Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the ...

A thousand years of legal protections against tyranny are being stolen right before our eyes. Under the guise of good intentions, personal liberties as old as the Magna Carta have become casualties in the wars being waged on pollution, drugs, white-collar crime, and all of the other real and imagined social ills. The result: innocent people caught up in a bureaucratic web that destroys lives and livelihoods; businesses shuttered because of victimless infractions; a justice system that valu...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An impassioned clarion call to return to the traditional values that served generations of civil rights heroes in order to overcome the obstacles faced by black Americans today“Written in the tradition of DuBois and King, Enough is an impressively powerful and courageous book.”—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the CrossHalf a century after brave Americans took t...

Group Politics and Social Movements in Canada, Second Edition updates and expands its exploration of a wide range of organized group and social movement activity in Canadian politics. Particularly distinctive is the inclusion of Quebec nationalism and Aboriginal politics. Many other areas of collective activity are also included: the Occupy movement and anti-poverty organizing, ethnocultural political mobilization, disability, lesbian and gay politics, feminism, farmers and organi...

By the spring of 1970, Americans were frustrated by continuing war in Vietnam and turmoil in the inner cities. Students on American college campuses opposed the war in growing numbers and joined with other citizens in ever-larger public demonstrations against the war. Some politicians—including Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon—exploited the situation to cultivate anger against students. At the University of California at Berkeley, student leaders devoted themselves, along with...

The ABCs of Human Survival examines the effect of militant nationalism and the lawlessness of powerful states on the well-being of individuals and local communities?and the essential role of global citizenship within that dynamic. Based on the analysis of world events, Dr. Arthur Clark presents militant nationalism as a pathological pattern of thinking that threatens our security, while emphasizing effective democracy and international law as indispensable frameworks for human pro...

Why American democracy favors the affluent and educatedPolitically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system. The Unheavenly Chorus is the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in ...

Debates over social movements have suffered from a predominate focus on North America and western Europe, often neglecting the significance of collective action in the global South. Citizenship and Social Movements seeks to partially redress this imbalance with case studies from Brazil, India, Bangladesh, Mexico, South Africa and Nigeria.This volume points to the complex relationships that influence mobilization and social movements in the South, suggesting that previous theories h...

The book offers a counter-model to the classical liberal theories of civil disobedience, as developed by authors such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Based on a strict opposition between liberalism and democracy it proposes a new perspective for the understanding of political disobedience. As an alternative to civil disobedience the author proposes the idea of civic disobedience. With reference to authors such as Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière and Stanley Fish, and in opposition to lib...

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. How can "Speaking Rights to Power" construct political will to respond to human rights abuse worldwide? Examining dozens of cases of human rights campaigns and using an innovative analysis of the politics of persuasion, this book shows how communication politics build recognition, solidarity, and so...

"A detailed history of the transformation of First Amendment law" from one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers ( The New York Times).Are you sitting down? It turns out that everything you learned about the First Amendment is wrong. For too long, we've been treating small, isolated snippets of the text as infallible gospel without looking at the masterpiece of the whole. Legal luminary Burt Neuborne argues that the structure o...

We the People offers powerful portraits of communities across the United States that have faced threats from environmentally destructive corporate projects and responded by successfully banning those projects at a local level. We hear the inspiring voices of ordinary citizens and activists practicing a cutting-edge form of organizing developed by the nonprofit law firm, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). Their methodology is an answer for the frustrations of u...