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Social Movements

Research: How A Movement Mobilized Masses

June 18, 2015 First Nations Drum, www.facebook.com , , ,
By First Nations Drum - In 2012, the Idle No More movement (“the movement” or INM) sparked hundreds of teach-ins, rallies, and protests across Canada. What initially began as a grassroots response to impending parliamentary bills that would erode Indigenous sovereignty and environmental protections quickly became one of the largest Indigenous mass movements in Canadian history. “Though it was born largely out of protest against measures in the Conservative government’s fall 2012 omnibus budget implementation of Bill C-45, the movement was more about culture than achieving any short-term political agenda,” said Ken Coates, Canada Research Chair and Professor, Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (JSGS). “Its legacy is a new confidence among aboriginal Canadians.”

Newsletter: Movements And Elections

May 31, 2015 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org , , , , , , ,
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. Popular Resistance was created to help build a broad-based movement that is informed and acts strategically to challenge the status quo. There are so many crises today and we have been focused on trying to stop those crises from worsening (“stop the machine”) while using the fights and partial victories to build capacity for the movement. We have avoided putting emphasis on elections in part because it is important not to get caught up in the electoral cycle which has been nothing more than a periodic horse race between corporate candidates chosen through a rigged system. Instead, we hoped that more people would step out of the electoral cycle and take a longer-term view of the work that must be done to build a movement with real power.

Germany’s Asylum Seekers – You Can’t Evict A Movement

May 28, 2015 Francesca Dziadek, www.ipsnews.net , , ,
In a move to take their message of solidarity to refugees across the country and calling for their voices to be heard in Europe’s ongoing debate on migration, Germany’s asylum seekers have taken their nationwide protest movement for change on the road under the slogan: “You Can’t Evict a Movement!”. Earlier this month, in a twist to conventional protest movements, refugees organised a Refugee Bus Tour across Germany, turning action into networking through mobile solidarity. “We wanted to go out and bring a message of solidarity to all corners of Germany, to meet other refugees and tell them not to be afraid, to take life into their own hands and above all that you are not a criminal,” Napuli Görlich told IPS, tired but relieved after a month of travelling.

To Defend The Environment Support Social Movements

April 27, 2015 Jeff Conant, www.ipsnews.net , , , ,
The 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for Central and South America has been awarded to Berta Cáceres, an indigenous Honduran woman who co-founded the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, known as COPINH. If there is one lesson to be learned from the events that earned Cáceres the prize it is this: to defend the environment, we must support the social movements. COPINH’s leadership has made it a driving force in preserving the country’s cultural and environmental heritage – and earned it the ire of loggers, dam-builders, palm oil interests, and others whose wealth depends on the depredation of the natural world and its defenders.

A Genuine Movement For Social Change

December 3, 2014 Noam Chomsky, www.truth-out.org , ,
The role of the technical intelligentsia in decision-making is predominant in those parts of the economy that are "in the service of the war technique" and closely linked to the government, which underwrites their security and growth. It is little wonder, then, that the technical intelligentsia is, typically, committed to what sociologist Barrington Moore in 1968 called "the predatory solution of token reform at home and counterrevolutionary imperialism abroad." Moore offers the following summary of the "predominant voice of America at home and abroad" - an ideology that expresses the needs of the American socioeconomic elite, that is propounded with various gradations of subtlety by many American intellectuals, and that gains substantial adherence on the part of the majority that has obtained "some share in the affluent society".

Popular Resistance Newsletter: Glimpses Of Our Power

November 28, 2014 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.PopularResistance.org , , , ,
The nationwide reaction to the grand jury decision in Ferguson and police killings across the country taught the social justice movement an important lesson: The people have the power to shut down the nation. This is an important reality to consider. The reaction to the grand jury in 170 cities included people blocking major roadways, highways, bridges and tunnels. The police were unable to stop mobilized people working together to stop traffic. Those involved in the protest were still a small number, perhaps 200,000 people, but even this small percentage of the population had the power to #ShutItDown. In most instances protests were met with support even by people who were inconvenienced by traffic. Now that we know that even a small percentage of Americans, well under .1%, have this power, how do we grow this capacity? How do we use it to our advantage in the case of racially unfair policing? How do we use this power for other issues?

How Did Gandhi Win?

October 10, 2014 Mark Engler and Paul Engler, www.wagingnonviolence.org , , ,
For those who seek to understand today’s social movements, and those who wish to amplify them, questions about how to evaluate a campaign’s success and when it is appropriate to declare victory remain as relevant as ever. To them, Gandhi’s may still have something useful and unexpected to say. That the Salt March might at once be considered a pivotal advance for the cause of Indian independence and a botched campaign that produced little tangible result seems to be a puzzling paradox. But even stranger is the fact that such a result is not unique in the world of social movements. Martin Luther King Jr.’s landmark 1963 campaign in Birmingham, Ala., had similarly incongruous outcomes: On the one hand, it generated a settlement that fell far short of desegregating the city, a deal which disappointed local activists who wanted more than just minor changes at a few downtown stores; at the same time, Birmingham is regarded as one of the key drives of the civil rights movement, doing perhaps more than any other campaign to push toward the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Government’s Arsenal To Destroy Revolutionaries

August 22, 2014 Maya Schenwar, www.truth-out.org , , ,
Defining "political prisoner" is a risky endeavor, historian Dan Berger notes in the introduction to his recently released book on the topic, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States. Too often, it's assumed that political prisoners are people who "haven't done anything" - who are imprisoned simply because of their beliefs. However, as Berger articulates throughout this engrossing, fact-packed primer, most political prisoners did do something: They participated actively in movements to resist state power, often acting outside the bounds of the law. And so, rather than limiting conversations about political prisoners to determinations of "innocence" and "guilt," it's much more useful to discuss how and why the state attempted to suppress those movements. Through recounting the incarceration of activists fighting for black liberation, Native American sovereignty, Puerto Rican independence, economic justice, the abolition of nuclear weapons and more, Berger illustrates how imprisonment serves as a political tool deployed to maintain the status quo. The activists Berger introduces us to aren't usually protesting legislation or railing against particular politicians housed within current power structures. They're working to disrupt the deep groundings of those structures - including the legitimacy of the law itself. In other words, they're shaking the foundation of the very laws that are later used to confine them.

Part III: Tools To Track And Kill Activists

August 21, 2014 Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, www.occupy.com , , ,
The U.S. Department of Defense's multimillion dollar university research program, the Minerva Research Initiative, is developing new data mining and analysis tools for the U.S. military intelligence community to capture and analyze social media posts. The new tools provide unprecedented techniques to identify individuals engaged in political radicalism around the world, while mapping their behavioral patterns and social or organizational connections and affiliations. The range of research projects undertaken by Arizona State University (ASU), a National Security Agency (NSA)-designated university, includes the development of algorithms which leading intelligence experts agree could directly input into the notorious "kill lists" – enhancing the intelligence community’s ability to identify groups suspected of terrorist activity for potential targeting via the CIA’s extrajudicial "signature" drone strikes. Through the Social Media Looking Glass One Pentagon-sponsored ASU project whose findings were published by the Social Network Analysis and Mining journal in 2012 involved downloading and cataloging 37,000 articles from 2005 to 2011 from the websites of 23 Indonesian religious organizations to “profile their ideology and activity patterns along a hypothesized radical/counter-radical scale.”
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