Revolution S Other World

Introduction: Empires at war -- Civil war in the British Empire : the American Revolution -- The war on privilege and dissension : the French Revolution -- From prize colony to black independence : the revolution in Haiti -- Multiple routes to sovereignty : the Spanish American revolutions -- The revolutions compared : causes, patterns, legacies

Ken Post examines the 'turn to the East' by the international communist movement in fostering world revolution after the success in Russia in 1917, which led to communism's greatest gains after the Second World War. Based on a theorisation of the building of revolutionary movements, this study critically assesses communist strategy and tactics using three key cases, China, India and Brazil, drawing out implications for possible future developments in less-developed countries.

This book explores the significant contributions of African American women radical activists from 1955 to 1995. It examines the 1961 case of African American working-class self-defense advocate Mae Mallory, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina, to provide support and weapons to the Negroes with Guns Movement. Accused of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, she spent thirteen months in a Cleveland jail, facing extradition. African American women radical activists Ethel Azalea Johnson of Negroes with Guns, Audrey Proctor Seniors of the banned New Orleans NAACP, the Trotskyist Workers World Party, Ruthie Stone, and Clarence Henry Seniors of Workers World founded the Monroe Defense Committee to support Mallory. Mae’s daughter, Pat, aged sixteen also participated, and they all bonded as family. When the case ended, they joined the Tanzanian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan World Revolutions. Using her unique vantage point as Audrey Proctor Seniors’s daughter, Paula Marie Seniors blends personal accounts with theoretical frameworks of organic intellectual, community feminism, and several other theoretical frameworks in analyzing African American radical women’s activism in this era. Essential biographical and character narratives are combined with an analysis of the social and political movements of the era and their historical significance. Seniors examines the link between Mallory, Johnson, and Proctor Seniors’s radical activism and their connections to national and international leftist human rights movements and organizations. She asks the underlying question: Why did these women choose radical activism and align themselves with revolutionary governments, linking Black human rights to world revolutions? Seniors’s historical and personal account of the era aims to recover Black women radical activists’ place in history. Her innovative research and compelling storytelling broaden our knowledge of these activists and their political movements.

Stories about institutions and regimes that have failed us are echoing worldwide. This book critically engages the multiple uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) following the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010. It brings together authors who critically analyse the unstoppable force unleashed in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Libya and Yemen. This book analyses the roots and trajectory of the recent revolts in the context of the global transformations that have redefined the politics of movement and revolution. For example, some authors engage extensively with the strategies embraced by the younger generation of activists. Others argue that the power of these revolutions lies in the people’s creative orientations including their collaborations. While much of the mobilization efforts in these different parts of the world happen through word of mouth, radio, cartoons, placards, and SMS services; sites such as Facebook helped people meet each other with a click, carrying their claims through stories, songs, poetry and art of protest across international borders quickly enabling them to rapidly bring authoritarian regimes to the brink of collapse and make a qualitatively different expression of uprisings. All authors in this volume address the question of the stakes in these revolts, as through them, spectacular and everyday violence can be challenged, and alternative social projects can emerge. Neither a footnote to the West's history, nor an appendix to neoliberal capitalist global projects, people are actively drawing on their power to disrupt domination and oppression, creatively responding to global problems and calling for democratic institutions with viable ecologies. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

From an award-winning historian, a “vivid” (Wall Street Journal) account of the revolution that created the modern world The French Revolution’s principles of liberty and equality still shape our ideas of a just society—even if, after more than two hundred years, their meaning is more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the reader in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society. We meet Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton, in all their brilliance and vengefulness; we witness the failed escape and execution of Louis XVI; we see women demanding equal rights and Black slaves wresting freedom from revolutionaries who hesitated to act on their own principles; and we follow the rise of Napoleon out of the ashes of the Reign of Terror. Based on decades of scholarship, A New World Begins will stand as the definitive treatment of the French Revolution.

This unique work analyzes the crisis in modern society, building on the ideas of the Frankfurt School thinkers. Emphasizing social evolution and learning processes, it argues that crisis is mediated by social class conflicts and collective learning, the results of which are embodied in constitutional and public law. First, the work outlines a new categorical framework of critical theory in which it is conceived as a theory of crisis. It shows that the Marxist focus on economy and on class struggle is too narrow to deal with the range of social conflicts within modern society, and posits that a crisis of legitimization is at the core of all crises. It then discusses the dialectic of revolutionary and evolutionary developmental processes of modern society and its legal system. This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society by a leading scholar in the field provides a new approach to critical theory that will appeal to anyone studying political sociology, political theory, and law.

A theoretical account of moral revolutions, illustrated by historical cases that include the criminalization and decriminalization of abortion and the patient rebellion against medical paternalism. We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love, for example, and the proper role of women, have undergone paradigm shifts over the last several decades. In this book, Robert Baker argues that these inversions are the product of moral revolutions that follow a pattern similar to that of the scientific revolutions analyzed by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. After laying out the theoretical terrain, Baker develops his argument with examples of moral reversals from the recent and distant past. He describes the revolution, led by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that transformed the postmortem dissection of human bodies from punitive desecration to civic virtue; the criminalization of abortion in the nineteenth century and its decriminalization in the twentieth century; and the invention of a new bioethics paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, supporting a patient-led rebellion against medical paternalism. Finally, Baker reflects on moral relativism, arguing that the acceptance of “absolute” moral truths denies us the diversity of moral perspectives that permit us to alter our morality in response to changing environments.

Comparative analysis of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. How do we make sense of the Arab revolution of 2011? What were its successes, its failures, and significance in world history? The Arab Revolution of 2011 brings together a broad range of perspectives to explain the causes, processes, and consequences of the revolution of 2011 and its critical implications for the future. The contributors, in this major addition to the sociology of revolutions, step back from the earlier euphoria of the Arab Spring to provide a sober analysis of what is still an ongoing process of upheaval in the Middle East. The essays address the role of national armies and foreign military intervention, the character and structure of old regimes as determinants of peaceful or violent political transformation, the constitutional placement of Islam in post-revolutionary regimes, and the possibilities of supplanting authoritarianism with democracy. The revolution of 2011 is also examined within a broad historical perspective, comparing the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya with such epochal events as the European revolution of 1848 and Russia in 1917. Saïd Amir Arjomand is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. He is the author and editor of many books, including Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age and (with Nathan J. Brown) The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran, both also published by SUNY Press.