Social movements in an era of post-democracy: how the Israeli J14 tent protests of 2011 challenged neoliberal hegemony through the production of place

Abstract

Inspired by the Arab Spring, massive social movements have erupted since 2011 in many places around the world. Despite their differences, these movements have had at least two remarkable common features: all of them struggled for ‘real democracy’ and occupied prominent urban public spaces to erect temporary tent encampments. By focusing on the case study of the 2011 Israeli tent protests, this paper argues that the production of such places of resistance works as a crucial, albeit ambivalent, strategy to confront hegemonic power relations. On the basis of the literature on the spatialities of contentious politics, the article demonstrates that the establishment of more than 70 tent camps in public spaces all across Israel was of vital importance not only to challenging the post-democratic political system but also to overcoming an internal crisis of representation within the Israeli protest movement. However, the case of the Israeli J14 tent protests also underlines that while the production of place can be a powerful starting point for social movements, it is not a durable alternative to multi-scalar, networked forms of organisation, which are also able to confront state authorities in the long term.     

Spatial Displacements: Transnationalism and the new social movements

This paper looks at connections between transnationalism and the new social movements in the USA. Drawing on feminist and 'queer theory' critiques of totalising 'lesbian-feminist' and 'radical feminist' arguments, as well as on the neo-Marxist analyses of transnationalism, I argue that it is possible to theorise transnational 'flexible accumulation' in terms of gender, race and sexuality as well as class. I analyse David Harvey's argument about the role of the 'spatial fix' and 'temporal fix' in post-modernity. I compare Harvey's approach to the analysis of post-modernity with Mike Davis's more local/global analytic. I contrast their approaches with the ways that the notion of displacement can be applied to the deconstructive reading of narrative and representational texts. I conclude with an analysis of the way transnationalism is displaced, as multiplanetary capitalism, in C.J. Cherryh's science fiction. Cherryh links the construction of spatialities to ways of constructing gender, species, and sexualities, as well as to changes in the mode of production. Her heroines, too, as translators, knowledge brokers and political intriguers, are centrally involved in the crisis of accumulation in the novels' fictive universe. In this way, Cherryh's fictions, and her heroines' actions, produce an implicit theorisation of accumulation, based on gender, and sexuality, as well as class.     

Export-oriented industrialisation,the new international division of labour and the corporate state in the Third World: an exploratory essay on conceptual linkage*

The division of the social sciences into separate disciplines is now largely recognised as spurious. Nowhere is this more so than in what we generally call ‘development studies’. Major contributions to development studies have come, and must continue to come, from economists, political scientists, sociologists and geographers–a pattern that is epitomised in the enormous amount of ‘interdisciplinary readers’ in development studies and the manner in which journals from all social science disciplines publish research on development studies as part and parcel of their regular format. As a political scientist my research in general and my research in development studies in particular has recently been informed, amongst others, by scholars who we might nominally call geographers (especially the work of Clark and Dear, 1984; Clark, 1983; Harvey. 1982; Brookfield, 1975; Peet, 1980; and Rimmer and Forbes, 1982). I am pleased, therefore, to be able to publish a contribution to the current debate on development issues in a journal of geographical studies. It is, indeed, most apposite that the following discussion of the New International Division of Labour should be presented to an audience which, more than most, should appreciate the increasingly significant spatial aspects of this division of labour as it strives to locate and relocate major elements of the global productive processes in different parts of the developing world.     

Border food and food on the border: meaning and practice in Mexican haute cuisine

Restaurants and their attendant practices are high-profile sites at which regional and national cuisines are experienced, experimented with, and negotiated. In particular, they are important settings for the consumption and production of national identity—a crucial space through which to understand the coalescing of the material and representational. This article focuses specifically on the production side of the pairing through an examination of restaurants that are part of a prominent culinary movement (alta cocina mexicana) in the Mexican border town of Tijuana. The central argument of the paper is that Tijuana's culinary scene is indicative of the reassertion of boundaries between Mexico and the USA through the intentional rejection of northern stereotypes of Mexican food. The emphasis on traditional Mexican cuisine, rather than an internationally hybrid cosmopolitan approach, suggests that chefs are adhering to a set of rules that reflect Mexicanness. Restaurants propagating alta cocina mexicana work to differentiate the border and act as social devices which both complicate conventional understandings of Mexican food and disrupt hegemonic discourses of the border as productive of hybridity.     

Bridging East and West: Muslim-identified activists and organisations in the UK anti-war movements

Divisive Orientalist discourses and practices, mobilised in the 'war on terror', have been resisted through collaborative political projects designed to contest and close gaps between East and West, Muslim and non-Muslim. Through interviews with Muslim-identified and other British anti-war activists, this paper traces the making of a 'new bridge between the East and the West'. It then goes on to examine the limitations of this political model and describe the search for political relationships that would mobilise Muslim identities in more subtle ways and speak past rather than against contemporary Orientalism.     

Horizontal movements in the ozone layer

The variations of the column ozone densities at Middle-Asian stations and several others in the former USSR were examined by auto- and cross-correlation analyses. Periodic processes with amplitude of tens of DU and periods of 15 to 25 days occur simultaneously at many stations. The movement of this wave disturbance is directed towards the south-east and can also be seen in the weather maps at 500 hPa and 100 hPa, and the driving force is most probably meteorological air motion.     

Feasts and gifts: sharing food in the middle ages

This essay introduces a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History on feasting and gifts of food from the early middle ages through to the early modern period. It discusses the tensions between hierarchy and community, largesse and luxury in the feast, and the continued importance of communal eating throughout the medieval period.     

Interpreting collective action: Methodology and ideology in the analysis of social movements in France

The meaning of contentious collective action has itself always been open to contention. This is true not only of the historiography of revolutions, for example, but also of social science analyses of other, arguably less extreme, forms of contemporary 'contestation'. While up to the 1960s studies of collective action in Europe focused largely on the labour movement, since then much attention has also been paid to 'new' social movements. This article examines some of the methodological and ideological considerations which have shaped the analysis of social movements in France and influenced the debate in recent years as to their significance.     

Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow'

Organic food consumption is one of several new trends in eating read as active opposition to industrialized food provision. While fast food consumption is characterized by compulsive gluttony, manifest in fat bodies, alternative consumption practices are seen to be driven by conscious reflexivity, such that consumers monitor, reflect upon and adapt their personal conduct in light of its perceived consequences. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. One is to examine the evolution of organic food from what Belasco called the 'counter-cuisine' to what organic growers call 'yuppie chow', to show how organic salad mix was the carrier of major changes in the organic system of provision, thereby calling into question the notion that organic food is necessarily an antidote to industrialized food. The other is to problematize the facile dichotomies between fast and slow, reflexive and compulsive, fat and thin, and, hence, good and bad eaters, to show where there is slippage and instability in these categories, in addition to a troubling politics of class and gender. To these ends, I showcase the changing provision of a particular organic commodity (salad mix, or mesclun) in California.     

Rhetoric and pragmatics in Ulysses: how Joyce invented Twitter

Particularly upon their first appearance, Twitter and James Joyce’s unique style had to face similarly infamous charges in that they were both accused of slowly but inexorably corrupting the English language. In fact, the linguistic practices – stylemes in the case of Ulysses – breeding such corruption are often the same: clippings, abbreviations, the dropping out of inflexional endings, omissions, ellipses, the overabundance of acronyms, creative compound words and blends, symbolisations and onomatopoeias, lexicalisations of (often) vernacular pronunciations. This paper sets out to investigate these features, their rhetorical effect and pragmatic function in order to explore the epistemological, perceptive and social context which made it possible a hundred years ago for an Irish modernist to anticipate how English was to be used on today’s social media and on Twitter in particular.     

Resurrections and rebirths: how the Risorgimento shaped modern Italian politics

The Risorgimento was the process of independence and unification of the Italian nation between 1848 and 1860, and has remained a powerful symbol of Italian politics ever since. Elaborating on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, the article discusses the Risorgimento at crucial moments in twentieth-century Italian politics: the 1911 anniversary of unification, the elaboration of the Risorgimento during fascism, the re-appropriation of the Risorgimento by the left and by the Resistance during the 1930s and 1940s, the general semantic space carved by the post-war democratic forces on both right and left with reference to the Risorgimento, and the sudden return to the memory of the Risorgimento in the 1990s and afterwards. The aim of the article is to understand both continuities and changes in the reference to the Risorgimento in twentieth-century political discourse, and to put into perspective Italy’s ‘particular’ road to modernity within a comparative European frame.     

略谈抗战中我党对封建会道门的惩治

在抗日战争时期,中国共产党和其所领导的八路军,在华北前线与日本帝国主义进行了殊死搏斗,给日寇以沉重的打击,同时开创了晋察冀、晋绥、晋冀鲁豫等抗日根据地。在我党领导的抗日根据地中,广大军民一面坚持与日寇进行战斗,一面则在根据地内推行了许多新政策、新制度,从而使这一地区的社会结构和社会面貌发生了根本的变化。在抗战初期,由于特殊的时代和环境,给封建会道门的繁衍创造了一个生存和发展的机遇。各种会道门组织在华北地区大量繁衍,形形色色的封建势力结会结社,秘密或半公开地进行活动。这些会道门组织,利用广大百姓无…