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Gardening metaphors with English middle-class overtones were widely used in the late nineteenth-century child saving writings in Toronto, Canada to explain and promote the ideal mode of parenting and the objective of child saving. An analysis of gardening metaphors contributes to understanding mechanisms of bio-power on the site of child saving. This paper argues that the child saving movement attempted to install a mode of proper parental control that can be described as “the gardening governmentality”– it was primarily positive/productive (yet without excluding repressive elements), individualized, intelligent, and localized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Africa's reputation as a place of political repression and limited popular agency, activism and popular mobilisation have been central to political change in colonial and post-colonial Africa. The social and cultural identity of activists has been neglected by historians, who have commonly studied activism through imposed normative frameworks (e.g. class struggle or decolonisation) that have not always been central to the motivations of activists themselves. This article identifies and analyses specific phases of popular activism. Mass mobilisation was crucial to the success of anti-colonial nationalism, but did not commonly result in governments that addressed the aspirations or grievances of activists. From the 1970s, African governments became vulnerable to popular pressure, in the form of urban riots and uprisings, but attempts to establish more institutionalised pressure groups for change were not generally successful. The pro-democracy movements of the early 1990s again utilised mass mobilisation to achieve their aims, but the advent of multi-party democracy across the continent did not translate into meaningful popular reform. Since 2000, popular movements have expressed discontent with neo-liberal economic policies and authoritarian governments. The Arab Spring has inspired new waves of activism, but it remains unclear whether this will bring about significant political change across the continent. Two underlying linked themes will be analysed in the paper. Firstly, the interaction between local activism and broader ideological movements and influences (nationalism, socialism, religious belief, etc): to what extent have these ideological frameworks, commonly introduced by external agents, assisted or hampered in the development of discourses of resistance or activism? Secondly, African activists, in contrast to their western counterparts, have commonly operated in relationship to both local state and western or international elites, including colonial governments, multinational corporations and international donors. The paper will examine the extent to which these relationships have shaped the ideas and behaviour of African movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The High Court of Delhi recently declared that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial anti-sodomy law that effectively criminalised homosexuality, violates rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India. This has been the first juridical recognition of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender folk as citizens and also the first time that the juridical subject has been ascribed a 'sexuality'. 'Sexuality', in other words, has been identified as an aspect of personhood, the 'self' that the subject refers to. And yet, same-sex desire in India is not contained within discrete bodies, much less so within bodies presumed in bio-medical or juridical discourses as 'sexuality types'. This recognition lies at the centre of the Queer movement which made the ascription of sexuality to the juridical subject in the first place. Based on ethnographic fieldwork related to the litigation, this paper argues that the juridical register requires demands for rights to articulate in terms of subjectivity and personhood, and examines the ways in which this disjuncture came to be managed by the movement. The paper examines theoretical approaches to subjectivity and argues for a conceptual distinction between the idea of the 'subject' and the 'self'. Subjectivity, it is argued, is better understood in terms of forms of (legal) legibility, bringing our focus onto the political-economic, historical and cultural conditions under which these forms come to be performed as embodiments-in-the-world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiqued as being a-historical, current social movement theorists argue for a more dynamic, theoretical model that focuses on processes within historical contexts (). This paper seeks to apply existing social movement theory on framing to the historically, embedded case of the American abolitionist movement. Specifically, this paper analyzes the influence of the adopted religious masterframe of the abolitionist movement on the trajectory of the movement through a case study of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS). Prior to the Civil War, the good versus evil framework encouraged by the religious masterframe effectively mobilized movement followers against slavery. However, with Emancipation and the onset of the muddled political environment of Reconstruction, the religious masterframe no longer resonated well with the changed context or mustered the same degree of support. Attempts to alter the masterframe to a rights-based masterframe compromised the integrity of the movement’s framing process. Ultimately, the movement dissolved, unable to remedy their collective action frame with the new political reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Waldensianism and Mormonism, two very different religious movements, separated by time, space, cultural, and economic conditions. The sources are a mixture of secondary and published primary sources, including church documents both in translation and the original language, and personal writings, such as diaries and letters. The treatment of these sources is not unusual, rather the contribution of this paper is a synthetic theoretical analysis of these movements in terms of the practical consequences of action. Both movements were coherent attempts to address contemporary social issues; neither was principally illogical nor irrational, nor comprised primarily of socially disconnected individuals. These movements were neither apolitical nor solely comprised of pure political action. Instead, both became political protest movements, in addition to being religious movements, because the symbolic content of the movement was interwoven with contemporary politics: the movements' ideological critiques implicated the larger political structure which attempted to prevent ideological change. These religious struggles were processes, becoming political movements because ideological change implied political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the period 2000 to 2005, Bolivia experienced a profound political convulsion as social movements rose‐up to contest the neoliberal model of development. This was most markedly inspired by contestation over the control of natural resources, namely water and gas. The period of mobilisation brought down two successive governments and propelled the MAS, led by Evo Morales, to power in 2006. This period also helped to revalorise indigenous culture and held out hope for a reimagining of power, politics and political economy. The transformation that would result from this uprising, effectively re‐founded Bolivia as a "pluri‐national state," recognising 36 separate national groups with their own languages and cultures. This was, furthermore, a process based on the convergence of national‐popular and indigenous struggles. However, following his disputed election for a fourth successive term in office, Evo Morales and other key leaders of the MAS have gone into exile, while right‐wing, revanchist social forces are increasingly prominent. How do we begin to make sense of this turn of events, which include the swirling combinations of reactionary capitalist interests but also left‐indigenous critiques of development from marginalised sectors? In this article, I argue that we need to situate Bolivia's indigenous social movements in the struggle between Pachakuti (an Andean term referring to the desire to turn the world upside down and forge a new time and space) and passive revolution (a state‐led process of modernisation that seeks to expand capitalist social relations whilst incorporating limited demands from below, ultimately diffusing their radical potential). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the protest repertoire of an Indian labor movement between 1990 and 2006. Chhattisgarh Liberation Front led a seventeen year struggle against the industrialists and state in central India for the recognition of contract workers' entitlements. During this long contentious history, the movement deployed disruptive repertoire, ranging from relatively legitimate “wild-cat strikes” (illegal stoppage of work) to extreme physical attacks, against the industrialists, and non-disruptive repertoire, ranging from disciplined participation in court-cases to mass martyr day celebrations, against the state. The mixed repertoire points at the two distinct capacities in which the movement was acting, as a radical trade union against the industrialists and a social movement in relation to the state. The finding suggests that the CMM participants perceived the state as holding genuine power, and their relation to it as citizens, and perceived the industrialists, despite their being indigenous capitalists, as adversaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains how the contingent of complex interactions among pre-existing structural settings, institutional constraints, processes of regional and international transformative events, and uniquely combined developments within and between different contenders in the aftermath of the Second World War shaped Northern Ireland socio and political relations and thus instigated the Civil Rights Movement mobilization process. By re-introducing the time-space context into our studies of collective action, through a relational reading, my intent first is to advance our understanding of those episodes and complex patterns of interaction that give rise to social movements, and second to move beyond the static movement-centric approach explanation and away from the a-historical nature of much of the social movement literature. My historical-sociological research, into the longitudinal case study of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement mobilization, involves secondary and new empirical primary sources, such as archival analysis, qualitative examination of Northern Ireland daily newspapers during the 1960s, and the collection of 35 semi-structured interviews with key players from the Civil Rights Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I put forward a Marxian analysis of the conflict over dam-building on the Narmada River in central and western India, which seeks to bring out how in this specific conflict it is possible to discern the workings of the master change processes that have moulded the Indian trajectory of postcolonial capitalist development. I start by showing how the concrete case of dispossession in the Narmada Valley is expressive of how the development strategies that defined the postcolonial nation-building project have been moulded in such a way as to create a de facto transfer of productive resources to the country's dominant proprietary classes. I then move on to argue that these features of the political economy of India's postcolonial development project can be understood as the sediment of struggles between social movements from above and below in the decades immediately prior to Independence. Arguing that the postcolonial development project has unravelled, I outline the fundamentals of an analysis of the characteristics of social movements from below in the conflictual field of force which is emerging in its wake. Finally, I draw on the trajectory of resistance to dam-building on the Narmada to articulate a series of reflections on the nature of state power in India and the possibilities that might exist for the state to function as an enabling space for the struggles of subaltern social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional perspectives on ethnic institutions tend to consider mainly their role in the preservation of the cultural and social fabric of ethnic communities. Increasing evidence indicates that ethno-institutional effects are often more varied and complex. France's first industrial-era immigrants, massively crossing the border from Belgian Flanders during the second half of the 19th century, are a case in point. Immigrant Flemish workers introduced a new type of institution to the French working class: socialist cooperatives. These would have a long-term impact not only on the immigrant Flemish community itself, but also on the larger labour movement, on the region, and on the country as a whole. Three elements were important in this process of institutional cross-fertilization: Belgian workers' rich institutional repertoire; the coincidence of their settlement with the rise of the French labour movement; and the fact that their institutional innovation was easily transferable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of coffee cultivation in Nicaragua in the 1870s unleashed a social revolution. Previously most land was common property; by 1920 throughout the coffee districts land was privately owned. Influential historians of Nicaragua see this as the capitalist transition. This essay argues that instead of forging a rural proletariat, this social revolution created a differentiated peasantry whose access to land depended on relations of patronage. Peasant resistance to land privatization and the political, as opposed to economic, nature of the process are examined. The essay concludes that this revolution was more incongruent than congruent with a capitalist social order. The relevance of this history for contemporary political debates in Nicaragua is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American studies of social movements have been dominated since the late 1970s by the resource mobilization perspective. Proponents of this view have made valuable contributions to the field. Their economic model of social movements helped correct lingering assumptions that collective behavior is essentially irrational. As against traditional distinctions between "normal" politics or institutional action and "mass" politics or noninstitutional behavior, moreover resource mobilization theory's hard-headed emphasis on how people acquire and deploy resources brought the politics of elites and protesters under a common analytical umbrella. By highlighting the strategic dimensions of collective action, finally, this approach has narrowed the gap between academic theory and the concerns of social movement activists and organizers. Resource mobilization theory helps explain the occurrence and success of social movements. Proponents of resource mobilization theory would ask whether craftsmen mobilized to defend their interests, and then proceed to examine the circumstances which led them to do so.