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The article focuses on the institutionalization of the female presence in the state structure. It is noted that for the advancement of the women's cause around the democratic world, the institutionalization of the female presence in the state structure matters a great deal. It is mentioned that overcoming a negative view of the state, which equated it to a quintessential patriarchal power structure is one of the key achievements of the "state feminism" phenomenon.

The lack of the articulation of a coherent understanding of Afro-Brazilian identity has received relatively uncritical attention both within and outside of black women's movements in Brazil. The combination of the importation of American racial conceptions of blackness and the historical legacy of racial democracy in Brazil has resulted in a constructed black female identity that attempts to resolve ideological versus phenomenological conceptions of identity. But recognition movements such as black women's movements are often mobilized around a particular identity. In the case of Brazil, the construction of a black female identity presents challenges to recognition claims in that the identity put forward may or may not adequately represent the individuals who are marginalized. This paper seeks to put Fraser, Benhabib, Taylor, and Honneth into dialogue on the issues of recognition, identity, and status in order to explore a new theoretical framework that could accommodate, explain, or perhaps resolve the problems that black women's movements have encountered. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My research closely examines the shift in Brazil's state racial policy beginning in 2001. To do this, I look at events in Rio de Janiero's State Legislative Assembly as a case study. This allows me to highlight the combination of local, national and international processes that configure the development of affirmative action policy in Brazil. I am interested in uncovering the micro-mechanisms of power that operate in Rio de Janiero's local politics as I consider these to be not that different from what happens at the national or global level. Democratic regimes operate with a logic according to which indignation and resistance should be incorporated into the system. Time and again Black Movement activists and other SMOs and activists in Brazil have complied comprehensive policies and programs to address racial and social injustice -- including land and wealth redistribution -- only to have their work transformed by state institutions and actors into policies of quotas for black Brazilians in hiring and education. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the influence of social movements on electoral outcomes in Brazil, particularly with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). MST is a movement founded in the mid-1980s which aims to improve the lives of people experiencing inequality. In order to push structural change, MST engaged into land occupation and recognized the need to have political allies in order to have access to social programs and infrastructure.

Social movements have played a key role in the process of democratization in Brazil since the mid 1970s. The changing political opportunity structure engendered by this process allowed for new identities and demands to emerge in the public sphere. Social movements struggling for inclusion of a wide range of marginalized groups have based their demands on issues related to redistribution, as well as recognition of marginalized and stigmatized identities. Focusing on the activity and gains of the gay, lesbian and travesti movement in Brazil, but also including other important movements active in contemporary Brazil (women, Afro-Brazilian, and landless peasants) in the analysis, this paper will examine the extent to which a gap between recognition and redistributive struggles has emerged in the impact of these diverse social movements. It also seeks to explain why impressive gains have been secured in regard to the recognition of identities, while progress in relation to redistributive issues has been more limited, both within movements (e.g., lower class sexual minorities, poor women and Afro-Brazilians) and across movements (e.g., LGBT rights vs. land reform). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prospects for Brazil rising from the semi-periphery are bleak. This is due to both world systems considerations based on international indebtedness, penetration of foreign capital and fiscal crisis within the state - and agency considerations based on political and social factors within Brazil itself. The key to rising into the core is developing local proprietary technology which could created pro-Brazilian favorable terms of trade. Debt induced high interest rates are limiting economic growth and investment reducing local capital's ability to generate such technology. Increased foreign ownership of Brazilian companies is leading to a reduction of research and development actitivies. An alternative road to a locally controlled science would be development of basic science at the university level. Brazilian universities are hampered by low salaries, poor facilities, very low graduation rates, and unwieldy administrative structures that prevent universities from rewarding star researchers. These factors stem less from debt-induced fiscal crisis within the state and more of political considerations within Brazil that lead to the misallocation of scarce educational resources. Agency attempts to overcome these handicaps are having mixed results. The new anti-globalization social movements coming out of Porto Alegre are having impressive results in improving municipal governance - but face too many political obstacles to have a chance to produce a national Brazilian state willing to confront international capital. There are however positive developments in less glamorous areas. The economic wing of the Porto Alegre movement - the Economia Solidaria - is producing impressive increases in employment and reductions in poverty in Brazil - using an explicit nationalist anti-globalization strategy. Furthermore, routine social and economic policies such as support for small business are confronting for the first time disarticulation in Brazil and producing a more balanced distribution of economic incentives and government benefits. These developments by themselves will not propel Brazil into the core. However there is one conjunctural factor that could make a difference ..... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that social movements respond to two dimensions of political opportunity in deciding when and how to seek political influence in multilevel governance. One dimension, the degree of access or openness, is already common in the literature on transnational social movements. A second dimension of political capacity - the ability to generate authoritative outcomes - is also important, but much less studied. Both activists and scholars can assess institutions in multi-level governance for their simultaneous placement on these two dimensions. I briefly review the four resulting quadrants and the kinds of strategies social movements are likely to choose in them, discussing trade institutions that might fit in each: strong and open, strong and closed, weak and open, and weak and closed. I use this framework to argue that the Mercosur free trade area fits best in the weak and closed quadrant, and thus it is not surprising that regional social movements have directed little time to this level of governance. I also briefly review the politics of GMOs in the Mercosur region, showing that the politics of GMOs in Brazil and Argentina have surprisingly different patterns of political opportunity for their national movements that have led to very different concrete results. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a question that has so far been under-explored in the study of civil society organizations: Which factors determine whether or not the interaction between "experts" working at NGOs and grassroots activists produces practices of knowledge construction that truly promote the moral, political and economic agency of popular groups with restricted access to "expert" knowledge? Such exploration is based on a literature review, complemented by an analysis of ethnographic data collected during the summer of 2006. The fieldwork data included in this paper is the result of a voluntary work experience at PACS - Instituto Politicas Alternativas para o Cone Sul, an NGO based in Rio de Janeiro. PACS is one of the most influential NGOs in the emergence and institutionalization of the Brazilian movement of Solidarity Socio-Economy. It had a fundamental role as the coordinator of the mobilization process that led to the creation, in 1996, of FCP-RJ - the Forum of Worker's Cooperatives of Rio de Janeiro. This forum was the first organized structure created by the movement in Brazil to debate policy issues affecting cooperatives, networks of microenterprises, microcredit and the informal economy. For reasons of practicality and focus, this paper will only use field data on "Casa da Confiança" ("The House of Trust"), a microcredit and training project that PACS developed with members of neighborhood-based associations, in the framework of FCP-RJ. This project is a typical example of production of practices of knowledge construction that empower popular groups with restricted access to "expert" knowledge. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we discuss the failure of social movement theories to adequately understand and theorize the locally-based, grassroots social movements like the landless workers movement in Brazil , "livability movements" in third world cities, "peoples planning" in Kerala, India, and living wage movements in the US. These movements came to the attention of most social movement analysts only when the activists who participated in such local movements came together in the streets of Seattle or international forums like the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre. For social movement analysts, it is the transnational character of these forums and protests that have excited the most attention. The local and generative aspects of these movements have received much less consideration. We argue that the old theories of social movements do not help us understand the local and generative dynamics and processes of these new movements because they reflect a particular configuration of relations between the state, society, and the economy that emerged during the 20th century and have been superceded in the 21st century. We look at the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the Justice for Janitors Campaign in Los Angeles to illustrate the important terrain of civil society as well as the role of community organizing. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece draws on symbolic interactionism to explain why leftist parties in Brazil first broached debates on homosexual liberation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Electoral institutional changes and the emergence of a new generation of cadres changed left party militants' audience calculations. The emergence of a youth counterculture also expanded a discursive repertoire, permitting party militants to contest meanings historically attached to the body, sexuality, the political, and everyday life. The article seeks to extend symbolic interactionism's methodological tools and insights to areas undertheorized in the paradigm, establishing a dialogue with a literature on political parties and electoral institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many are concerned with the rise of the technology or information age. Part of this interest is generated by uncertainty regarding how this change in social landscape impacts other social processes. Studying social movements elucidates both the generation and resolution of conflicts particular to issues of science, technology and information. I propose a new framework through which we can understand social movements characteristic of the technology and information age: anti-scientization movements. These movements contest and democratize expert knowledge in order to achieve their goals. I hypothesize that these social movements have emerged to create institutions where science and knowledge is democratized in response to growing policy dependence on expert knowledge. In order to empirically explore the way such movements work, I compare the anti-dam movement (ADM) in Brazil and environmental breast cancer movement (EBCM) in the United States. Qualitative data in the form of interviews (128), ethnographic observations and document collection were used to study these movements. Despite the very different internal and contextual aspects of these movements, they both employ similar tactics and institutional forms to legitimize lay knowledge and reconstruct official discourse. This framework elucidates a growing phenomenon critical to social movement theorists, science studies and political scientists. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little systematic research has been done on the social characteristics, organizational affiliations, and views of the hundreds of thousands of people that attend the World Social Forum. This paper addresses these questions through an analysis of original survey data of 640 participants of the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Our findings have important implications for understanding the social bases of political divisions within the global justice movement and the potential role that the WSF may play in strengthening this movement and paving the way for global democracy. We found that most WSF participants were young, from Brazil and neighboring countries, expressed radical views, and actively participated in social movements. Most belonged to relatively privileged social groups; most were highly educated (a proxy measure for class), and "white" was the most common racial identity. Our analysis of our survey results suggest that respondents who were from the global north, white, highly educated, less than 55 years of age, and members of NGOs were more likely to hold reformist positions compared to other groups. We also found that respondents from the global north were more likely to favor global strategies for social change than respondents from the global south. This is likely the outcome of southern nations' long history of marginalization within, and bad experiences with, existing global institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study that seeks to draw on preliminary findings from an ongoing case study of environmental crises in Brazil to illustrate the continued explanatory power of the dominant models of norm diffusion in international relations and political science literature. It cites the relationship between social movements and domestic NGOs on international norms. It details the boomerang model of norm diffusion and the impact of an information cascade.

The article cites a study which discusses Brazil's response to the problem of AIDS. In 1992, members of Brazil's National Commission on HIV/AIDS, including actors from government institutions, NGOs and universities, co-authored a letter of intent to the World Bank, asking for a grant for the purpose of strengthening their AIDS program. The World Bank lent a huge sum of money that helped Brazil achieve an increase in life expectancy for those living with HIV by 12 times. Moreover, statistics reveal that only half of the predicted cases of HIV have even appeared, due to successful prevention measures.

This exploratory project examines the development of Afro-Brazilian protest politics. I review the existing explanations for the relative lack of black movement formations in Brazil and offer a critique of state centered explanations of race based movements. Using event data and newspaper articles about race in Brazil, I explore patterns and trends in Afro-Brazilian politics from 1985-2000 in an attempt to understand the level and nature of protest politics among black Brazilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution of Brazil's New Unionism in the context of regime consolidation. Changes in democratic practice are understood as by-products of factional responses to challenges posed by broad economic and political transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the participatory effectiveness of the Brazilian landless movement. Dynamics of the impact of the social movement on public policy; Impetus for agrarian reform in the country; Background of the passage of agrarian law.

Focuses on the engagement in electoral activism by gay and lesbian liberation movements in Brazil and Mexico in 1982. Electoral reforms which were responsible for the legal registration of political parties on the left and their entry into electoral politics in Mexico; Establishment of the Rosario Ibarra Lesbian and Homosexual Support Committee; Electoral strategies that came to prevail both countries within social movement fields.

This paper analyzes the anti-dam movement in Brazil, including its initiation, growth and current form. It argues that the anti-dam movement has constructed a new arena of communicative action to contest the construction of hydroelectric dams. The local meetings and organizing conducted by the anti-dam movement build this arena of communicative action to directly oppose governmental and corporate interests. As a result the anti-dam movement in Brazil has successfully halted the construction of many dams, including what would have been the largest dam in Latin America. It has garnered resettlement packages for previously ignored communities, and has altered discourse around dam-planning. Its instigation and success has been strongly shaped by governmental policy, institutions and connections. It has also relied heavily on an organizational form of internal cross-class alliances in the form of professionalized non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups. This paper argues that the scientization of governmental decision-making has been used to rationalize dam-building and has hence stimulated the movement?s attempt to create new forms of communicative action. It additionally argues that these norms and their supporting governmental structures shape activism. This paper is the first assessment of one of the most important transnational social movements in the world; one that played a critical role in initiating the global anti-dam movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the dimensions, impacts and challenges associated with coalitional choice within the social movement theory in Brazil. Risks and trade-offs linked to alliance patterns; Schematic representation of the cycle of coalition choices; Pattern of alliances in the history of Landless Rural Workers' Movement.

Abstract The post-industrial dependence on experts and its related power imbalances has engendered social movement demands for participation. Given the reliance of environmental policy on science and expert knowledge, one such key group of movements and collaborations is those that attempt to democratize environmental research and slow the environmental degradation. This paper examines the social movement and resultant participatory methods that democratize environmental knowledge. I conceptualize the democratization of knowledge as the process through which local, lay perspectives become legitimate in science and/or expert knowledge to the point that they affect political decision-making. Theorists have pointed to movement contestation of research and technology as characteristic of new social movements, but have yet to empirically study this movement tactic. The environmental movement is the classic case to contest knowledge in order to improve policy. This paper examines the movement of dam-affected people in Brazil to understand its 1) strategies, ideologies and alliances, 2) resultant research collaborations between experts and lay people, and 3) the affects of these collaborations on policy. Based on interviews with movement actors, government officials, and scientific experts, I find that this movement has been effective in constructing new environmental research that serves as an alternative to that conducted by industry proposing potential dams. This paper is therefore an examination of the processes involved therein. Such projects play a pivotal role in the achievement of movement goals. The anti-dam movement in Brazil provides an empirical instance in which to explore how movements contest and consequently shape research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why hasn?t abortion been liberalized in Latin America? The first part of this article analyzes the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in an attempt to answer this question, focusing on the rise of the reproductive rights movement, activism of the Vatican and anti-abortion movements, and the peculiar sociology of abortion in the region. The next part explores how differences in the position of the president on abortion and the availability of congressional allies for the reproductive rights movement affected the political climate surrounding abortion in the three countries in the 1990s and early 2000s. In Brazil, the most liberal country, a ?legal abortion? movement has emerged to encourage public health services to perform abortions on women who have been raped. In Argentina, there is almost no discussion about liberalizing abortion, but conservative attempts to ban abortion under all circumstances have failed. Chile, where abortion is illegal under all circumstances, is completely closed to discussions about liberalizing abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the new left in Taiwan and South Korea and the renewed left in Brazil and Chile. I contend that the left can no longer best understood in terms of antiquated sociological or economic categories. The new left in East Asia and Latin America is a political project and its politics are embedded in the processes of democratic transition. My argument is simple: (i) Democratization, a variable process of change, leads to different patterns of new left organization. (ii) Meanwhile, the introduction of democracy, a form of governance with universally shared features (irrespective of how the transition to democracy took place), promotes the moderation of the new left across all four cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]