitutes citizenship and political participation through gendered analyses of refugees' experiences and lives.

This chapter presents an overview of Sibelius’s early musical training, especially as a violinist. It highlights the life-long persistence of Sibelius’s violin training in his musical imagination. It introduces key questions that are pursued throughout the book: What is the labor of virtuosity? How are performing traditions formed over time? What are the cross-genre musical influences in Sibelius’s violin concerto? The discussion in this chapter unfolds in relation to philosophical discourses on beauty and statehood, as well as on the idea of the virtuoso’s political potential, which builds on nineteenth-century views on the redemptive potential of civic action and on military-heroic symbolism in performance.