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This paper draws on the ethnographic case of pious Shi‘i Muslim gender activists in Lebanon in order to argue for the necessity of considering transnational discourses on gender and Islam in our analyses of piety. Based upon field research conducted in al-Dahiya – the southern suburb of Beirut – since 1998, the paper examines pious Shi‘i women's engagements with transnational discourses about gender roles and stereotypes about Muslim women. The paper excavates a Hizbullah Women's Committee seminar during which reformulated Islamic models of womanhood as well as models associated with ‘the West’ were discussed in relation to women's participation in the public sphere. The paper suggests that political and social contexts are critical aspects of modern formations of piety, and that scholarship should aim towards multifaceted and non-reductive analyses that incorporate transnational discursive and political-economic contexts into discussions of piety politics in ways that are not necessarily constitutive and that are always contextually contingent. Résumé Le présent article est consacré au cas ethnographique de féministes chiites pieuses au Liban et se veut un plaidoyer pour la prise en compte des discours transnationaux sur le sexe et l’islam dans les analyses de la piété. Sur la base de recherches sur le terrain menées à al-Dahiya, dans la banlieue sud de Beyrouth, depuis 1998, l’auteur examine l’engagement de femmes chiites pieuses dans le discours transnational sur les rôles et stéréotypes de genre concernant les femmes musulmanes. L’analyse prend appui sur un séminaire du Comité des femmes du Hezbollah, au cours duquel des modèles islamiques reformulés de la condition féminine et des modèles associés à« l’Occident »étaient débattus en relation avec la participation des femmes aux affaires publiques. L’auteur suggère que les contextes politique et social sont cruciaux dans la formation moderne de la piété et que les études doivent tendre vers des analyses non réductrices, portant sur de multiples aspects, qui intègrent les contextes discursifs et politico-économiques transnationaux dans la discussion de politiques de la piété, selon une approche qui ne soit pas nécessairement constitutive et toujours contextualisée. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the spatialities constructed through resistances to globalization. It focuses on the Inter-Continental Caravan, an ambitious project which united activists from the Indian New Farmers Movements with West European green activists in contesting neo-liberal institutions and biotechnology. The paper argues that these political activities constructed distinctive ‘maps of grievance’. This term is used to suggest that the construction of grievances has both a distinctive spatiality and is constitutive of political identities. The paper argues that the different maps of grievances generated through the project were both a condition of possibility for these transnational alliances and exerted pressure on the formation of solidarities. It concludes by arguing that the location of counter-globalization politics at the intersection of different routes of resistance can be integral to the formation of alternative political imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on social movements considers collective action frames and collective identities to be resources or achievements of social movement activity because they symbolicly link individuals to a collective cause. This paper maintains that a collective action frame operates at a sociocultural level and can be redefined by groups external to a movement. Nuclear power proponents worked to suppress the first cycle of protest against nuclear plants by redefining the movements' collective identity, such that individuals were unable to recognize movement organizations as representative of their interests. Citizens within the Ten Mile Radius, a group opposed to the licensing of the Seabrook nuclear power plant, initiated a second cycle of protest by overcoming the collective action frame imposed on the movement This case suggests that the articulation and the representation of dissent is constrained due to the inability of social movement groups to retain control over their own collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformations within religious institutions and traditions often occur via conflict and internal social movements. Yet previous research on such phenomena has missed some important sociological insights because it has not incorporated methodological and theoretical resources from other sociological literatures dealing with social movements and organizational change and conflict. This paper presents a comprehensive critical review of extant research on intradenominational conflict and identifies and describes five shortcomings in this literature. As a corrective, we suggest that analysts focus on organizations and conflict events as units of analysis, pay more attention to ideal factors in conflict, examine relationships between internal and external variables, and compare conflicts across organizations and across time. These alternative methodological recommendations are related to three new theoretical directions in other sociological subfields: resource mobilization theory's focus on intermediate levels of social life, the "new institutionalist" emphasis on how organizational actors respond to their environments, and the recent work on the interplay of "schema? and "resources" in social structure. Such new directions address questions that were not accessible via earlier approaches. They also begin to build important bridges between the sociology of religion and other sociological subfields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the progress made in the fight against discrimination and stigma in relation to HIV/AIDS over the past decade. It highlights the positive impact of measures such as self-testing, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and antiretroviral therapy (ART) in reducing new HIV cases and mortality rates. However, it also acknowledges that discrimination and stigma still persist, particularly affecting transgender individuals who experience higher rates of HIV prevalence and discrimination. The article emphasizes the importance of culturally competent and respectful care for transgender individuals and calls for governments and international agencies to establish policies that address social determinants and intersectional stigma to ensure equity, dignity, and health for all. [Extracted from the article]

This article aims to broaden and deepen debates on the everyday practices of autonomous activists. To do this we present three main research findings from a recent research project that looked in detail at what we called ‘autonomous geographies’. First, in terms of political identity, we highlight how participants in political projects problematise and go beyond the simple idea of the militant subject, set apart from the everyday who opposes the present condition. Second, we highlight how everyday practices are used to build hoped-for futures in the present, but that this process is experimental, messy and contingent, and necessarily so. Finally, we illuminate the contested spatialities embedded within political activism that are neither locally bounded nor easily transferable to the transnational. This exploration of everyday activism has illuminated that the participants we engaged with express identities, practices and spatial forms that are simultaneously anti-, despite- and post- capitalist. We argue that it is through its everyday rhythms that meaning is given to post-capitalism and it is this reconceptualisation that makes post-capitalist practice mundane, but at the same time also accessible, exciting, feasible and powerful. This paper draws upon material collected during a 30-month empirical research project into the everyday lives of grassroots, non-party political activists in the UK between 2005 and 2008. Three case studies were explored in detail – autonomous social centres, Low Impact Developments, and tenants’ networks resisting gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a visceral take on the role of identity in social movement mobilisation. The authors emphasise how identity goes beyond cognitive labels to implicate the entire minded-body. It is suggested that political ideas, beliefs and self definitions require a bodily kind of resonance in order to activate various kinds of environmental and social activism. The authors refer to this bodily resonance as ‘visceral processes of identification’ and, through empirical investigation with the Slow Food (SF) movement, they reveal specific instances of such processes at work. Examining SF in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Berkeley, California, USA, the authors ask how SF comes to feel in the bodies of members and non-members and they interrogate the role that feelings play in the development of activism(s). Bodies are shown to both align with movements’ socio-political aims and (re)create them. The account provides a means for shifting recent social theoretical attention to bodied/material life to a broad application in political geography, political ecology and social movement theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decline in electoral participation is a feature of many Western democracies. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between trade union membership and political participation. Workplace authority structures, trade union membership and union presence have been identified as important influences on electoral participation. Based on a survey of employees in 15 member states of the European Union, we test for a relationship between political participation, union membership and union workplace presence. The independent effect of trade union membership on political participation was found to be both significant and positive and is associated with higher levels of political activism and electoral participation. Furthermore, an institutional context that facilitates high levels of union density seems likely to have an overall positive effect on citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on fundamentalist and evangelical Christians has used these labels interchangeably, despite differences between the two groups This paper compares and contrasts the political attitudes and behaviors of the fundamentalists and evangelicals within the Ohio Moral Majority. The fundamentalists are consistently more conservative, and the difference is significant after controls for denomination and demographics. The fundamentalists are more likely than the evangelicals to perceive a strong connection between their religious and political beliefs. The strength of this connection is associated with domestic conservatism among the fundamentalists, and with domestic liberalism among the evangelicals. Evangelicals are more politically active and sophisticated, and are more likely to be active in other political groups The study suggests the utility of differentiating between fundamentalists and evangelicals in future research.
This paper will compare the political beliefs and behaviors of fundamentalists and evangelicals within an activist organization of the New Christian Right. The data comes from a mail survey of the membership of the Ohio Moral Majority. In the summer of 1982, a mail survey was conducted of the membership mailing list of the Ohio Moral Majority. The membership list of the organization contained some 285 names. 59% of the surveys were returned, yielding 149 respondents who considered themselves members of or supporters of the Moral Majority. The membership list was composed of political activists. To appear on the list the individual must have attended a rally, signed a petition, contributed money, or been active in some other way. Evangelicals and fundamentalists were distinguished by the use of a serf-identification item. This item asked respondents to classify themselves as evangelicals, fundamentalists, both, or neither. The utility of a serf-identity item has been hinted at by other researchers (Hunter, 1982; Smidt, 1983), but... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews and explains the relationship between socioeconomic status and political participation from a structural perspective; i.e., social organization influences people's range of options, producing different rates of behavior among those in varying locations in the society. There are six categories of political participation: cognitive, expressive, organizational, electoral, partisan, and governmental. In each case, the poor display the lowest and the rich the highest rate of participation. This difference reflects variations in political and psychological resources and the structure of the electoral process. As a result, political benefits also differ by social class.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the rationales of antiabortion activists, or "rescuers," in the pro-life movement in a large Midwestern city, and we attempt to explain variation in the unconventional protest activities of such people. We find no differences between rescuers with either pragmatic or purist orientations, but we find that conviction experiences help predict the number of rescuers in which an individual activist will engage. We also find that protesters who give instrumental meanings to their activism are much more likely to participate in frequent sit-ins than those who attach a primarily symbolic meaning to their protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined the hypothesis that women who took part in student movements of the 1960s would be distinguishable from their contemporaries in terms of political ideology, political behavior, and feminism in middle age. Women who had been identified as student activists in public records during the late 1960s and early 1970s were compared to a sample of nonactivist peers. Although the two groups scored similarly on variables related to work and family arrangements, former activists scored higher on measures of leftist political orientation and political efficacy, reported greater political salience and collectivism, and reported greater current political participation. Although both groups reported high levels of feminist consciousness and identity, activists scored significantly higher. The difficulty of politically mobilizing women to combat gender discrimination is discussed in light of the discrepancy between consciousness and activism in the comparison group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists often assume that individuals and societies orient themselves with respect to overarching symbolic frames of reference, sometimes called "meaning systems" But until the recent publication of Robert Wuthnow's analysis of San Francisco area survey data, evidence in favor of this key theoretical proposition has been lacking This paper respects both a new network survey of 1439 respondents and the original data in search of the four competing meaning systems reported by Wuthnow. We find strong evidence demonstrating that traditional religion remains an influential meaning system, producing conventional attitudes and preventing experimentation with radical Lifestyles and occult practices But the three alleged secular meaning systems failed to emerge, even in the original data. These findings undercut the assumption that most persons possess meaning systems, and they support our view that a meaning system is easiest to sustain if it is based on supernatural beliefs and promulgated by formal church organizations and religious social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of the legal candidate quota for women in Indonesia following the 2019 general elections. It argues that the legal candidate quota is working to increase women's numerical representation, even if progress is gradual and hard won. Second, it has become clear that the position of candidates on party lists is critical for electoral success. Awareness of this issue empowers women candidates and activists to lobby political parties to improve women's positions on party lists as a demonstration of political parties' commitment to gender equality. A third observation is that the turnover of women parliamentarians remains high, which means women still struggle to build careers as legislators and to effect legislative change in the interests of women. The article also addresses the role of political parties in selecting and promoting a minimum of 30% women candidates and argues that party structures are an obstacle, especially party organisations that purport to promote women's issues. Findings from this study suggest that Indonesia does not need major electoral reform to strengthen women's numerical representation in parliament. However, women candidates will need more support from political parties if they are to win and retain more seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laboratory experiments indicate that many people willingly contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a personal cost. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong reciprocators, allow political parties to overcome collective action problems, thereby allowing those organizations to compete for scarce resources and to produce public goods for like-minded individuals. Using a series of laboratory games, we examine whether partisans contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a greater rate than nonpartisans. The results show that partisans are more likely than nonpartisans to contribute to public goods and to engage in costly punishment. Given the broad theoretical literature on altruistic punishment and group selection as well as our own formal evolutionary model, we hypothesize that it is being a partisan that makes an individual more likely to be a strong reciprocator and not vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental governance regimes concerned with the management of biological life have encouraged not only new forms of expertise, but also political activism and struggle. One such regime, the international Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (Biosafety Protocol), a subagreement of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) , seeks to monitor the potential risks of releasing living modified organisms, such as transgenic seeds, into the environment. Drawing on market-oriented visions of environmental conservation and risk management, the Biosafety Protocol is closely tied to the development of new bioeconomies and the ascent of neoliberal principles globally. NGOs and environmentalists have played prominent roles in the Biosafety Protocol by occupying spaces designated for civil society participation, raising the question of how activists both disrupt and sustain the neoliberal logics embedded in new regimes of environmental governance. I explore this question through ethnographic research in Costa Rica among activists, biosafety officials, and private biosafety auditors, where activists have engaged biosafety as part of a campaign against transgenic seeds. Working with limited resources and a genuine concern to manage the risks of agricultural biotechnology, officials draw on strategies that position both the market and civil society as key mechanisms of biosafety monitoring. Despite opposing transgenics and the concept of biosafety, activists participate in the government biosafety commission as civil society representatives and informally monitor local fields. Officials have labeled activists “biovigilantes,” viewing them as parallel to private biosafety auditors who subsidize the lack of state capacity in biosafety. Recent research on civil society and governance suggests that discourses of participation have depoliticizing impacts, encouraging specific forms of self-conduct that reinforce a dominant order of things. Illustrating how activists occupy and negotiate civil society and biosafety expertise, I argue by contrast that their engagement with biosafety is uneven and contradictory, revealing an unsettled struggle, rather than some prevailing governmental logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an epidemic that has emerged since the 1980s, still has no cure, and may bear no symptoms, HIV/AIDS is powerfully linked to questions of knowledge. In this article, I explore intersections of HIV/AIDS and knowledge by drawing from ethnographic and activist work with an HIV/AIDS nonprofit organization in Indonesia that focuses on gay men and warias (roughly, male transvestites). In particular, I look at testimony, a form of knowledge production differing from confession in that it emphasizes form over content. Examining testimony with regard to persons living with AIDS, I show how it produces a “bare” or “asymptomatic” knowledge that may cast light on broader dynamics of epistemology, selfhood, and belonging. [ HIV/AIDS, Indonesia, gay men, transgenderism, knowledge, emotion, nonprofit organizations] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I deal with the complexities of “indigeneity” and “autochthony,” two distinct yet closely interrelated concepts used by various actors in local, national, and international arenas in Africa and elsewhere. With the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2007, hopes were high among activists and organizations that the precarious situation of many minority groups might be gradually improved. However, sharing the concerns of other scholars, I argue that discourses of indigeneity and autochthony are highly politicized, are subject to local and national particularities, and produce ambivalent, sometimes paradoxical, outcomes. My elaborations are based on in-depth knowledge of the case of the Mbororo in Cameroon, a pastoralist group and national minority recognized by the United Nations as an “indigenous people” although locally perceived as “strangers” and “migrants.” For comparative purposes, and drawing on related studies, I integrate the Bagyeli and Baka (also known as Pygmies) of southern and southeastern Cameroon into my analysis, as they share the designation of indigenous people with the Mbororo and face similar predicaments. [ indigeneity, autochthony, identity, United Nations, Cameroon] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective To suggest that the patient movement is an emancipation movement. Background The patient movement is young and fragmented; and it can seem confusing because it lacks an explicit ideology with intellectual and theoretical underpinnings. Methods Drawing mainly on the experiences and the published writings of patient activists, the author identified eight aspects of the patient movement that could be compared with aspects of recognized emancipation movements: the radicalization of activists; the creation of new knowledge; the identification of guiding principles; the sense of direction; the unmasking of new issues; schisms within the movement and allies outside it; and the gradual social acceptance of some of the ideas (here standards of health care) that activists work to promote. Results Similarities between certain aspects of the patient movement and of the recognized emancipation movements were close. Conclusion The patient movement can be regarded as an emancipation movement, albeit an immature one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the public origins and deployment of information technology in relation to Iranian society's political system. It is mentioned that Iran faces issues about reformist ulama and women. In order participate in a civil power, Internet is being used since the political system is not able to incorporate their demands. The reformist clerics and women's rights activist use the Internet to deliver their ideas, recruit new members and invite international attention. It is also mentioned that although these two movements differ in ideals and strategies, they are similar in a way that they both demand the fulfillment of their interests.

Objective. The objective of the article is to show that in order to understand the ongoing transnational mobilizations of the European wing of the World March of Women (WMW) between 2000 and 2006 we also need to consider the politics of scale of the transnational social movements' mobilizations. The WMW is a transnational collective action that integrates women from grassroots organizations, labor unions, and leftist political parties in over 150 countries (approximately 6,000 groups) into a process of transnationalization of solidarities. Method. The method is based on the analysis of internal documents of the international and European wings of the movement, interviews with key actors and militants, and direct observations over the years 1998–2005. Results. The results are twofold: we investigate the shift in the politics of scale of the movement, from using the same scale as the political authorities with which they interact to the creation of its own scales of action (first part); we focus on the articulation of different scales of protest, showing how, by constructing networks and coalitions, actions, and demands under the WMW umbrella, grassroots women's groups are becoming empowered and are regaining political power over the definition, dissemination, and resolution of gender issues (second part). Conclusion. The conclusion is that this specific process of empowerment helps to explain why feminist activists pursue transnationalization actions despite all the material, ideological, and relational difficulties that accompany such actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal political salience (PPS) is proposed as a personality characteristic that assesses individuals' linkage of political events with their personal identities. Its role in facilitating the development of politicized collective identity and action is examined. In four samples of midlife and activist women, we show that PPS was consistently related both to politicized gender identity and political participation. Further analyses show similar results for PPS, politicized racial identity, and political participation. Politicized gender identity mediated the relationship between PPS and women's rights activism, and politicized racial identity mediated the relationship between PPS and civil rights activism. PPS is demonstrated to independently predict political action and also to provide a personality link between group memberships, politicized collective identity, and political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Aldo Leopold's “land ethic” and Arne Naess's “deep ecology” have been criticized as providing intellectual justifications for both a misanthropic ecofascism and a policy of ecoterrorism for environmental activists. This chapter argues that each of these two approaches to providing a ground or framework for an environmental ethics is subject to the charges of ecofascism or ecoterrorism only to the extent that each is committed to the notion of “intrinsic value” as a nonnegotiable moral absolute or, as Kant puts it, “a value beyond all price.” This chapter begins by describing shared value experience between humans and animals and then points the way to an alternative and pragmatic concept of value that can better guide environmental thinking on matters of law, policy, and activism. This concept of value emerges from an experiential and epistemic understanding of the inherent rationality of value experience. A description of value experience reveals that the lived significance of value experience exhibits a meaningful and referential structure in which anticipations of future experience are either satisfied or frustrated in future experience. This meaningful structure of value experience, in which value experiences point to their own confirmation or disconfirmation, constitutes a self-correcting tendency or a prima facie rationality inherent in value experience. The result is a pragmatic conception of value that takes all value intuition and attribution to be intrinsically revisable in light of future experience. As such, value experience is always subject to negotiation, dialogue, and the weight of future experience. This conception of value undercuts the intellectual, psychological, and moral justification for ecofascism or ecoterrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) as well as its relationship with right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and conservative ideology was tested in three Flemish samples. In the first study conducted on a sample of ordinary voters (N = 208), a newly developed LWA scale was found to be internally consistent and to show high construct validity In the second study, another voter sample (N = 264) and a sample of political activists (N = 69) were tested. In the two samples of ordinary voters, only a few people obtained high LWA scores. Moreover, the aggression and submission items did not load on distinct components and LWA was positively related to RWA and cultural conservatism and negatively to economic conservatism. Conversely in the political activist sample high LWA scores were common among left-wing extremists and evidence was found for a two-dimensional LWA aggression-submission structure. LWA was negatively related to RWA, cultural conservatism, and economic conservatism. The concept of LWA and its theoretical underpinnings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to show that future players and future stakes—two factors generally ignored by political scientists—strongly influence government decisions to cooperate or fight at least against ethnic minorities seeking self-determination. Data on all separatist movements between 1956 and 2002 reveals that governments are significantly less likely to accommodate one challenge if the number of ethnic groups in a country and the combined value of the land that may come under dispute in the future is high. Governments that refused to accommodate one challenger were also significantly less likely to face a second or third challenge down the road. This provides some of the first systematic evidence that governments invest in reputation building a least in the domain of domestic ethnic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research reported here examined the effects of two potential motivators of political activism—policy change threat and policy change opportunity—in a field experiment. Different versions of a letter were sent by a political lobbying organization to potential contributors. One version highlighted threats of undesirable policy changes, another version highlighted opportunities for desirable policy changes, and the third version did neither. Policy change threat increased the number of financial contributions made to the interest group, but policy change opportunity did not. Policy change opportunity increased the number of signed postcards returned to be sent to President Clinton, but policy change threat did not. These findings highlight the impact of interest group recruitment strategies on citizen responsiveness and demonstrate the need to account for sources of motivation in order to more fully understand when, why, and how citizens choose to become politically active. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using survey data collected on African Methodist Episcopal and Church of God in Christ clergy, this article finds that black clergy are strongly supportive of their roles as community leaders. However, there are differences along denominational lines in terms of how they interpret their role, in their policy preferences, and in their activities both in and out of the pulpit. In total, this study reveals that there is diversity in black clergy attitudes and activities and that there is a need to examine further how these differences affect black political attitudes and activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of how an activist identity develops is one of the core issues in social psychology and social movement research. Because of problems in the measurement of individuals' propensities to engage in social action, however, findings in this area are often equivocal, and cross-study comparisons and conclusions are difficult to draw. Hence, the aim of these studies was to develop a measure to assess individuals' propensities to engage in social action. This measure, the Activism Orientation Scale (AOS), demonstrates strong psychometric properties and allows assessment of activist propensity across a wide continuum of social action behaviors, ideological positions, and movement issues. Additionally, the broad applicability of the AOS allows for its use by researchers, activists, and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What led Argentine human rights activists to risk challenging state repression in the late 1970s? Chi-square analyses of 78 interviews with early activists and nonactivists suggested few commonalities among activists but revealed two distinct and inverse routes to high-risk other-centered political activism. Activists directly affected by regime violence tended to be relatively inexperienced politically, to have little experience with fear, and to see groups as comprising individuals rather than as monolithic wholes. An inverse pattern characterized activists not directly affected by regime violence: Their activism was preceded by experience in politics and survival of previous fear-evoking episodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements transform participants' identities. Why they do so is an unresolved puzzle. I argue that for participants, social movements are liminal phenomena characterized by varying degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. As such, the transformative power of social movements depends on their degree of liminality. Those that approximate most to the pure type of the liminal offer to the participants high degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. They transform identities most powerfully. In the 1960s, China's Red Guards experienced a profoundly liminal movement. As a result, an age-cohort that was coming of age began to recreate itself. The personal transformations of the Red Guards would persistently bear on Chinese politics and society up to the 1989 Chinese student movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addresses the theoretical debate within feminist legal studies in Great Britain. Relationship between academic feminism and political activism; Distinction between feminist analysis and broader engagements with law and gender; Normative underpinnings of feminist legal scholarship; Emergence of an anti-essentialist norm in feminist discourse.

-In agreement with many other students of social movements and related phenomena, the Goodwin--Jasper critique of political process theorizing about contentious politics rightly calls attention to the incomplete, provisional, and sometimes contradictory state of explanations in the field. However, it wrongly indicates that major analysts are unaware of these difficulties, it adopts a flawed model of explanation, and it proposes remedies that will actually hinder explanation of contentious political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the influence of the heritage of Peronist activism of the 1970s and the influence of the difficulties of contemporary neo-liberalism on the local government of the Greater Buenos Aires region. Discussion on the basismo social movement in Argentina in the 1970s; Significance of cura villero in the basista movement; Analysis of the heritage of basismo in the local government.

Three explanations have been advanced to account for the generalized action potential of contemporary protest movements: the rise of the new class, a set of general social trends that cumulatively lead to liberalized social values and loosened social restraints against protest, and the mobilization of excluded groups. Analyzing three dimensions of generalized action potential-protest potential, political action repertoires, and protest movement support-we find support for all three explanations. Educated salaried professionals, especially sociocultural and public sector professionals, display greater protest potential, especially for civil disobedience, and are supportive of emerging "middle class" movements. A set of general social trends centering on increased education, life-cycle and generational change, secularism, and increased women's autonomy also create greater action potential. Reflecting mobilization against political exclusion, African Americans display a consistently strong generalized action potential. These protests reflect the rise of new political repertoires, particularly "protest activism," which combines protest with high levels of conventional participation and is centered among the more educated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surprisingly little research has sought to explain differential participation after recruitment into social movement organizations (SMOs). This study examines the influence of several sets of predictors on participation by members of a national organization in the antihunger movement. The findings highlight the importance of incentive, ideological, and microstructural factors for differential participation and suggest that favorable perceptions of SMOs also promote participation. Final remarks address the implications of the findings for the social movement and voluntary organization literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology appears to be one of the most internally divided disciplines, if not the most. Departmental struggles, which have led to sociologists complaining to administrators about each other, have put the field in bad repute among campus officials and have endangered its survival in some schools. The American Sociological Society and American Sociological Association have been among the most conflict-ridden associations in academe for generations. Severe internecine struggles have a long history in the field. It may be suggested that they are related to the propensity of the field to attract social reformers and political activists. But hard evidence indicates sociology graduate students are among the weakest, as judged by test scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to draft a framework for the comparison of movement participation. The standards of comparison I developed at the movement level were the magnitude of mobilization potentials, the composition of multi-organizational fields, organizational characteristics, and action orientation. Utilizing this framework I compared mobilization campaigns for three different types of activities conducted by three different movements: a campaign conducted by a labor union for, possibly, a strike, a campaign of the Dutch peace movement in a local community for a national demonstration, and campaigns by women's groups in a community for a variety of activities. I explain differences in motivational dynamics and levels of participation in terms of differing movement characteristics. Finally, I discuss the advantages of comparative work on social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents results of the first study of the contemporary antihunger movement. We compare the membership characteristics of one its largest organizations, Bread for the World (BFW), with data on the general population of the United States drawn from the 1985 General Social Survey. When compared with the general population, BFW members are, among other things, unusually well educated, religious, politically liberal and efficacious, and active in church-related and political organizations. The differences in religious and political belief and organizational involvement persist even when BFW members are compared with their equally well educated counterparts in the general population. Our findings thus elucidate certain ideological and organizational bases for membership in BFW. We discuss the implications of the findings for issues in the contemporary study of social movements and for BFW's prospects in the political arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a study which examines the relationship between political involvement and subsequent family life course decisions using a longitudinal study of former political activists and nonactivists from the 1960s. The purpose of this study is to compare the family life course transitions of activist and, nonactivist youth who were first surveyed in 1971. The effects of activism, gender role attitudes, and education on the hazard of marriage and births of first and second child are estimated using a proportional hazards model with data collected 14 years from baseline. Results suggest that youthful activism has had pervasive effects as seen in the delay of childbearing but not in the delay of marriage. Activism was related only to the timing of the first child for men, while for women, activism was related to the timing of the second child. Results indicate that by 1985, men and women who were activists in the 1960s had children later than did nonactivists, but that activism was not related to timing of marriage.

An interview with Ibrahim Yazdi, secretary general of the Liberation Movement of Iran, is presented. When asked about the goal of several reformist movements, he denotes that such groups aim to establish a political change or modification within the system. He focuses on the challenges faced by the U.S. concerning its efforts in establishing a good relationship with Iran. Also, he discusses his views concerning the idea of Islamic resurgence or revivalism by the Islamic movements.

The article discusses issues in the conflict between Islamic Group al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya and other movements in Egypt. Sheikh Umar Abd al-Rahman, the blind spiritual leader of al-Gamaa, was accused of complicity in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City and other bombing plots. The deepening violence in the country was considered. It includes the attacking of tour buses and Nile cruise boats and an assassination attempt against Interior Minister General Hasan Alfi. Information about the radical groups operating within the country is further presented.

The article focuses on the social conditions in Egypt. According to the author, the imprisonment and torture of the Islamists has personalized the struggle. He added that due to the brutal government campaign against Islamists in the south where revenge killing is an accepted custom, revenge assassinations are more likely to be the norm in Egypt. He emphasized that political violence will increase unless Egyptian government undertakes a serious reform program that focuses on the widening spectrum of political participation to include the Islamists, repealing the repressive 11-year-old emergency laws and working toward more equitable distribution of goods and services.

Since January 20, 1994, the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, a church located near the Pearson International Airport, has become the center of a global revival. Although similar revival fires are under- way at other centers (in various parts of North America as well as on other continents), TACF is an important institutional source for the dissemination of the experience, ideology, and structural form of this religious social movement. Using a Weberian theoretical framework based on Thomas O'Dea's "institutional dilemmas," this descriptive account of the "Toronto Blessing" provides a first-hand portrayal of the process through which charisma becomes routinized. Each of O'Dea's five dilemmas is discussed, noting the balance between charismatic manifestations and institutional features set into place by TACF leadership. The dynamic interplay between charisma and institutions is illustrated through teachings, testimonies, and observations made during 22 months of field research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been some controversy about the role of religion in the black community, this research found that religion was an important source of collective and political action among blacks in Washington, D.C. Those who frequently attended churches where pastors attempted to politicize their flock, and those who identified as pentecostals or who reported a pentecostal experience, were more supportive of collective action, reported higher rates of political participation, and showed more support for Jesse Jackson. These results suggest that the black church is a positive force in black political mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studying the draft resistance movement of the 1960's the author combined sociological observation with active and politically committed participation in the movement. The resulting conflicts of loyalty were rooted in basic characteristics of the movement, and of field research as a way of being in and experiencing the world. There were conflicts between political and research goals in daily decisions about bow to allocate time and energy, and in larger choices about whether to take risks and to more fully join the community of fate of the movement. The role of researcher became a retreat, expressing limits to involvement and risk-taking, and providing a point of outside leverage which full participants lacked. The movement's ways of defining and interpreting experience ran counter to the more detached and routinizing perspectives of sociology. Conflicts between being a committed participant and an observing sociologist culminated in a sense of betraying the movement, and raised basic questions about uses, organization, and types of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mobilization to defeat the United States-Canada Free Trade Agreement is used as a point of departure for reflections on the role political processes play in social movement mobilization Previous articles in this Journal presented a resource mobilization-political opportunities paradigm in the study of social movements This article expands this paradigm's analytic reach to a country that has contributed little research to the ongoing debate about social movement mobilization Adopting a political process perspective, political institutions, political opportunities, and social and political organizations shaped the emergence and mobilization of the popular campaign This case can strengthen a generalized understanding of those political factors most conducive to the interesting interplay and outcome of movement, party, and electoral politics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]