Virtual Library

When do national movements adopt or reject international agendas? This question regarding the relationship between global and local thinking goes to the heart of the current globalization debates. This study examines the contrasting responses from the Chinese and Indian women's movements to the agenda adopted by the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The contrast challenges the dominant assumption that global thinking can substitute for local thinking. The article shows how national movements decided for or against international agendas through context-dependent meaning-making processes. The Chinese and Indian movements drew on the international agenda to pursue similar national policy goals. Each reached its decision on the international agenda through a similar sequence of interactions with the government. However, due to mediation by nationally unique combinations of political rules and policy-related timing, the two movements attached opposite meanings to the international agenda. The Chinese movement embraced the international agenda and reinterpreted it by emphasizing its difference from the government position; the Indian movement used the international agenda as a surrogate target and rejected it by emphasizing its similarities to the government position. The article also proposes an alternative conceptualization of authoritarianism and democracy that understands better international influences on social movement dynamics.

While transitions to democracy have been hailed as the most important phenomena of this century, few scholars understand the role that women have played in these metamorphoses. This article uses an historical in-depth case study to examine how and why women mobilized against the state in Chile. Previous social movement theories have not attended adequately to cultural and ideational elements (e.g., gender ideology), much less these factors in the Third World and authoritarian context. In contrast, the present study modifies and extends the concepts of political opportunity structure and collective action frames, suggesting that the manner in which ideology and cultural themes are framed may provide opportunities for protest, especially in the authoritarian context. Specifically, the rise and fall of broader mobilizational frames or master frames shapes how movement-specific frames compete, decay, and transform, as some master frames create space for certain ideas (e.g., feminism) while others do not. New hypotheses regarding the use of collective action frames in a nondemocratic setting are offered.

Social movements such as environmentalism, feminism, nationalism, and the anti-immigration movement are a prominent feature of the modern world and have attracted increasing attention from scholars in many countries. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, first published in 1996, brings together a set of essays that focus upon mobilization structures and strategies, political opportunities, and cultural framing and ideologies. The essays are comparative and include studies of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. Their authors are amongst the leaders in the development of social movement theory and the empirical study of social movements.

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that “Freedom is a constant struggle.”

How do social movements die? Some explanations highlight internal factors like factionalization, whereas others stress external factors like repression. Christian Davenport offers an alternative explanation where both factors interact. Drawing on organizational, as well as individual-level, explanations, Davenport argues that social movement death is the outgrowth of a coevolutionary dynamic whereby challengers, influenced by their understanding of what states will do to oppose them, attempt to recruit, motivate, calm, and prepare constituents while governments attempt to hinder all of these processes at the same time. Davenport employs a previously unavailable database that contains information on a black nationalist/secessionist organization, the Republic of New Africa, and the activities of authorities in the U.S. city of Detroit and state and federal authorities.

How can we make sense of human rights in China's authoritarian Party-State system? Eva Pils offers a nuanced account of this contentious area, examining human rights as a set of social practices. Drawing on a wide range of resources including years of interaction with Chinese human rights defenders, Pils discusses what gives rise to systematic human rights violations, what institutional avenues of protection are available, and how social practices of human rights defence have evolved. 

Three central areas are addressed: liberty and integrity of the person; freedom of thought and expression; and inequality and socio-economic rights. Pils argues that the Party-State system is inherently opposed to human rights principles in all these areas, and that – contributing to a global trend – it is becoming more repressive. Yet, despite authoritarianism's lengthening shadows, China’s human rights movement has so far proved resourceful and resilient. The trajectories discussed here will continue to shape the struggle for human rights in China and beyond its borders.

Rights Make Might examines why the three most salient minority groups in Japan all expanded their activism since the late 1970s against significant headwinds, and chronicles how global human rights ideas and institutions empowered all three groups to engage in enhanced political activities. It also documents the contributions of the three groups to the expansion of global human rights activities, demonstrating the feedback mechanism from local groups to global institutions. Examining the prehistory of the three groups, it first sets the scene for minority politics in Japan before the 1970s, which featured politically dormant Ainu, an indigenous people in northern Japan; active but unsuccessful Koreans, a stateless colonial legacy group; and active and established Burakumin, a former outcaste group that still faced social discrimination. Against this background, the infusion of global human rights ideas and the opening of international human rights arenas as new venues for contestation transformed minority activists’ movement actorhood, or subjective understanding about their position and entitled rights in Japan, as well as the views of the Japanese public and political establishment toward those groups, thus catalyzing substantial gains for all three groups. Having benefited from global human rights, all three groups also repaid their debt by contributing to the consolidation and expansion of global human rights principles and instruments. Rights Make Might offers a detailed historical and comparative analysis of the co-constitutive relationship between international human rights activities and local politics that contributes to our understanding of international norms, multilateral institutions, social movements, human rights, ethnoracial politics, and Japanese society.

The collapse of communism and the process of state building that ensued in the 1990s have highlighted the existence of significant minorities in many European states, particularly in Central Europe. In this context, the growing plight of Europe's biggest minority, the Roma (Gypsies), has been particularly salient. Traditionally dispersed, possessing few resources and devoid of a common "kin state" to protect their interests, the Roma have often suffered from widespread exclusion and institutionalized discrimination. Politically underrepresented and lacking popular support amongst the wider populations of their host countries, the Roma have consequently become one of Europe's greatest "losers" in the transition towards democracy.

Against this background, the author examines the recent attempts of the Roma in Central Europe and their supporters to form a political movement and to influence domestic and international politics. On the basis of first-hand observation and interviews with activists and politicians in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, he analyzes connections between the evolving state policies towards the Roma and the recent history of Romani mobilization. In order to reach a better understanding of the movement's dynamics at work, the author explores a number of theories commonly applied to the study of social movements and collective action.

Providing vivid examples of how sociologists are using sociological tools to make a positive impact on our society, this one-of-a-kind book helps students better understand how their study of sociology can be put to good use in today’s world. Each of the 14 chapters, closely aligned with key topics in sociology courses, is filled with stories from practicing sociologists that help students better understand how their sociology studies can be applied and provides answers to the question, “…but what can I do with a sociology degree?” Discussion questions and suggested additional readings and resources at the end of each chapter give students the opportunity to delve further into the topics covered and carry out full and nuanced discussions, grounded in the “real world” work of public sociologists.

State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.