Group items tagged

We investigated the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT, namely mobile phones) in support of citizen agency and its potential in calling authorities to account. We focused on Eastern Africa and we used a mixed methodology, which allowed us to explore the current uses of ICT to strengthen accountability and to forecast the growth of mobile phones' adaption in that region. Evidence from both analyses suggests that there are two main areas where citizen agency and ICT can reinforce each other in bottom-up and horizontal processes: participation and engagement of citizens, and the diffusion of information.

In this article, we consider how privileged masculine performances within different spaces of (anti-)globalization politics discipline political praxis in ways that bolster, as much as contest, the order that these movements seek to subvert or overthrow. We draw on two case studies: a British 'anti-imperialist' organization working in solidarity with Latin America and the emerging British anarchist movement. On the basis of our own interpretive participation within these spaces, we consider how each was structured with reference to a privileged masculine identity - that of a patriarchal and authoritarian 'Man with Analysis' in the case of the former and what we call 'Anarchist Action Man' in the case of the latter. We reflect on how these dominant gendered scripts set restrictions around which bodies and voices could be included, and within what capacity; and how our own 'off-script' performances were reinterpreted with reference to available cultural texts within these activist subcultures.

In this commentary I engage with Coleman and Bassi's significant intervention 'Deconstructing Militant Manhood'. My intention is a further problematization of what they identify as the exclusionary orderings of powerful gendered and heteronormative scripts within left-political organizations that otherwise identify with a project of contesting the inequities associated with patriarchal modernity. I draw on Nietzsche in considering the production and exclusion of societal 'truths', and the (im)possibilities of 'speaking truth to power', when what is empowered is so precisely through dismissal of difference. I affirm the significant political project of 'becoming-other', as a multiplicity of choices that do not collude with contemporary onto-epistemological order, at the same time as noting the seeming impasse of identity politics in shifting the juggernaut of broader disciplining structures.

This discussion engages with Janet Conway's and Sian Sullivan's comments on our article, 'Deconstructing Militant Manhood: Masculinities in the Disciplining of (Anti-)Globalization Politics'. First, we clarify our understanding of global capitalist forms of ordering and of the gendered scripts attendant to them as a response to Conway's call for a more intersectional analysis and to her point about the relationship between the situated practices we explore and the global order within which we locate them. In doing so, we defend our methodology based on an ascending analysis of power and the usefulness of our particular ethnographical approach to carry out such analysis. Second, we address Sullivan's concerns about our choice of an academic journal as the site for a discussion of the forms of gendered exclusion that we have experienced. While we have not been able to engender a space of active listening in the activist groups we analyse, developing our own tools of analysis of what had happened to us and finding this academic space to share them has been part of a process of making sense of our traumatic experiences both intellectually and emotionally.

In a commentary on Coleman and Bassi's study of hegemonic masculinities in the British anti-globalization movement, the author brings to bear the scholarship on the gendered culture of the World Social Forum and through this, suggests the importance of contextualizing such studies in particular places and incorporating race, nation and class as salient dimensions.

"The purpose of this article is to critically interrogate, from a feminist perspective, the manner in which the politics of dissent, in general, and the collective practices that constitute it, in particular, have been portrayed and conceptualized within the field of social movement theory (SMT). To this end, the first part of the article offers a brief sketch of Political Process Theory, one of the most well-established conceptual frameworks within the field, before moving on to examine its impact on prevailing depictions of the 'global justice movement', often taken as the exemplar of contemporary dissent in this field of study. The second part then goes on to develop a critical review of this narrative, along with the theoretical commitments that sustain it, based on field research into the collective practices of feminist anti-globalization activists. Turning to feminist scholarship for help, the article concludes by elaborating on an alternative way of conceptualizing what activists do and how they do it."

Voluntary services and the word 'volunteer' have been discursively highlighted as something 'new' in China in the last few years. The large number of volunteers involved in relief work following the 5/12 Sichuan earthquakes, in the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and in the 2010 Shanghai Expo are examples of this yet understudied phenomenon. This article aims to examine volunteerism and its close relationship with the production of model citizens. It attempts to shed light on how China uses soft power - through appeal and attraction - in its governing strategies. Informed by Foucault's work on governmentality, this article aims to show how promotional strategies and training materials pertaining to volunteering programmes acted as governing strategies that invoked and produced specific power relationships through which the state governed its citizens. Taking the Beijing Olympic volunteer programme as a case to examine how a new model citizenry is produced, I trace three discourses: dream and glory, hosting a great Olympics, and not to 'lose face'. These discourses shape citizens' everyday lives; they help volunteers internalize and embody the ideal of a model citizen, and as such they are part of the organized practices through which subjects are governed in China.

Slum dweller federations, like many other social movements, cater for the youth in their constituencies. This is critical to their relevance as agents of change and contributes to the sustainability of the movements. However, the youth formations are not merely scaled-down versions of the movements and often grapple with a set of dynamics unique to that transitory period in life. This story is a case study of the youth federation that is aligned to Kenya's slum dwellers federation.

This comparative longitudinal study of efforts to promote the environmental sustainability of the Brazilian and the Ecuadorian Amazon regions re-examines the theory of transnational advocacy networks (TANs). In particular, this study challenges the assumption that local advocacy groups participating in TANs are empowered by the experience. As we enter a second decade of accumulated knowledge about transnational advocacy networks, empirical evidence suggests a murkier portrait of the impact of TANs on local activism. Local groups may indeed gain political power and technical capacity as a result of their participation in a TAN. They may also experience a reversal of their initial empowerment gains. Finally, local activist groups may undergo complete demobilization in the aftermath of their participation in a TAN. This study underscores the possibility that participation in global advocacy efforts may entail a variety of consequences for local activist organizations and attempts to explain this variance.