Networks of engagement: electronic communication and grassroots environmental activism in Kaliningrad

This paper contributes to a discussion on networks as political spaces by examining the work of an environmental activist group in Kaliningrad, Russia. Drawing from geographic work on communication and from literature on organizational structure and communication technology provides a useful means of understanding and conceptualizing computer networks from a social science perspective. The case study of grassroots activism illustrates how computer-based communication may support a unique space of political activity. Electronic mail (e-mail) communication can be a channel through which activists may overcome the constraints of location as an information container in order to create spaces of interaction and action appropriate to their political agenda. This case study is an example where organization members use e-mail communication to connect their activities, information sources and collaborative partners at different scales to create a viable space for environmental activism and information distribution within a shifting political context.     

Masquerade politics: race,Islam and the scale of Amazigh activism in southeastern Morocco*

ABSTRACT. This article explores the different scalar dimensions of Berber masquerades in southeastern Morocco. By ritually performing Jewish characters and demonstrating philo‐Semitic nostalgia for a former Jewish presence, Berber (Amazigh) activists simultaneously engage different audiences at a local, national and transnational scale. In the first place, they assert themselves as moderate (even secular) Muslims for a transnational audience for whom Muslims' supposed anti‐Semitism has been a mode of excluding them from modernity. At the same time, their performances underline the specificity of Berber culture as part of a national folkloric archive, welcome to a Moroccan national state interested in forging an authentic, national Islamic practice distinct from pan‐Islamic Wahhabism. Thirdly, in allying themselves with Jews, Berber activists distance themselves from a variety of rivals to local political and economic dominance, particularly black “Haratin” whose demographic and economic strength in the southeastern oases has increased since Moroccan independence. In exploring the confluences and contradictions between these different scales of activism, this article points to the internal fractures within social movements organised around religion or ethnicity.     

The future of political Islam: the importance of external variables

Much has been written about the potential of political Islam to affect in major ways the future of Muslim societies and polities around the world. However, most analyses of political Islam that explicitly try to assess its future potential concentrate on its innate characteristics as a political ideology with the propensity to mobilize its adherents for purposes of regime change or social transformation or both. Therefore, these analyses emphasize the inherent nature of, and the in-built contradictions within, Islamism. Far less has been written about the environment external to the phenomenon of Islamism, namely, the milieu in which Islamist groups operate and propagate their ideology. Moreover, only a minuscule portion of the writings on political Islam try explicitly to analyse the impact that variables external to the inherent characteristics of political Islam are likely to have on Islamism's future prospects. This article attempts to fill this gap by putting Islamism in a wider perspective and by analysing the impact of environmental factors external to Islamism as an ideology, and largely outside the control of Islamists, on the future potential of political Islam.