Virtual Library

During the Great Depression, black intellectuals, labor organizers, and artists formed the National Negro Congress (NNC) to demand a "second emancipation" in America. Over the next decade, the NNC and its offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, sought to coordinate and catalyze local antiracist activism into a national movement to undermine the Jim Crow system of racial and economic exploitation. In this pioneering study, Erik S. Gellman shows how the NNC agitated for the first-class citizenship of African Americans and all members of the working class, establishing civil rights as necessary for reinvigorating American democracy. Much more than just a precursor to the 1960s civil rights movement, this activism created the most militant interracial freedom movement since Reconstruction, one that sought to empower the American labor movement to make demands on industrialists, white supremacists, and the state as never before. By focusing on the complex alliances between unions, civic groups, and the Communist Party in five geographic regions, Gellman explains how the NNC and its allies developed and implemented creative grassroots strategies to weaken Jim Crow, if not deal it the "death blow" they sought.

The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is often considered the “jewel in the crown” of the European Union's democracy promotion. Its mandate encompasses the funding of democratizing civil society organizations and thus the facilitation of democratization “from below.” It is argued here that if we apply Foucauldian governmentality tools to the analysis of the workings of the EIDHR, we can see that, despite the pluralistic rhetoric that guides it, the Instrument's objectives and management structures facilitate particular kinds of democratic visions. Neoliberal governmentality, it is argued, may be hidden deep within the expectations set for EU-funded civil society “democratizers.” This has important consequences for how we understand the model of democracy that the European Union promotes and the power relations of the European Union's “locally owned” democracy promotion.

Neutrality has been the classic answer of the liberal state to religious and cultural difference. A number of multicultural critics recently debunked it as “myth” and group power in disguise. Comparing Islamic headscarf laws in France and Germany, I argue that neutrality is more complex and multifaceted than this. The comparison shows that neutrality leaves space for particularistic and universalistic, unity- and rights-oriented stances, the first located in the sphere of democratic politics, the second in the legal–constitutional sphere. Recent headscarf laws may then be understood as political backlash against the rights-oriented neutrality that has emerged in the legal spheres of both countries.

The Arab Spring is still unfolding, as is the direction of change, and outcomes may be different for violent and nonviolent uprisings. This article focuses on three early cases of the Arab Spring – Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco – to discuss causes and likely outcomes, gender dynamics, prospects for genuine democratization, and the connection between feminist movements and democratization. A comparative and international perspective highlights similarities and differences across the Arab cases and between the Arab Spring and other ‘democracy waves’.

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.

In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body”---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

In this vivid ethnography, Harri Englund investigates how ideas of freedom impede struggles against poverty and injustice in emerging democracies. Reaching beyond a narrow focus on the national elite, Prisoners of Freedom shows how foreign aid and human rights activism hamper the pursuit of democratic citizenship in Africa. The book explores how activists’ aspirations of self-improvement, pursued under harsh economic conditions, find in the human rights discourse a new means to distinguish oneself from the poor masses. Among expatriates, the emphasis on abstract human rights avoids confrontations with the political and business elites. Drawing on long-term research among the Malawian poor, Englund brings to life the personal circumstances of Malawian human rights activists, their expatriate benefactors, and the urban and rural poor as he develops a fresh perspective on freedom—one that recognizes the significance of debt, obligation, and civil virtues.

The first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe, The Revolt of the Provinces explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade. It explains the spread of racist sensibilities in depressed rural areas, shows how activists, intellectuals and politicians took advantage of popular racism to empower right-wing agendas and examines the new ruling party's success in stabilizing an 'illiberal regime'. To illuminate these important dynamics, the author proposes an innovative multi-scalar and relational framework, focusing on interaction between social antagonisms emerging on the local level and struggles waged within the political public sphere.

Does democracy reduce state repression as human rights activism, funding, and policy suggest? What are the limitations of this argument? Investigating 137 countries from 1976 to 1996, State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace seeks to shed light on these questions. Specifically, it finds that electoral participation and competition generally reduces personal integrity violations like torture and mass killing; other aspects of democracy do not wield consistent influences. This negative influence can be overwhelmed by conflict, however, and thus there are important qualifications for the peace proposition.

Patricia Zimmermann describes the shifting terrains socially engaged documentary artists and experimental filmmakers encounter in the aftermath of corporate consolidation and technological transformations. Public space has been chiseled away and politically conscious documentaries forced to go underground. Viewing an array of subjects through technologies ranging from high-end video, camcorders, cable access, digital imaging systems, and media piracy, Zimmermann charts the intricately layered relationships between independent documentary, power, money, and culture. She analyzes how media artists use new technologies and radical media practices to undermine cuts in support and conservative backlash, arguing that the survival of democracies and public spaces is inextricably fueled by the robust endurance of documentary and other insurgent forms of communication.