Militant Research

Radio is an old medium that seems to struggle to renew itself. With the switchover from analogue to digital and the necessity to keep up with consumer demand and expectations, radio has been regularly deemed to be obsolete. Radio as a primetime media died, but radio also morphed into something else. During the French occupy movement Nuit Debout in April 2016, people who were walking around Place de la République-the Parisian heart of the protest-might have been surprised to discover Radio Debout ("radio stand up"). Why one should contribute to such a radio when Internet and social networks prevail? With the idea that micro-radio broadcasting holds the potential to empower ordinary people at the local community level, radio-activism is tinkering its way back against the overriding force of computer-mediated technologies. An earlier version of this piece appeared on inaglobal.fr, the online journal of the French National audiovisual institute (INA).

« Revolt on the air - Radio Activism, Protest and French Politics », Explosivepolitics.com, 28/12/2016, http://explosivepolitics.com/blog/revolt-on-the-air-radio-activism-protest-and-french-politics/

Over the past few years, increased ‘unauthorised’ migrations into the territories of Europe have resulted in one of the most severe crises in the history of the European Union. Stierl explores migration and border struggles in contemporary Europe and the ways in which they animate, problematise, and transform the region and its political formation. This volume follows public protests of migrant activists, less visible attempts of those on the move to ‘irregularly’ subvert borders, as well as new solidarities and communities that emerge in interwoven struggles for the freedom of movement. Stierl offers a conceptualisation of migrant resistances as forces of animation through which European forms of border governance can be productively explored. As catalysts that set socio-political processes into frictional motion, they are developed as modes of critical investigation, indeed, as method. By ethnographically following and being implicated in different migration struggles that contest the ways in which Europe decides over and enacts who does, and does not, belong, the author probes what they reveal about the condition of Europe in the contemporary moment.
This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of Migration, Border, Security and Citizenship Studies, as well as the Political Sciences more generally.

The emergence of female bombers is fairly recent in the history of modern day suicide
bombing. This essay examines the history of suicide bombing and the use of women as
human bombers in various terrorist groups currently active through out the world.
Comparisons are drawn between the groups and the politics, and the media implications of
sending women as bombers are also discussed. The author ask the question – do female
human bombers differ essentially from their male counterparts and if so in which ways?
Based on the author’s research interviews of terrorists; suicide terrorists, their family
members, close associates, hostages, senders and sympathizers; and radicals living in Europe
(collected in Russia, Chechnya, Belarus, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Uzbekistan, Iraq,
Lebanon, Morocco, Belgium, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France)1; as well as on
data from experts and other open source materials, this question is explored in terms of
motivational sets for suicide bombing both on the part of the individual and the organization
sending the bombers; psychological defenses necessary to carry out the act; the potential
roles of coercion; personal traumatization; feminism; traditional roles in the societies from
which many bombers originate; and the importance of organizational backing. The author
argues while there are marked similarities between male and female bombers, there are some
essential differences worthy of discussion and further research.

""Squatting in Europe aims to move beyond the conventional understandings of squatting, investigating its history in Europe over the past four decades. Historical comparisons and analysis blend together in these inquiries into squatting in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and England. In it members of SqEK (Squatting Europe Kollective) explore the diverse, radical, and often controversial nature of squatting as a form of militant research and self-managed knowledge production.

Contents:

    Hans Pruijt: Squatting in Europe
    Pierpaolo Mudu: Resisting and challenging Neoliberalism: the development of Italian Social
    Centres
    Gianni Piazza: How activists make decisions within Social Centres? A comparative study in an Italian city
    Miguel A. Martínez: The Squatters’ Movement in Spain: A Local and Global Cycle of Urban Protests
    Claudio Cattaneo: Urban squatting, rural squatting and the ecological-economic perspective
    Andre Holm, Armin Kuhn: Squatting and Urban Renewal: The Interaction of Squatter Movements and Strategies of Urban Restructuring in Berlin
    Linus Owens: Have squat, will travel: How squatter mobility mobilizes squatting
    Florence Boullon: What’s a ‘good’ squatter? Categorization’s processes of squats by government officials in France
    Thomas Aguilera: Configurations of Squats in Paris and the Ile-de-France Region: diversity of goals and resources
    E.T.C. Dee: Moving towards criminalisation and then what? Examining dominant discourses on squatting in England
""

Avtorica v magistrskem delu razpravlja o pedagoških praksah Gibanja delavcev brez zemlje (Movimentos dos Trabalhadores sem Terra, MST) in Nacionalne šole Florestan Fernandes (Escola nacional Florestan Fernandes, ENFF) iz občine Guararema v São Paulu, v Braziliji. Trdi, da v okviru zgodovinsko-političnih okoliščin nastanka države Brazilija in posledično Univerze kot elitistične in izključevalne institucije šola ustvarja revolucijo pedagoških praks, saj demokratizira dostop do izobrazbe. Ker pa pedagoške prakse gibanja izhajajo iz marksistične matrice in je njihov končni cilj socialistična revolucija, so le-te revolucionarne. Izhajajoč iz Gramscijeve intelektualne zapuščine in približno enoletnega terenskega dela, avtorica poskuša razložiti dialektiko med stranko in gibanjem ter trdi, da Gibanje delavcev brez zemlje deluje kot organizacija, okrog katere se združujejo različne ljudske moči. Nacionalna šola Florestan Fernandes pa predstavlja več kot samo fizični prostor, predstavlja prostor, kjer se ustvarja identiteta subalternega razreda, črpajoča iz lastne zgodovine. Avtorica prepoznava pomembnost Nacionalne šole Florestan Fernandes v kontekstu Latinske Amerike, saj ima šola lastno teoretsko produkcijo in pomembnost v svetovnem merilu prek povezovanja z drugimi enako mislečimi družbenimi gibanji.
Ključne besede: Gibanje delavcev brez zemlje, Nacionalna šola Florestan Fernandes, Antonio Gramsci, revolucionarna pedagogika, subalternost.

This paper reflects on the process, outcomes and next steps of an inquiry on the socio-economic conditions of designers in Italy that we co-produced with the “Cantiere per pratiche non-affermative” between 2012 and 2013.

Co-authored with Caterina Giuliani and based on the presentation we did in May 2013 at the Ephemera conference on “The Politics of Workers’ Inquiry” at Essex University (see pdf on academia.eu).

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Between mid-2006 and late-2010 the UK experienced a parabola of spectacular protests relating to climate change, ranging from the occupation of airport taxiways through to the blockade of coal power stations. Mobilizing thousands of people, this ‘radical climate movement’ was distinguished from a popular concern with climate change by its general commitment to direct action, widely-held anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian beliefs, and a stated focus of tackling the ‘root causes’ of climate change. Written from within this ‘radical climate movement’, this thesis is an investigation into the praxis of the movement, exploring the extent to which participants contributed to the emergence of a ‘radical’ knowledge of climate change, and thus assessing the appropriateness (and effectiveness) of the movement’s methodologies.

Driven by an internal debate regarding the movement’s tendency to depart from its radical political roots, the theoretical core of this thesis draws upon the concept of the ‘post-political condition’, a condition of the liberal consciousness that forecloses the very possibility of a political praxis on the climate. It is contended that a specific post-political discourse of ‘dangerous climate change’ emerged in the late-1980s which, defined by an apocalyptic discourse that placed a ‘carbon fetishism’ at the core of its rationale, evacuated the space for political discourse in favour of a general humanitarian effort to forestall “the greatest danger we’ve ever faced”.

It is suggested that despite the efforts of many to confront the problem, the UK’s ‘radical climate movement’ broadly failed to escape this liberal discourse. The research thus turns to the international mobilizations around the COP15 in 2009, concluding that the emergence of a discourse of ‘climate justice’ was a partial attempt to overcome this post-political discourse. From the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) in Bolivia, to the continued organization of the Climate Justice Action (CJA) network, it is suggested that ‘climate justice’ diverged according to two separate discourses - one around ‘climate debt’ and another around anti-capitalist critique. It is finally concluded that a true politicization necessitates celebrating the death of the environmental movement, instead placing our social-reproduction at the core of any claim to an ecological politics.

We are currently facing incredible challenges due to environmental and social crises on a global scale and cities are at the forefront of these challenges. Within this context, this thesis analyses the role of urban social movements in addressing these crises in the urban environment, learning about, with and from their practices. It does so by critically engaging with social ecology, a theory continuously developed by Murray Bookchin from the 1960s onward, which, while critiquing current social and ecological crises, provides a vision and theory of action needed to achieve a free and ecological society.
Specifically, the thesis, using participatory research approaches, focuses on the role of urban social movements in addressing the urban crises which acutely affect Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where intense social mobilizations emerged in 2013-2014. It examines the complex understanding of urban crises by urban social movements, and their tactics and organizational strategies, tracing points of contact between urban social movement practices and the social ecology perspective. The thesis bridges these two, highlighting how urban social movements practices and the social ecology theory can benefit from each other, in order to build relevant and decolonized knowledge for social change.

This dissertation centers on the shifting cultures of labor within the European Union due to economic flexibilization, new patterns of feminine work and transformations in immigration. I analyze how civil society efforts are engaging these overlapping processes through the practice of activist research. These grassroots projects design, conduct and distribute their own research, influencing public debates and everyday understandings of labor. The study focuses on contemporary european movements engaging transforming notions and practices of work: mainly, the increasing “precarization” of labor conditions and everyday life; and the effects generating what these movements call a “care crisis” with reference to changes in social
reproduction. I focus on Spanish feminist organizations as exemplary of alternative development models stemming from social movements.

We, the Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs), propose a specific form of counter-mapping, autonomous cartography, to understand and intervene in the processes at our university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As autonomous, militant research, this mapping aims to foster cooperation among researchers and participants to practically intervene in real problems without attempting to marshal state or administrative power. Our experience shows that 1 Published under the Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Mapping as Militant Research 440

Article based on paper presented as part of Panel 24: ‘Looting, Refusing, Negating, Embodying’ ‘Critical Refusals’ Fourth Biennal Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, University of Pennsylvania, 27-29th October 2011

http://www.pdcnet.org/radphilrev/content/radphilrev_2013_0016_0001_0375_0385

http://web.asc.upenn.edu/news/Critical_Refusals_Conference.pdf

When members of the militant women's suffrage organisation Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) started to go on hunger strike when imprisoned, they challenged the British prison authorities that firstly struggled to find an adequate answer to this new form of political protest at the beginning of the 20th century. With the introduction of forcible feeding, the British prison administration could adapt to new requirements, neutralise the suffragettes' hunger strike and set the terms of the prison battle. As the question of the responsibility of the prison administration in implementing forcible feeding has not yet been touched, this article examines how the Irish prison administration applied certain administrative practices in order to avoid taking responsibility when implementing forcible feeding of mentally competent patients into the Irish prison system.
This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de),

The 'Gran Ghettò' is a spontaneous settlement located in the Capitanata Plain, Apulia, Italy. Since the 90s, thousands of migrant workers have travelled to this " shanti town " transforming it in the vastest recruiting centre in the area, providing cheap labour for the tomato harvest. In 2012 Campagne in Lotta, a large political network of native and foreign workers, has established a project in the Gran Ghetto with the aim to break workers' seclusion and articulate collective demands for fairer labour conditions. This chapter is an account of that experience and of the political struggle which was born from it. The account will be structured in two sections corresponding to the two separate, but intertwined, moments of my own militant research as part of Campagne in Lotta. The first section will be concerned with an analysis of the existing conditions of life in the Ghetto: here workers' exploitation will be explained against the backdrop of the intersection between Capital and the many governmental tools for the control of migrant mobility. The second section, furthermore, will be concerned with Campagne in Lotta's political intervention in the Ghetto. The practices of Campagne in Lotta, I will argue, are based on the appreciation of and contribution to informal networks of migrant relations. These networks constitute the infrastructure of a virtual migrant metropolis, connecting migrant's movements on a global scale. In the three years of its existence Campagne in Lotta has managed to become a part of these travelling relations: moving across the metropolis through the accounts of people who have participated in its projects and finding new places of intervention as it's members change location. The embeddedness of Campagne in Lotta in this metropolis, therefore, constitutes its biggest strength and is precondition for a radically different political process to take place.

Kashmir 2016 is distinctly different, when the gun first surfaced in the valley. A new breed of militants is rising in Kashmir-young, educated, tech-savvy. The new generation has left all the comforts and chosen the path of violence. The ground reality in Kashmir is changing slowly but surely and it can be gauged even from plain statistics. If in 2013, thirty ones local youths join militancy, the number for 2015 jumped to 66, according to police records. The locals outnumbering what the security establishment refers to as " foreign terrorists ". The youth of Kashmir are feeling frustrated, finding opportunities closing upon them. They find " Burhan " a new age militant, to be more of a role model than anybody else in the state. This is highly a disturbing trend and unfortunately for the last one or two years this has been picking up. All this makes for a complex situation and the state is clearly steering at a gloomy picture. In this paper, an effort would be made of to stretch the issues which pushed educated youth to knock the door of militants by coming into the forefront again? Towards this; the article is divided into two parts. In the first portion, the author has disseminate the various issues that pushed youth to join the militant ranks and subsequently in the latter part effort was made out by intending policy action.

This paper is a critical reflection on, and theorisation of, the issues arising from (and explored during) Militant Training Camp . 
Militant Training Camp was a social, experimental, performance camp held at Arcadia Missa Gallery in Peckham (March 2012).  It involved physical and mental training in preparation for the inevitable apocalypse and collapse of capitalism.  The weeklong camp was designed to explore the activity and mind-set of militant groups and the idea of non-pacifist activity within wider social movements.  Through physical and mental exercise the camp aimed to empower the group of artist-volunteers to be active and resistant to the last desperate acts of capitalism. 
The project aimed to question whether it is possible to replicate, in just one week, the conditions and mind-set created in real-life militant training camps.  In order to test this hypothesis it was essential that the camp be residential. The project always intended to bring together likeminded artists and thinkers and to provide a space in which a process of radicalisation of thought could occur.  This was supported through a strict regime of exercise, propaganda films, basic living conditions and diet with a lack of communication to the outside world.
The Project directly engaged with both the failings and successes of a historically strategic position (in the extreme) that was held by groups such as The Weather Men, Angry Brigade, and the Baader Meinhof Gang as well as in art groups like King Mob and Black Mask.
This paper questions the notion of a political art practice that engages with activism and organisation directly using Boris Groys’ ‘Art Power’ as a point of departure. We then explore the problems and advantages with documentation and the risks of becoming an object/image/artefact that can exist in a context well removed from its original provenance.

In this study, membership processes in political parties towards young people and specific positions of youth inside the party space are examined within the framework of concepts such as space, apparatus, habitus, capital, and illusio introduced by Bourdieu through an analysis of interviews conducted with young people who have management responsibilities in the AKP youth branches and MHP Grey Wolves. In this framework youth branches are taken to be a sub-space, especially a site for struggle, where the actors take action with their diverse capital accumulations. Throughout the article the dispossession of the youth in politics is addressed through issues such as relationship of the branches with the main party structure, intra-party representation mechanisms and democracy, and perception of the leader.

he state of Pakistan has, unfortunately, been at the vortex of various forms of terrorism and insurgent activities for several decades. he country is internally crippled by terrorism and the vast lows of funds to violent extremist groups that operate within its borders, even as the danger from this domestic infrastructure of terrorism percolates to other parts of the region and the world. Pakistanbased terrorist groups use a range of instrumentalities to raise inances, which include, among other things the manipulation of hawala (an informal system of money transfer), abuse of the charitable sector, narco-inance, and abduction for ransom. Raising money from criminal activities has long been a forte of militant organizations in Pakistan, and the Taliban are not loath to utilize these same methods. Ostensibly, such activities in a dar-ul-harb 3 (a war zone) are perceived to be legal under Qur'anic law. 4 Worse, Pakistan's state institutions are deeply complicit in a wide range of terror inance operations, prominently including the printing and distribution of counterfeit Indian rupees, as well as long-term involvement in drug running to facilitate the operations of the Taliban in Afghanistan. 5 he attitude of Pakistan's government toward terror groups could be described as dualistic. On the one hand, terrorists are criminalized by law; on the other hand, the Pakistani government provides them with both logistical and inancial support. 6

Diese Forschungsarbeit beschäftigt sich mit Formen der „indigenen“ Selbstorganisation im Kontext sozialer und politischer Konflikte in dem mexikanischen Bundesstaat Oaxaca. Ausgehend von der These, dass die Einbeziehung hochkomplexer sozialer Wirklichkeiten in gesellschaftlichen Systemen notwendig ist um die Reproduktion ungleicher Machtverhältnisse zu vermeiden, ergibt sich die Fragestellung, inwiefern Selbstorganisationsprozesse diese Einbeziehung leisten und wie sie dies tun. Also, ob und in welcher Art und Weise bei der untersuchten sozialen Bewegungen diese multiplen und komplexen sozialen Wirklichkeiten, bzw. „Lebenswelten“ in der politischen Arena ausdruckt finden. Die seit 1990 aktive Organizaciones Indias de Derechos Humanos en Oaxaca (OIDHO) bildet das Hauptsubjekt dieser Arbeit. Dabei werden der Diskurs und das Handeln der OIDHO untersucht sowie ihre Beziehungen mit anderen Bewegungen, die auf die Emanzipation unterdrückter sozialen Gruppen zielen. Die Ergebnisse der Analyse von Beobachtungen und Interviews werden mit Konzepten der hermeneutischen Wissenssoziologie und der Theorien der Sozialen Bewegungen in Verbindung gesetzt.

La periferia orizzontale Un modello di etnografia collaborativa a Barcellona istitutoeuroarabo.it/DM/la-periferia-orizzontale-un-modello-di-etnografia-collaborativa-a-barcellona/ di Eugenio Giorgianni A metà dello scorso, torrido mese di agosto, un furgoncino percorre a zigzag la Rambla di Barcellona, uccidendo 13 passanti e ferendone 80. La nuova emergenza del terrorismo islamista in Europa ripropone il copione ormai consueto: il commando di terroristi ragazzini, la commozione pubblica, le libertà occidentali sotto attacco. Barcellona catalizza l'attenzione del mondo: sullo sfondo della tragedia, la città multiculturale del turismo e del divertimento, la Sagrada Familia e l'architettura fantastica del modernismo, la gente che grida in catalano di non avere paura tra le vie del centro. Le strategie dell'ISIS, la giunta progressista di Ada Colau, e le testate giornalistiche di mezzo mondo concordano appieno su quali sono-e quali devono essere-i luoghi simbolo della città, questa meravigliosa

Since last decade, the world has been facing Muslim militancy as the most tough challenge and threat. Activities of global Muslim militant groups like Al Qaeda and Taliban have engulfed a large number of human lives have cost dollars in billions. The militants as a base, cite different verses of the holy Quran related to dominancy of Islam over all religions, Islam as the only acceptable religion to God, Killing Polytheists and people of the books a religious obligation and thus making an Islamic state. It is argued in this study that they (militant) are not alone in basing their militant activities on divine obligations. Some very prominent, well learned Muslim scholars (of which Maulana Shabeer Ahmad Usmani and Maulana Syed Mawdudi are the focus of this study) are also projecting and promoting the same concept and ideology. The study highlights how these scholars interpret these specific verses of the Holy Quran and how their concepts and explanations are countered by scholars like Ameen Ihsan Islahi and Javed Ahmad Ghamidi. Upon comparing both the groups' interpretations, the study found that these verses which are the base of Muslim Militants agenda mean something very different from militant's narrative. This profound counter narrative can remove the base provided to militants and can serve as a soft tool to handle them ideologically, and thus reducing any further militancy in the name of Islam and Quran.

The problematic of the activist/academic relationship has been a source of sustained concern for radical Geographers over the past 15 years. Drawing on my personal experience within the radical climate movement(s), this paper looks to develop on the commitments of militant research, contribute to the development of militant ethnography as a research approach and consider the subsequent implications for thinking through the activist/academic problematic. Elaborating on the epistemological distinction between 'truth relaying' and 'knowledge production' , it is contended that militant research is an orientation and process synonymous with the disavowal of positivist knowledge and the construction of situated partisan knowledge(s). Rather than the (social) science of transmitting truth, research thus becomes the art of producing tools you can fight with. From this perspective, the activist/academic problematic is not a 'neutral' problem but a product of a certain way of knowing associated with the academy. The paper concludes that our concern should not be to navigate between (and thus reiterate) the fields of 'activism' and 'academy' , but to surpass the problematic altogether. We are tasked not with reproducing the university in its current form, but reimagining it as a machine for the production of other worlds.

Les ZAD ou Zones À Défendre sont caractérisées comme un espace, souvent rural et occupé par des militants, qui s’opposent à un projet d’aménagement susceptible de porter atteinte à l’environnement et à l’intérêt de la population locale. En France, la première ZAD qui se qualifie comme telle est constituée en 2009 à Notre-Dame-des-Landes (NDDL) à Nantes dans un mouvement d’opposition au projet de construction d’extension d’un aéroport.

De nombreux travaux ont traité de cette nouvelle forme d'engagement politique par l'occupation du territoire tant en sociologie de l'urbanisme qu'en sciences politiques. Il s'agit ici d'actualiser les travaux existants par une observation participante à la ZAD du Carnet située en Loire-Atlantique et d'étudier particulièrement les trajectoires militantes des occupants afin d'établir une typologie d'individus sur site.

L'objectif de ce travail est ainsi de tester la relation entre radicalité politique et ZAD. Quel est le degré d’engagement politique et d'implication la lutte des occupants ? Le mouvement zadiste relève-t-il de la radicalité politique ?