Insurgent Democracy

Author : Michael J. Lansing
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022643477X
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Insurgent Democracy written by Michael J. Lansing and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1915, western farmers mounted one of the most significant challenges to party politics America has seen: the Nonpartisan League, which sought to empower citizens and restrain corporate influence. Before its collapse in the 1920s, the League counted over 250,000 paying members, spread to thirteen states and two Canadian provinces, controlled North Dakota’s state government, and birthed new farmer-labor alliances. Yet today it is all but forgotten, neglected even by scholars. Michael J. Lansing aims to change that. Insurgent Democracy offers a new look at the Nonpartisan League and a new way to understand its rise and fall in the United States and Canada. Lansing argues that, rather than a spasm of populist rage that inevitably burned itself out, the story of the League is in fact an instructive example of how popular movements can create lasting change. Depicting the League as a transnational response to economic inequity, Lansing not only resurrects its story of citizen activism, but also allows us to see its potential to inform contemporary movements.

Author : James Holston
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400832780
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Insurgent Citizenship written by James Holston and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence. James Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states--one that is universally inclusive in national membership and massively inegalitarian in distributing rights and in its legalization of social differences. But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil's urban peripheries have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. Their mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city--particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it. Rather than view this paradox as evidence of democratic failure and urban chaos, Insurgent Citizenship argues that contradictory realizations of citizenship characterize all democracies--emerging and established. Focusing on processes of city- and citizen-making now prevalent globally, it develops new approaches for understanding the contemporary course of democratic citizenship in societies of vastly different cultures and histories.

Author : Elisabeth Jean Wood
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521788878
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Forging Democracy from Below written by Elisabeth Jean Wood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-30 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 2000, analyzes the role of economically marginalized people in recent transitions to democratic rule.

Author : John S. Dryzek
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780199250431
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.3X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Deliberative Democracy and Beyond written by John S. Dryzek and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical tour through recent democratic theory examines the deliberative turn in democratic theory which argued that democratic legitimacy is to be found in authentic deliberations on the part of those affected by a collective decision.

Author : Erik Swyngedouw
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262038225
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Promises of the Political written by Erik Swyngedouw and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The possibility of a new emancipatory and democratizing politics, explored through the lens of recent urban insurgencies. In Promises of the Political, Erik Swyngedouw explores whether progressive and emancipatory politics is still possible in a post-political era. Activists and scholars have developed the concept of post-politicization to describe the process by which “the political” is replaced by techno-managerial governance. If the political domain has been systematically narrowed into a managerial apparatus in which consensual governance prevails, where can we find any possibility of a new democratic politics? Swyngedouw examines this question through the lens of recent urban insurgencies. In Zuccotti Park, Paternoster Square, Taksim Square, Tahrir Square, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, he argues, insurgents have gathered to choreograph new configurations of the democratic. Swyngedouw grounds his argument in urban and ecological processes, struggles, and conflicts through which post-politicization has become institutionally entrenched. He casts “the city” and “nature” as emblematic of the construction of post-democratic modes of governance. He describes the disappearance of the urban polis into the politics of neoliberal planetary urbanization; and he argues that the political-managerial framing of “nature” and the environment contributes to the formation of depoliticized governance—most notably in the impotent politics of climate change. Finally, he explores the possibilities for a reassertion of the political, considering whether—after the squares are cleared, the tents folded, and everyday life resumes—the urban uprisings of the last several years signal a return of the political.

Author : Jeffrey S. Juris
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822353628
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Insurgent Encounters written by Jeffrey S. Juris and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insurgent Encounters illuminates the dynamics of contemporary transnational social movements, including those advocating for women and indigenous groups, environmental justice, and alternative—cooperative rather than exploitative—forms of globalization. The contributors are politically engaged scholars working within the social movements they analyze. Their essays are both models of and arguments for activist ethnography. They demonstrate that such a methodology has the potential to reveal empirical issues and generate theoretical insights beyond the reach of traditional social-movement research methods. Activist ethnographers not only produce new understandings of contemporary forms of collective action, but also seek to contribute to struggles for social change. The editors suggest networks and spaces of encounter as the most useful conceptual rubrics for understanding shape-shifting social movements using digital and online technologies to produce innovative forms of political organization across local, regional, national, and transnational scales. A major rethinking of the practice and purpose of ethnography, Insurgent Encounters challenges dominant understandings of social transformation, political possibility, knowledge production, and the relation between intellectual labor and sociopolitical activism. Contributors. Giuseppe Caruso, Maribel Casas-Cortés, Janet Conway, Stéphane Couture, Vinci Daro, Manisha Desai, Sylvia Escárcega, David Hess, Jeffrey S. Juris, Alex Khasnabish, Lorenzo Mosca, Michal Osterweil, Geoffrey Pleyers, Dana E. Powell, Paul Routledge, M. K. Sterpka, Tish Stringer

Author : Jennifer L. Burrell
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 0857457527
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Central America in the New Millennium written by Jennifer L. Burrell and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most non-Central Americans think of the narrow neck between Mexico and Colombia in terms of dramatic past revolutions and lauded peace agreements, or sensational problems of gang violence and natural disasters. In this volume, the contributors examine regional circumstances within frames of democratization and neoliberalism, as they shape lived experiences of transition. The authors--anthropologists and social scientists from the United States, Europe, and Central America--argue that the process of regions and nations "disappearing" (being erased from geopolitical notice) is integral to upholding a new, post-Cold War world order--and that a new framework for examining political processes must be accessible, socially collaborative, and in dialogue with the lived processes of suffering and struggle engaged by people in Central America and the world in the name of democracy.

Author : Erica Chenoweth
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231527489
Total Pages : 451 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why Civil Resistance Works written by Erica Chenoweth and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

Author : Miguel Abensour
Publisher : Polity
ISBN 13 : 0745650090
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy Against the State written by Miguel Abensour and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” the young Marx elliptically alludes to a "true democracy" whose advent would go hand in hand with the disappearance of the state. Miguel Abensour’s rigorous interpretation of this seminal text reveals an “unknown Marx” who undermines the identification of democracy with the state and defends a historically occluded form of politics. True democracy does not entail the political and economic power of the state, but it does not dream of a post-political society either. On the contrary, the battle of democracy is waged by a demos that invents a public sphere of permanent struggles, a politics that counters political bureaucracy and representation. Democracy is "won" by a people forewarned that any dissolution of the political realm in its independence, any subordination to the state, is tantamount to annihilating the site for gaining and regaining a genuinely human existence. In this explicitly heterodox reading of Marx, Miguel Abensour proposes a theory of "insurgent" democracy that makes political liberty synonymous with a living critique of domination.

Author : William Patterson
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137600608
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democratic Counterinsurgents written by William Patterson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which democracies can win counterinsurgencies when they implement a proper strategy. At a time when the USA is retrenching from two bungled foreign wars that involved deadly insurgent uprisings, this is a particularly important argument. Succumbing to the trauma of those engagements and drawing the wrong conclusions about counterinsurgency can only lead to further defeat in the future. Rather than assuming that counterinsurgency is ineffective, it is crucial to understand that a conventional response to an insurgent challenge is likely to fail. Counterinsurgency must be applied from the beginning, and if done properly can be highly effective, even when used by democratic regimes. In fact, because such regimes are often wealthier; have more experience at institution-building and functional governance; are more pluralistic in nature and therefore enjoy higher levels of legitimacy than do autocracies, democracies may have considerable advantages in counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than give up in despair, democracies should learn to leverage these advantages and implement them against future insurgencies.