119 books match the query 'Protest movements' and 18 start with t

cover of The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement

The Appearing Demos

Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement

Pang Laikwan

University of Michigan Press, 2020

As the waves of Occupy movements gradually recede, we soon forget the political hope and passions these events have offered. Instead, we are increasingly entrenched in the simplified dichotomies of Left and Right, us and them, hating others and victimizing oneself. Studying Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, which might be the largest Occupy movement in recent years, The Appearing Demos urges us to re-commit to democracy at a time when democracy is failing on many fronts and in different parts of the world.
 
The 79-day-long Hong Kong Umbrella Movement occupied major streets in the busiest parts of the city, creating tremendous inconvenience to this city famous for capitalist order and efficiency. It was also a peaceful collective effort of appearance, and it was as much a political event as a cultural one. The urge for expressing an independent cultural identity underlined both the Occupy movement and the remarkably rich cultural expressions it generated. While understanding the specificity of Hong Kong’s situations, The Appearing Demos also comments on some global predicaments we are facing in the midst of neoliberalism and populism. It directs our attention from state-based sovereignty to city-based democracy, and emphasizes the importance of participation and cohabitation. The book also examines how the ideas of Hannah Arendt are useful to those happenings much beyond the political circumstances that gave rise to her theorization. The book pays particular attention to the actual intersubjective experiences during the protest. These experiences are local, fragile, and sometimes inarticulable, therefore resisting rationality and debates, but they define the fullness of any individual, and they also make politics possible. Using the Umbrella Movement as an example, this book examines the “freed” political agents who constantly take others into consideration in order to guarantee the political realm as a place without coercion and discrimination. In doing so, Pang Laikwan demonstrates how politics means neither to rule nor to be ruled, and these movements should be defined by hope, not by goals.
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cover of The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements

The Art of Moral Protest

Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements

James M. Jasper

University of Chicago Press, 1997

In The Art of Moral Protest, James Jasper integrates diverse examples of protest—from nineteenth-century boycotts to recent movements—into a distinctive new understanding of how social movements work. Jasper highlights their creativity, not only in forging new morals but in adopting courses of action and inventing organizational forms.

"A provocative perspective on the cultural implications of political and social protest."—Library Journal
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cover of The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present

The Art of Protest

Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present

T.V. Reed

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A second edition of the classic introduction to arts in social movements, fully updated and now including Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and new digital and social media forms of cultural resistance


The Art of Protest, first published in 2006, was hailed as an “essential” introduction to progressive social movements in the United States and praised for its “fluid writing style” and “well-informed and insightful” contribution (Choice Magazine). Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of T. V. Reed’s acclaimed work offers engaging accounts of ten key progressive movements in postwar America, from the African American struggle for civil rights beginning in the 1950s to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century. 

Reed focuses on the artistic activities of these movements as a lively way to frame progressive social change and its cultural legacies: civil rights freedom songs, the street drama of the Black Panthers, revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, poetry in women’s movements, the American Indian Movement’s use of film and video, anti-apartheid rock music, ACT UP’s visual art, digital arts in #Occupy, Black Lives Matter rap videos, and more. 

Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic expression, Reed reveals how activism profoundly shapes popular cultural forms. For students and scholars of social change and those seeking to counter reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on social equality and justice, the new edition of The Art of Protest will be both informative and inspiring.

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cover of The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle

The Art of Protest

Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle

T.V. Reed

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Imagine the civil rights movement without freedom songs and the politics of women's movements without poetry. Or, more difficult yet, imagine an America unaffected by the cultural expressions and forms of the twentieth-century social movements that have shaped our nation. The first broad overview of social movements and the distinctive cultural forms that express and helped shape them, The Art of Protest shows the vital importance of these movements to American culture. In comparative accounts of movements beginning with the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and running through the Internet-driven movement for global justice ("Will the revolution be cybercast?") of the twenty-first century, T. V. Reed enriches our understanding of protest and its cultural expression. Reed explores the street drama of the Black Panthers, the revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, the American Indian Movement's use of film and video, rock music and the struggles against famine and apartheid, ACT UP's use of visual art in the campaign against AIDS, and the literature of environmental justice. Throughout, Reed employs the concept of culture in three interrelated ways: by examining social movements as sub- or countercultures; by looking at poetry, painting, music, murals, film, and fiction in and around social movements; and by considering the ways in which the cultural texts generated by resistance movements have reshaped the contours of the wider American culture. The United States is a nation that began with a protest. Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic and cultural expression, Reed reveals how activism continues to remake our world.
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cover of The Community of Nuchi Du Takara ("Life Is the Ultimate Treasure") in Postwar Okinawa: Local Subjectivity within and against Empire

The Community of Nuchi Du Takara ("Life Is the Ultimate Treasure") in Postwar Okinawa

Local Subjectivity within and against Empire

Masamichi (Marro) Inoue

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Against the background of the prolonged US military presence in post–World War II Okinawa, The Community of Nuchi Du Takara (“Life Is the Ultimate Treasure”) in Postwar Okinawa explores the conflict between Okinawa and the US-Japan alliance. Developing the local notion of nuchi du takara into an analytical concept, Inoue examines how Okinawan activists, artists, writers, and other social actors have resisted US military presence, particularly the planned construction of a new military facility in northern Okinawa. The concept of nuchi du takara also helps Inoue explore complex negotiations Okinawa has had with Washington and Tokyo beyond resistance and protest, a process that involves developing a local communal capacity to embrace diverse and often contradictory attitudes toward the US military. Inoue’s grounded investigation underscores the possibility of small yet significant, incremental social changes from below, a possibility that ultimately points toward the World Republic—an international politics built upon peace, democracy, and shared affluence—against the sovereignty of global capitalism.
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cover of The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests

The Defoliation of America

Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests

Amy M. Hay

University of Alabama Press, 2022

Examines the domestic and international use of phenoxy herbicides by the United States in the mid-twentieth century.

In The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests, Amy M. Hay profiles the attitudes, understandings, and motivations of grassroots activists who rose to fight the use of phenoxy herbicides, or Agent Orange chemicals as they are commonly known, in various aspects of American life during the post-WWII era. Hay focuses her analysis on citizen responses to illuminate how regulatory policies were understood, challenged, and negotiated, contributing to a growing body of research on chemical regulatory policies, risk society, and hazardous chemicals. This volume uncovers new understandings about the authority of the state and its obligation to society, the role of scientific authority and expertise, and the protests made by various groups of citizens.

First introduced in 1946, phenoxy herbicides mimic hormones in broadleaf plants, causing them to “grow to death” while grass, grains, and other monocots remain unaffected. By the 1950s, millions of pounds of these chemicals were produced annually for use in brush control, weed eradication, forest management, and other agricultural applications. Pockets of skepticism and resistance began to appear by the late 1950s, and the trend intensified after 1962 when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring directed mainstream attention to the harm modern chemicals were causing in the natural world. It wasn’t until the Vietnam War, however, when nearly 19 million gallons of Agent Orange and related herbicides were sprayed to clear the canopy and destroy crops in Southeast Asia, that the long-term damage associated with this group of chemicals began to attract widespread attention and alarm.

Using a wide array of sources and an interdisciplinary approach, Hay contributes to the robust fields of chemical toxicity, regulation, environmental management, and public health. This study of the scientists, health and environmental activists, and veterans who fought US chemical regulatory policies and practices reveals the mechanisms, obligations, and constraints of state and scientific authority in mid-twentieth-century America. Hay also shows how these disparate and mostly forgotten citizen groups challenged the political consensus and contested government and industry narratives of chemical safety.
 

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cover of The Fires of New England: A Story of Protest and Rebellion in Antebellum America

The Fires of New England

A Story of Protest and Rebellion in Antebellum America

Eric J. Morser

University of Massachusetts Press, 2017

In the winter of 1834, twenty men convened in Keene, New Hampshire, and published a fiery address condemning their state's legal system as an abomination that threatened the legacy of the American Revolution. They attacked New Hampshire's constitution as an archaic document that undermined democracy and created a system of conniving attorneys and judges. They argued that the time was right for their neighbors to rise up and return the Granite State to the glorious pathway blazed by the nation's founders.

Few people embraced the manifesto and its radical message. Nonetheless, as Eric J. Morser illustrates in this eloquently written and deeply researched book, the address matters because it reveals how commercial, cultural, political, and social changes were remaking the lives of the men who drafted and shared it in the 1830s. Using an imaginative range of sources, Morser artfully reconstructs their moving personal tales and locates them in a grander historical context. By doing so, he demonstrates that even seemingly small stories from antebellum America can help us understand the rich complexities of the era.
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cover of The New Politics of Protest: Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America's Neoliberal Era

The New Politics of Protest

Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America's Neoliberal Era

Roberta Rice

University of Arizona Press, 2012

In June 1990, Ecuador saw the first major indigenous rebellion within its borders since the colonial era.  For weeks, indigenous protesters participated in marches, staged demonstrations, seized government offices, and blockaded roads. Since this insurrection, indigenous movements have become increasingly important in the fight against Latin American Neoliberalism.

Roberta Rice's New Politics of Protest seeks to analyze when, where, and why indigenous protests against free-market reforms have occurred in Latin America. Comparing cases in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, this book details the emergence of indigenous movements under and against Neoliberal governments. Rice uses original field research and interviews with indigenous leaders to examine long-term patterns of indigenous political activism and overturn accepted theories on the role of the Indian in democracy. 

A useful and engaging study, The New Politics of Protest seeks to determine when indigenous movements become viable political parties. It covers the most recent rounds of protest to demonstrate how a weak and unresponsive government is more likely to experience revolts against unpopular reforms. This influential work will be of interest to scholars of Latin American politics and indigenous studies as well as anyone studying oppressed peoples who have organized nationwide strikes and protests, blocked economic reforms, toppled corrupt leaders, and even captured presidencies.
 

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cover of The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era

The New Winter Soldiers

GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era

Moser, Richard

Rutgers University Press, 1996

Richard Moser uses interviews and personal stories of Vietnam veterans to offer a fundamentally new interpretation of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement. Although the Vietnam War was the most important conflict of recent American history, its decisive battle was not fought in the jungles of Vietnam, or even in the streets of the United States, but rather in the hearts and minds of American soldiers. To a degree unprecedented in American history, soldiers and veterans acted to oppose the very war they waged. Tens of thousands of soldiers and veterans engaged in desperate conflicts with their superiors and opposed the war through peaceful protest, creating a mass movement of dissident organizations and underground newspapers.

Moser shows how the antiwar soldiers lived out the long tradition of the citizen soldier first created in the American Revolution and Civil War. Unlike those great upheavals of the past, the Vietnam War offered no way to fulfill the citizen-soldier's struggle for freedom and justice. Rather than abandoning such ideals, however, tens of thousands abandoned the war effort and instead fulfilled their heroic expectations in the movements for peace and justice. According to Moser, this transformation of warriors into peacemakers is the most important recent development of our military culture.

The struggle for peace took these new winter soldiers into America rather than away from it. Collectively these men and women discovered the continuing potential of American culture to advance the values of freedom, equality, and justice on which the nation was founded.

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cover of The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements

The Politics of Social Protest

Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements

J. Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1995

The Politics of Social Protest was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Bringing together celebrated scholars from diverse traditions and backgrounds, The Politics of Social Protest focuses on the reciprocal relationships among social movements, states, and political parties. The volume is organized around three key questions: Why do citizens resort to the often risky and demanding strategy of using disruptive protest when other channels of political intervention appear to be available? What is the relationship between social protest movements and systems of political representation? And what is the impact of the structure and development of the state on social movements themselves?

Contributors include Ronald Aminzade, University of Minnesota; Paul Burstein, University of Washington; Russell J. Dalton, University of California, Irvine; Donatella della Porta, University of Florence; Henry Dietz, University of Texas, Austin; Rachel L. Einwohner, University of Washington; Steven E. Finkel, University of Virginia; Jerrold D. Green, University of Arizona; Jocelyn Hollander, University of Washington; Hanspeter Kriesi, University of Geneva; Diarmuid Maguire, University of Sydney; Bronislaw Misztal, Indiana University, Fort Wayne; Edward N. Muller, University of Arizona; Michael Nollert, University of Trier; Karl-Dieter Opp, University of Hamburg; Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin; Michael Wallace, Indiana University; and Gadi Wolfsfeld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

J. Craig Jenkins is professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Worker Movement of the 1960's (1985).

Bert Klandermans is professor of applied social psychology at Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has published widely on social movements in journals such as the American Sociological Review, Sociological Forum, and the European Journal of Social Psychology. He is the editor of the Social Movements, Protest, and Contention series for the University of Minnesota Press.

Copublished with UCL Press, London.

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cover of The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism

The Revolution Will Be Improvised

The Intimacy of Cultural Activism

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder

University of Michigan Press, 2024

The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism traces intimate encounters between activists and local people of the civil rights movement through an archive of Black and Brown avant-gardism.  In the 1960s, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists engaged with people of color working in poor communities to experiment with creative approaches to liberation through theater, media, storytelling, and craft making. With a dearth of resources and an abundance of urgency, SNCC activists improvised new methods of engaging with communities that created possibilities for unexpected encounters through programs such as The Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, and the Poor People’s Corporation. 

Reading the output of these programs, Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder argues that intimacy-making became an extension of participatory democracy. In doing so, Rodriguez Fielder supplants the success-failure binary for understanding social movements, focusing instead on how care work aligns with creative production. The Revolution Will Be Improvised returns to improvisation’s roots in economic and social necessity and locates it as a core tenet of the aesthetics of obligation, where a commitment to others drives the production and result of creative work. Thus, this book puts forward a methodology to explore the improvised, often ephemeral, works of art activism.
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cover of The Rise of the Masses: Spontaneous Mobilization and Contentious Politics

The Rise of the Masses

Spontaneous Mobilization and Contentious Politics

Benjamin Abrams

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An insightful examination of how intersecting individual motivations and social structures mobilize spontaneous mass protests.

Between 15 and 26 million Americans participated in protests surrounding the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others as part of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, which is only one of the most recent examples of an immense mobilization of citizens around a cause. In The Rise of the Masses, sociologist Benjamin Abrams addresses why and how people spontaneously protest, riot, and revolt en masse. While most uprisings of such a scale require tremendous resources and organizing, this book focuses on cases where people with no connection to organized movements take to the streets, largely of their own accord. Looking to the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Uprising, as well as the historical case of the French Revolution, Abrams lays out a theory of how and why massive mobilizations arise without the large-scale planning that usually goes into staging protests.
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Analyzing a breadth of historical and regional cases that provide insight into mass collective behavior, Abrams draws on first-person interviews and archival sources to argue that people organically mobilize when a movement speaks to their pre-existing dispositions and when structural and social conditions make it easier to get involved—what Abrams terms affinity-convergence theory. Shedding a light on the drivers behind large spontaneous protests, The Rise of the Masses offers a significant theory that could help predict movements to come.
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cover of The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America

The Soiling of Old Glory

The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America

Louis P. Masur

Brandeis University Press, 2024

Now available as a paperback: the history of a disturbing image, now iconic, that expressed the turmoil of the 1970s and race relations in the United States, with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Ted Landsmark.
 
In 1976, Boston was bitterly divided over a court order to desegregate its public schools. Plans to bus students between predominantly white and Black neighborhoods stoked backlash and heated protests. Photojournalist Stanley Forman was covering one such demonstration at City Hall when he captured an indelible image: a white protester attacking a Black attorney with the American flag. A second white man grabs at the victim, appearing to assist the assailant.
 
The photo appeared in newspapers across the nation and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. In The Soiling of Old Glory, esteemed historian Louis P. Masur reveals what happened the day of the assault and the ways these events reverberated long afterward. He interviews the men involved: Forman, who took the photo; Ted Landsmark, a Black, Yale-educated attorney and an activist; Joseph Rakes, the white protester lunging with the flag, a disaffected student; and Jim Kelly, a local politician who opposed busing, but who helped Landsmark to his feet after protesters knocked him to the ground. The photo, Masur discovers, holds more complexities than initially meet the eye. The flag never made contact with the victim, for example, and Kelly was attempting to protect Landsmark, not hurt him.
 
Masur delves into the history behind Boston’s efforts to desegregate the schools and the anti-busing protests that shook the city. He examines photography’s power to move, inform, and persuade us, as well as the assumptions we each bring to an image as viewers. And he delves into the flag, to explore how other artists and photographers have shaped, bolstered, or challenged its patriotic significance.
 
Gripping and deeply researched, The Soiling of Old Glory shows how a disturbing event, frozen on a film, impacted Boston and the nation. In an age of renewed calls for visual literacy and disagreements about the flag’s meaning, Masur’s history, now updated with a new foreword by Ted Landsmark and a new preface by the author, is as relevant as ever.
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cover of The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia

The Sovereign Street

Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia

Carwil Bjork-James

University of Arizona Press, 2020

In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011.

Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research, activist and scholar Carwil Bjork-James provides an up-close history of the indigenous-led protests that changed Bolivia. At the heart of the study is a new approach to the interaction between protest actions and the parts of the urban landscape they claim. These “space-claiming protests” both communicate a message and exercise practical control over the city. Bjork-James interrogates both protest tactics—as experiences and as tools—and meaning-laden spaces, where meaning is part of the racial and political geography of the city.

Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, The Sovereign Streetoffers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when protests made headlines worldwide, where a generation of pro-globalization policies were called into question, and where the indigenous majority stepped into government power for the first time in five centuries.

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cover of The Unfinished Arab Spring: Micro-Dynamics of Revolts between Change and Continuity

The Unfinished Arab Spring

Micro-Dynamics of Revolts between Change and Continuity

Edited by Fatima El Issawi and Francesco Cavatorta

Gingko, 2020

The aim of this volume is to adopt an original analytical approach in explaining various dynamics at work behind the Arab Spring, through giving voice to local dynamics and legacies rather than concentrating on debates about paradigms. It highlights micro-perspectives of change and resistance—as well of contentious politics—that are often marginalized and left unexplored in favor of macro-analyses. First, the story of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Algeria is told through diverse and novel perspectives, looking at factors that have not yet been sufficiently underlined, but carry explanatory power for what has occurred. Second, rather than focusing on macro-comparative regional trends, the contributors to this book focus on the particularities of each country, highlighting distinctive micro-dynamics of change and continuity. The essays collected here are contributions from renowned writers and researchers from the Middle East and North Africa, along with Western experts, brought together to form a sophisticated dialogic exchange.

 
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cover of The World Says No to War: Demonstrations against the War on Iraq

The World Says No to War

Demonstrations against the War on Iraq

Stefaan Walgrave

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

On February 15, 2003, the largest one-day protest in human history took place as millions of people in hundreds of cities marched in the streets, rallying against the imminent invasion of Iraq. This was activism on an unprecedented scale.
 
The World Says No to War strives to understand who spoke out, why they did, and how so many people were mobilized for a global demonstration. Using surveys collected by researchers from eight countries—Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States—The World Says No to War analyzes how the new tools of the Internet were combined with more conventional means of mobilization to rally millions, many with little experience in activism, around common goals and against common targets.
 
Contributors: W. Lance Bennett, U of Washington; Michelle Beyeler, U Bern; Christian Breunig, U of Toronto; Mario Diani, U of Trento; Terri E. Givens, U of Texas, Austin; Bert Klandermans, Free U Amsterdam; Donatella della Porta, European U Institute; Wolfgang Rüdig, U of Strathclyde; Sidney Tarrow, Cornell U; Peter Van Aelst, U of Antwerp.
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cover of This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace

This Was Not Our War

Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace

Swanee Hunt

Duke University Press, 2004

"Replacing tyranny with justice, healing deep scars, exchanging hatred for hope . . . the women in This Was Not Our War teach us how."—William Jefferson Clinton

This Was Not Our War shares amazing first-person accounts of twenty-six Bosnian women who are reconstructing their society following years of devastating warfare. A university student working to resettle refugees, a paramedic who founded a veterans’ aid group, a fashion designer running two nonprofit organizations, a government minister and professor who survived Auschwitz—these women are advocates, politicians, farmers, journalists, students, doctors, businesswomen, engineers, wives, and mothers. They are from all parts of Bosnia and represent the full range of ethnic traditions and mixed heritages. Their ages spread across sixty years, and their wealth ranges from expensive jewels to a few chickens. For all their differences, they have this much in common: all survived the war with enough emotional strength to work toward rebuilding their country. Swanee Hunt met these women through her diplomatic and humanitarian work in the 1990s. Over the course of seven years, she conducted multiple interviews with each one. In presenting those interviews here, Hunt provides a narrative framework that connects the women’s stories, allowing them to speak to one another.

The women describe what it was like living in a vibrant multicultural community that suddenly imploded in an onslaught of violence. They relate the chaos; the atrocities, including the rapes of many neighbors and friends; the hurried decisions whether to stay or flee; the extraordinary efforts to care for children and elderly parents and to find food and clean drinking water. Reflecting on the causes of the war, they vehemently reject the idea that age-old ethnic hatreds made the war inevitable. The women share their reactions to the Dayton Accords, the end of hostilities, and international relief efforts. While they are candid about the difficulties they face, they are committed to rebuilding Bosnia based on ideals of truth, justice, and a common humanity encompassing those of all faiths and ethnicities. Their wisdom is instructive, their courage and fortitude inspirational.

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cover of Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism

Tweets and the Streets

Social Media and Contemporary Activism

Paolo Gerbaudo

Pluto Press, 2012

Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the 'indignados' protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest.

Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a 'cyberspace' detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around 'occupied' places such as Cairo’s Tahrir Square or New York’s Zuccotti Park.

An exciting and invigorating journey through the new politics of dissent, Tweets and the Streets points both to the creative possibilities and to the risks of political evanescence which new media brings to the contemporary protest experience.

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