Search

Copyright of Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Berliner Journal für Soziologie is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses activist perceptions of the beneficial potentialities of new media for environmental campaigning as investigated in Australia, due to its high level of environmental activism and Internet usage. Drawing upon literature on communication theory, environmental politics, digital activism, and social movement theory, this study explores new media use for activism in two large Australia-wide environmental campaigns: contestation of old-growth forest logging and unconventional gas mining (fracking) development. From March to May 2017, 34 environmental activists involved in these campaigns were interviewed for this study. They shared their opinions on what it meant for them to use new media, the difficulties they encountered, but also the beneficial potentialities they identified in using these media for their activism. The study findings show that new media built significantly on more 'traditional' forms of activism, including stalls and non-violent street demonstrations, but also enabled extended activist outreach, enhanced engagement with supporters, and boosted campaign mobilisation. As such, despite an array of quite challenging limitations they also referred to, and to which they responded strategically, Australian environmental activists found new media highly beneficial to their activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how four key French newspapers that vary in their positions and outreach, (Le Monde—central leftist, Le Figaro—central rightist, L'Humanité—leftist, and La Croix— Catholic) covered the Yellow Vests (YV) movement. Specifically, it examines how the newspapers vary in their use of positive and negative frames, sources, and tone towards the YV protests during a six-month period. Analyses of frames reveal that the most prevalent across all newspapers was the legitimising frame (positive), and the least used was the delegitimising frame (negative). Additionally, Le Monde and Le Figaro shared slightly similar results of negatively framing the events in just more than half of their coverage despite their distinct political leanings. Several differences were also found between L'Humanité and the remaining publications; while official sources were the most used sources by Le Monde, La Croix, and Le Figaro, L'Humanité relied mostly on YV sources and presented the most overwhelmingly positive tone toward the YV movement. These results lend support to some perceived public concerns over the critical portrayal of the YV protests and overreliance on official narratives in the French press but show that significant disparities remain in the news coverage among newspapers with different ideological orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unequal exchange in international trade lies at the crossroads of all the major contradictions of the current global capitalist system: class, spatial and ecological. Countering unequal exchange can offer the basis for a broad global social coalition demanding a new international economic and ecological order. It can unite the claims of social and ecological movements around a common agenda where global social justice meets global environmental justice. The objective conditions are provided by the common ground of concrete interests that binds together various political and social actors in the global South and North who are harmed by corporate neoliberal globalisation. Building the subjective conditions, however, requires overcoming theoretical reductionisms and political sectarianisms that contribute to the fragmentation of social struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following three decades of armed conflict, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009. The victory was framed as a successful counterterrorism operation, yet, the GoSL's military campaign in the Tamil-populated Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka, faces credible allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. As the armed conflict reached its apex, the Tamil diaspora mobilised politically across the globe and the participation of younger generation Tamils (YGTs), namely, those who were born outside their parents' country of origin, or had settled outside of their ancestral homeland as children, caught the attention of scholars and analysts. Within this small pool of literature, the pervasive and problematic counterterrorism-inspired concept of "radicalisation" surfaced. This article contributes to critical debates on terrorism by analysing the cursory application of a radicalisation framework to the political mobilisation and perspectives of YGTs. Based on critical ethnographic research on YGT activism in the London diaspora, this article provides an alternative to criminalising and marginalising approaches by utilising an emotion-based conceptual framework, derived from social movement studies, to unearth and understand the complex mechanisms, contexts, and processes surrounding their political mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a terror movement like Boko Haram employ language and discourse towards collective action? This is the central question our paper addresses. Focusing on Boko Haram as a militant jihādist social movement organisation (SMO), our article shows how the movement's ideology, evidenced through its discourse, "frames" narratives that identify the problem, call for action and motivate adherents and potential recruits towards violent repertoires. Using interview data, critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Social Movement Theory (SMT), specifically framing analysis, we interrogate Boko Haram's Qur'anic exegesis based on the group's publications, exhortations, lectures and sermons between 2008 and 2016. Along with calls for jihād (holy war, within the movement's interpretation) and criticism of Nigeria's federal constitution vis-à-vis Sharī'a (Islamic law) as a superior social alternative, Boko Haram employs a specific takfir (apostate declaration) doctrine that divides the world into two camps: unbelievers (al-kāfirūn) or (kuffar) and believers. Such identity construction constitutes part of a "framing" approach to mobilisation and recruitment. In this sociological analysis of Boko Haram's discourse, we identify diagnostic, prognostic and motivational "framing" patterns employed alongside an injustice master frame as a means to encourage collective action by the "in-group" (adherents and potential recruits) against "out-group" identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following article we analyze the relationship between different governance models and democratisation. To do so, we first address the more structural dimension of the issue. We observe that there is a structural relationship between governance and neoliberal governmentality; however, we find models such as those proposed by Sonia Bussu and Adrián Bua that offer us instruments to think of alternative ways of approaching the issue. Furthermore, we analyze their theoretical framework in relation to consolidated proposals such as Charles Tilly's theory of democracy. Finally, we apply the theoretical concepts to the case of Hernani Burujabe, an innovative case of democracy-driven governance.

Since the 1980s, scholars have been documenting protest movements against the building of large hydropower dams. These movements have arisen mainly in communities where people have experienced displacement and loss of livelihood without receiving proper compensation. Less attention has been paid to community action and environmental movements that promoted the restoration of canalised, diverted, depleted and/or polluted rivers. Since the beginning of the 2000s, however, more attention is being paid in academic literature to communities and social movements that propose to remove dams, stop pollution of rivers, restore fish ecosystems, or rewild rivers. There has also been increased interest in movements advocating for the granting of legal personhood to rivers and in those that are opposing dams because they want to protect free-flowing rivers for fish migration or tourism. A systematic literature review was undertaken in order to analyse scientific publications on diverse river defence and restoration movements. A relatively small number (104) of publications was retrieved, but these nevertheless showed a diversity in geographic spread and coverage of river issues and river movement strategies. The attention of the publications shifted from anti-dam protests to a variety of issues including especially river pollution, and to a minor degree issues like indigenous rights and rights of rivers. Most of the publications addressed river movements in the USA and India and the majority did not describe the movements’ activities in detail; several, however, described effective activism, advocacy, citizen science monitoring, and litigation. The review suggests that river movements contribute to democratic governance and environmental justice. It also shows that the scientific literature is focused mainly on large anti-dam protests and pays less attention to local river activism and its networks.

We consider two local reparations cases—the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and Chicago reparations for police torture survivors. We argue that the programs are shaped by the differing political opportunities, the local context, and the social location of their advocates given that one was constructed within government systems in Evanston and the other largely by grassroots organizers in Chicago. Furthermore, both programs are criticized to varying degrees as being exclusive in their design and implementation. We term this exclusion a process of deliberative marginalization, whereby some of the most vulnerable and most directly affected beneficiaries of a redress initiative are left out of deliberations and implementation decisions about the initiative’s design. Subsequently, this study shows both the promise and constraints of reparations policy at the level of local government.

Rather, we are interested in movement itself and how any movement, whether in a sport, fitness, dance or educational setting, does things that come with reciprocal effects across the entirety of its respective movement landscape. This has led to the rise of competing perspectives concerning talent identification and ability in sport and dance as well as debates over what constitutes a functional or useless movement pattern in fitness or exercise settings. For example, in their review of the socio-cultural-history of the moving body Kerr and Espiner ([5]) expounded on the "normative structures that influence sport and movement ... [whereby] ... the techniques, styles and types of sporting movements are rarely stable" (p. 170). In addition, they pointed to the ways in which any movement practice, whether it be in sport, dance or fitness, needs to be analyzed as part of a larger system that includes rules and organizational bureaucracy that come together to "value, celebrate and reward particular types of movements" (p. 171). [Extracted from the article]