Protest And Reform

Brazil is a country of extreme inequalities, one of the most important of which is the acute concentration of rural land ownership. In recent decades, however, poor landless workers have mounted a major challenge to this state of affairs. A broad grassroots social movement led by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) has mobilized hundreds of thousands of families to pressure authorities for land reform through mass protest. This book explores the evolution of the landless movement from its birth during the twilight years of Brazil&’s military dictatorship through the first government of Luiz In&ácio Lula da Silva. It uses this case to test a number of major theoretical perspectives on social movements and engages in a critical dialogue with both contemporary political opportunity theory and Mancur Olson&’s classic economic theory of collective action. Ondetti seeks to explain the major moments of change in the landless movement's growth trajectory: its initial emergence in the late 1970s and early 80s, its rapid takeoff in the mid-1990s, its acute but ultimately temporary crisis in the early 2000s, and its resurgence during Lula's first term in office. He finds strong support for the influential, but much-criticized political opportunity perspective. At the same time, however, he underscores some of the problems with how political opportunity has been conceptualized in the past. The book also seeks to shed light on the anomalous fact that the landless movement continued to expand in the decade following the restoration of Brazilian democracy in 1985 despite the general trend toward social-movement decline. His argument, which highlights the unusual structure of incentives involved in the struggle for land in Brazil, casts doubt on a key assumption underlying Olson's theory.

Traditionally, the West has seen itself as a disadvantaged and oppressed region; protest against its hinterland status has been part of the Canadian fabric since Louis Riel. Written by distinguished Canadian historians, political scientists and journalists, the 20 essays in Riel to Reform: A History of Protest in Western Canada examines the legacy of third-party politics, agrarian revolt and alienation that has come to characterize Western ideology.

Robert Hornsby draws on a range of declassified archival material to analyse political protest and government repression in post-Stalin USSR.

In 2011, political protests sprang up across the world. In the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, the United States unlikely people sparked or led massive protest campaigns from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. These protests were made up of educated and precariously employed young people who challenged the legitimacy of their political leaders, exposed a failure of representation, and expressed their dissatisfaction with their place in the aftermath of financial and economic crisis. This book interrogates what impacts--if any--this global protest cycle had on politics and policy and shows the sometimes unintended ways it continues to influence contemporary political dynamics throughout the world. Proposing a new framework of analysis that calls attention to the content and claims of protests, their global connections, and the responsiveness of political institutions to protest demands, this is one of the few books that not only asks how protest movements are formed but also provides an in-depth examination of what protest movements can accomplish. With contributions examining the political consequences of protest, the roles of social media and the internet in protest organization, left- and right-wing movements in the United States, Chile's student movements, the Arab Uprisings, and much more this collection is essential reading for all those interested in the power of protest to shape our world.

The social novel in nineteenth-century Britain has been considered the effort of a predominantly male canon of writers. In this ground-breaking study, originally published in 1985, Joseph Kestner challenges that assumption, arguing that it was a succession of female writers – women often meriting only a footnote in literary history – who initiated and advanced the tradition of using narrative fiction to register protest, expose abuses, and promote reform. Kestner explores the contributions to Victorian social policy by the fiction of these neglected authors (Hannah More, Elizabeth Stone, Frances Trollope, Charlotte Tonna, Camilla Toulmin, Geraldine Jewsbury, Fanny Mayne, Julia Kavanagh, Dinah Mulock Craik) as well as more prominent female authors (Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot) and male writers (Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, G. M. W. Reynolds, John Galt, Charles Kingsley). This is an important work for every scholar, student, and reader of nineteenth-century literature and history, women’s studies, and sociology. Kestner’s book will encourage a reappraisal of women writers and their role in Victorian Britain and advance a long-needed reassessment of the traditional canon of nineteenth-century literature. In rediscovering the literary and social contribution of these undervalued writers, Kestner provides a chronological assessment of the female social narrative. Tracing the form from its inception in the late eighteenth century to its evolution in the 1830s and 1840s and to its maturation in the 1850s and 1860s, he reveals the continuity of a developing literary tradition that included early writers like More and later practitioners like Tonna, Stone, Jewsbury, and Mayne. In the process Kestner establishes a new basis for assessing major writers such as Eliot and Gaskell. In consciously using fiction for social protest purposes, these novelists were responding to a society marked by transition. Their common emphasis was on the plight of the disenfranchised in a new era and the need for manifold reforms in such areas as housing, labor legislation, education, childcare, access to employment, sanitation, and marital law. Reform was necessary as England evolved from an agricultural to an industrial economic system. Kestner uses evidence such as Parliamentary investigations and early social reporting by James Kay, William Cooke Taylor, Peter Gaskell, and others to assess the validity of the protests of these novelists. Their impassioned novels supplemented the legislative findings of male-dominated Parliamentary committees and reached an audience, often specifically addressed as female, that government documents could not. Galvanizing readers through their narratives, the socially conscious female writers gained new political influence that contributed to legislative process. These writers also won artistic ground, commanding a serious literary attention and respect never before accorded women writers. It is that serious literary status, Kestner argues, unjustly neglected for so long, that must be reclaimed today as we rethink and revise our view of Victorian fiction.

This is an open access book. The start of the 21st century has seen the world shaken by protests, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests, from the Occupy movement to the social uprisings in Latin America. There are periods in history when large numbers of people have rebelled against the way things are, demanding change, such as in 1848, 1917, and 1968. Today we are living in another time of outrage and discontent, a time that has already produced some of the largest protests in world history. This book analyzes almost three thousand protests that occurred between 2006 and 2020 in 101 countries covering over 93 per cent of the world population. The study focuses on the major demands driving world protests, such as those for real democracy, jobs, public services, social protection, civil rights, global justice, and those against austerity and corruption. It also analyzes who was demonstrating in each protest; what protest methods they used; who the protestors opposed; what was achieved; whether protests were repressed; and trends such as inequality and the rise of women’s and radical right protests. The book concludes that the demands of protestors in most of the protests surveyed are in full accordance with human rights and internationally agreed-upon UN development goals. The book calls for policy-makers to listen and act on these demands.