Protest Cycle,Political Violence and Social Movements in the Basque Country

A close look at the groups, organisations and social movements among which a terrorist organisation seeks refuge and support, will provide a fundamental and strategic view of its evolution. By means of the concept of a protest cycle, I analyse the relationship between political violence and social movements in the Basque Country. With the help of Tarrow's fundamental variables in the political structure, to which I have added the degree of consciousness‐raising and mobilisation in civil society, I aim to study the protest cycle of ETA's violence from its social origins at the start of the 1960s, through its consolidation in the 1970s, to its decline from the mid‐1980s onwards. The idea I will defend is that political violence should be seen as a form of collective action directed towards a mobilisation of society, and that its vicissitudes depend on the structure of interactions set up between the armed organisation, social movements and civil society.     

Economic Integration and the Politics of Independence

Abstract. Are nationalism and international economic integration irreconcilable? This paper explores the theoretical connections between these two phenomena and develops a framework to assess the implications of international economic integration for nationalist movements in the developed West. We focus upon the structural context of nationalism in democratic societies, emphasising the impact of changes in the international political economy and the influence of domestic institutions. Although the demand for secession may not stem from economic calculations, the expected costs and benefits of independence are constraints to nationalist mobilisation and are conditioned by the structure of the international political economy. We identify three ideal types of international structures and discuss how the strategies and prospects of nationalist movements are shaped within each of them. We find that a structure of ‘institutionalised interdependence’ is most conducive to nationalist mobilisation in a liberal democratic context, but the impact of economic integration depends largely upon conditions defined by domestic institutional structures.     

Ethnic Nationalism and Subaltern Political Process: Exploring Autonomous Democratic Action in Kashmir

Abstract. This article argues that the emergence and development of subaltern political process is a significant conflict dynamic found in the escalation of ethnic nationalist movements. These ethnie‐defined modes of political participation are in turn an expression of the autonomous nature of ethnic nationalism, but occur ‘underneath’ and often antecedent to the organised violence and militancy which distracts most analyses of these conflicts. The article discusses this process of insurgent political mobilisation as a response to the structural paralysis of the post‐colonial state, using the ethnic nationalist conflict in Indian Jammu and Kashmir as the central case study. In its discussion of this case, the article seeks to argue that the presence of such subaltern political process provides additional empirical evidence of the autonomous nature of ethnic nationalism, and its capacity to carve out alternative options for democratic action and popular participation.     

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

ABSTRACT. Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post‐national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of ‘post‐Islamism’ means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation‐state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reaffirmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of affiliation and socio‐political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nation‐state. I point to two different socio‐religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gülen movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo‐Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo‐Salafist movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity.     

East End immigrants and the battle for housing: a comparative study of political mobilisation in the Jewish and Bengali communities

Twice in the recent history of the East End of London, the fight for decent housing has become part of a bigger political battle. These two very different struggles are representative of two important periods in radical politics – the class politics, tempered by Popular Frontism, that operated in the 1930s, and the new social movement politics of the seventies. In the rent strikes of the 1930s the ultimate goal was Communism. Although the local Party was disproportionately Jewish, Communist theory required an outward looking orientation that embraced the whole of the working class. In the squatting movement of the 1970s political organisers attempted to steer the Bengalis onto the path of black radicalism, championing separate organisation and turning the community inwards. An examination of the implementation and consequences of these different movements can help us to understand the possibilities and problems for the transformation of grass-roots activism into a broader political force, and the processes of political mobilisation of ethnic minority groups.     

Minority Languages,Nationalism and Broadcasting: The British and Irish Examples

Abstract. This paper examines the relationship between nationalist movements and minority languages, with particular emphasis on examples from Britain and Ireland. This relationship is less straightforward than often assumed, and the media's role in it is particularly complex. The varying political uses of minority language broadcasting are discussed, along with the implications of the separation between cultural and political nationalism. The notion of the routine banality of daily broadcasting is used to indicate how such broadcasting can work against nationalist mobilisation. Finally, Ireland is examined in the light of the previous discussion in order to offer an explanation of why it was so far behind many other areas in the provision of minority language broadcasting.     

Popular Economies In,Against, and Through the Platform

Behind the conjunctural growth of popular economies in Brazilian cities lies a set of entangled disputes over urban density with important political consequences. While popular economic agents are repressed by local governments, informal work hired through digital platforms grows exponentially and engenders new precarious forms of assembling labour relations in, and extracting value from, global South cities. The contrasts and indirect relations between digital platforms and popular economic agents are important in understanding the growth of platforms, which hinges on accessing low-wage workers whose attempts to make an independent living are otherwise prohibited. This dynamic has resulted in the political mobilisation of popular economy agents and their alliances with urban social movements. Through this paper, I examine how their networking and particular disputes for a right to the city hold potential for the emergence of other economies.     

‘Singing oneself into a nation’? Estonian song festivals as rituals of political mobilisation

This article argues that Estonian song festivals were a powerful ritual of political mobilisation. Throughout their history, however, they had to be accommodated to narratives of ruling regimes. Taking Patrick Hutton's concept of such events as a ‘moment of memory’ with which images of the past are being reconstructed in a selective way, song festivals are on each occasion made to suit present needs. During the history of Estonian nationhood, these needs have been guided first and foremost by forms of political authority: during years of independence, the festivals were to serve different purposes than under imperial or Soviet Russian rule. Thus, the concept of ‘singing oneself into a nation’, popular in Estonian history textbooks, is only partly true. Although the performance of the festival changes only slightly through the years, its political significance changes enormously.     

Sub‐state nationalism and the welfare state: Québec and Canadian federalism

ABSTRACT. This article examines the relationship between sub‐state nationalism and the welfare state through the case of Québec in Canada. It argues that social policy presents mobilisation and identity‐building potential for sub‐state nationalism, and that nationalist movements affect the structure of welfare states. Nationalism and the welfare state revolve around the notion of solidarity. Because they often involve transfers of money between citizens, social programmes raise the issue of the specific community whose members should exhibit social and economic solidarity. From this perspective, nationalist movements are likely to seek the congruence between the ‘national community’ (as conceptualised by their leaders) and the ‘social community’ (the community where redistributive mechanisms should operate). Moreover, the political discourse of social policy lends itself well to national identity‐building because it is typically underpinned by collective values and principles. Finally, pressures stemming from sub‐state nationalism tend to reshape the policy agenda at both the state and the sub‐state level while favouring the asymmetrical decentralisation of the welfare state.     

Maximum Working Class Unity? Challenges to Local Social Movement Unionism in Cape Town

Joint political mobilisation between trade unions and community groups, often referred to as ‘social movement unionism’, has been upheld as a way forward for organised labour in a neoliberal world economy. Analysing the interaction between unions and communities is critical for understanding the potential and actual roles played by trade unions in voicing the concerns of marginalized workers and poor communities. This article examines the efforts of organised municipal workers and urban social movements trying to unite their forces in post‐apartheid South Africa, by looking at the politics of the Cape Town Anti‐Privatisation Forum (APF). While the participants of the APF have in common their opposition to commercialisation and privatisation of service delivery, their political unity is fragile. By contrasting the ‘ideal‐type’ social movement unionism depicted in the contemporary literature on labour and globalisation with the findings of this particular case, we uncover some main dimensions along which this organisational cooperation is challenged. In contrast to the political unity experienced during the anti‐apartheid struggle, the APF initiative operates in a restructuring post‐apartheid economy where bridging internal organisational differences and confronting the hegemonic position of the African National Congress (ANC) in civil society have proved particularly challenging.     

A geography of repoliticisation: Popularising alternative housing models in Oslo

The question of the political has gained renewed relevance in recent years. New movements are challenging what has been called ‘the post-political consensus’ and have facilitated the repoliticisation of a wide range of social, political and cultural phenomena—both on the left and the right. One task for geographers is to understand this repoliticisation spatially. The housing sector is a prime example of how such a repoliticisation occurs. With an emerging global urban housing affordability crisis, housing is becoming an important arena for engaging in emancipatory democratic politics. In this paper, we use Oslo as a case to analyse how housing, which has long been governed through liberal consensus, is being repoliticised. We investigate Oslo's agenda of establishing a ‘third housing sector’ beyond the privatised model, and its role in popularising alternative models in housing. We focus on the mobilisation and rearticulation of the genealogy of failure of housing in Oslo and the alternative housing solutions brought together in the city. Discussing the emerging geographical referencescape of housing as a distinctly spatial process of politicisation we show how arguments and positions gain legitimacy by situating references to other situations and places in a multiplicity of local and foreign arenas.     

Waves,Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

The task of conceptualising social movements draws on a wealth of watery images, from protest waves and political currents, to imagining mobilisations as tides, ripples, cascades or high-pressure hydraulics. Called upon to analyse complex processes, these waters have a life of their own, carrying analytical implications while extending a relationship to water that is never only symbolic and is material, embodied and historical. This article explores the ways water is “enrolled” to understand movements, to advance three arguments: first, these use familiar water morphologies to naturalise particular, located understandings of political change and social form; second, they imply normative claims and ideological affinities regarding political struggle; third, this has implications for our relationship to water, echoing the abstract and alienating “modern water” of capitalist world-ecology. The article considers how critical water knowledges and subjectivities, often sustained by social movement spaces, indicate possibilities of a being-otherwise with water and its meanings.     

Spatial imaginaries and collective identity in women’s human rights struggles in Honduras

In recent years, geographic analysis on social movements has emphasised the influence of actors’ concepts, lived experiences and perceptions of space on the emergence of collective action. Cultural approaches to social movements in Latin America as well as feminist scholarship have revealed that women’s collective action is shaped by their perceptions of institutional and societal challenges, which are rooted in authoritarian and patriarchal culture prevalent in their society. This article combines geographic and cultural approaches to social movements as well as transnational feminist theories to explore women’s human rights mobilisation in Honduras after the coup d’état in 2009. It investigates how a group of urban and rural activists that included feminists, rural women, students and community leaders, adopted human rights discourses and practices to respond to the coup. The article draws on interviews and focus group discussions to suggest firstly, that protests in response to the coup shaped the interviewees’ spatial imaginaries and particularly considers how urban feminists’ spatial imaginaries were merged with those of rural women under the collective framework of human rights. Secondly, the study demonstrates that a collective identity as women human rights defenders was crucial for the emergence of collective action and also prompted the establishment of a national network. This case study contributes to research on women’s collective action to negotiate women’s rights, human rights and social justice in changing political processes.     

Consociationalism and the politics of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland

Population censuses have symbolic and instrumental importance for ethnic, national, linguistic or religious groups and their political representatives. This is particularly apparent in deeply divided societies, where political institutions are designed to accommodate groups through forms of power sharing. Existing literature posits that consociational power-sharing institutions, which are commonly employed to manage inter-group conflict, are likely to incentivise contestation and mobilisation in relation to the census, but this claim has not been tested empirically. Employing the case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, this article tests a proposition about the relationship between consociationalism and the politics of the census: that it is corporate consociational designs that are likely to result in contestation of the census and mobilisation of groups during enumeration, whereas liberal consociational designs will not. The analysis offers support for this proposition, but also suggests that other features of power-sharing settlements, such as the federal nature of the Bosnian state and the majoritarian provision for a ‘border poll’ in the Northern Irish settlement, also play an important role in shaping census politics. These insights contribute to political geographic debates about the census by highlighting the influence of institutional design on struggles over how and where populations get counted, which are applicable beyond the immediate context of deeply divided societies.     

Seeing for the state: Kemalist long‐distance nationalism in Australia

The recent literature on Muslim organisations in the Turkish diaspora context is voluminous as is analysis of Kurdish and Alevi grassroots politics against the Turkish state. Yet nothing has been written on those whose political orientation is in line with the secularist‐nationalist ideology of the Turkish Republic, that is, of Kemalists. As a contribution to this endeavour, this paper explores Kemalist actors' mobilisation in Australia. The paper argues that their current activism is related to a threatened economic privilege, a loss of cultural capital and a waning political dominance in the ongoing social life of Turkey.     

The mobilisation of identities: a study on the relationship between elite rhetoric and public opinion on national identity in developed democracies

Over the last decade, the topic of national‐identity has gained considerable importance after various heads of states have made it an important political issue in the context of ongoing globalisation and European integration processes. There is also a large, mainly historical literature that has emphasised the role of the political elite in the formation of national‐identities. While this argument is widely discussed in both public and academic debates, there is, surprisingly, hardly any empirical research on this issue. We do not know whether elite positions resonate with how the masses think about these issues. We therefore set out to test this relationship by combining the 2003 wave of the International Social Survey Programme and content analysis of elite mobilisation rhetoric from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Results indicate that an overlap exists between politicians' articulation of exclusive notions about the contours of national‐identity and heightened expressions of civic and ethnic national‐identity within public opinion. By contrast, elite mobilisation along more inclusive lines appears ineffective. From this, it appears that exclusionary arguments play a more important role, at least in terms of attitudes about national‐identity, than inclusionary ones.     

Freethinkers,anarchists and Francisco Ferrer: the making of a transnational solidarity campaign

This article examines the transnational solidarity campaign for Francisco Ferrer, the Catalan anarchist and educator who was sentenced to death for his alleged involvement in Barcelona's ‘Tragic Week’ of 1909. The international scale of the protests against Ferrer's execution was much remarked upon by his contemporaries. While historians have examined both the nature of demonstrations in support of Ferrer and the way in which he was commemorated, they have mostly focused on specific national contexts. This article takes a different approach: it investigates the transnational dimensions of the campaign. It places the protests within the framework of the ‘culture wars’ surrounding church–state relations. These cleavages were inherently transnational, and the structures developed by the international freethought movement, for example, played a significant role in sustaining the Ferrer campaign. The article also draws attention to other factors that shaped the protests and transcended national categories: from widespread images of Spanish ‘despotism’ to the way in which a foreign case could be adopted for domestic political mobilisation.     

Majority versus minority religious status and diasporic nationalism: Indian American advocacy organisations

Studies of the homeland-oriented activism of diasporic groups focus on cases where those who share national origins also share common political interests. But other literature indicates that ethnic majority and minority groups may have different attitudes towards their homelands. This paper examines how majority and minority religious status in the homeland affects the foreign policy activism of immigrant organisations. It also examines how competing groups mobilising around foreign policy concerns frame their issues in such a way as to resonate with their Western audiences. Using examples of the mobilisation of Indian American groups around religious issues in India, it demonstrates that there are fundamental differences in the concerns and goals of Hindu American organisations and those representing Muslims, Sikhs and Christian Americans of Indian ancestry. These differences often result in opposing patterns of mobilisation around homeland issues.     

The political impact of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

This paper evaluates the political impact of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, now in its fifteenth year. The paper summarises the evolution of Mardi Gras from a protest march into a month long festival, culminating in a street parade. It traces the development of governance and organisational arrangements. The impact of this event in five contexts is then discussed: the political consciousness and organisational mobilisation of the gay and lesbian community; public attitudes; the major political centres; and the state. In particular the evolution of relations with the NSW state government, at political and executive levels, and with the police is reviewed. The paper concludes Mardi Gras has played a pace‐setting role in each context The success of Mardi Gras, at least in terms of attracting public attention, does however create new strategic challenges for its sponsors.     

The Transylvanian promise: political mobilisation,unfulfilled hope and the rise of authoritarianism in interwar Romania

This article addresses the relationship between political mobilisation by raising hope for change and the increasing loss of confidence in democratic order in the Romanian transformation process after the First World War from a regional perspective. The survey focuses on the political discourse of the Transylvania-based National Party (from 1926 the National Peasants’ Party), which gained governmental power in 1928 through regionalist activism, benefiting from a multi-stranded discourse of permanent crisis caused by living conditions that could not meet the expectations of social advancement raised by the general enthusiasm about the emergence of ‘Greater Romania’. Unable to fulfil its promises of fundamental political change and economic recovery after a century of failed transformation, the Transylvanian-led government’s failure marks the moment of another profound disappointment, which saw the public discourse on political order turn more and more towards strengthening the concept of ‘authority’.