Resistance (Social)

Political movements and personalities have been given nicknames in Zimbabwe.
Through an analysis of nicknames used on social and print media as well as in
popular music, this paper argues that nicknames describe physical appearances,
character traits and also utterances they make. Through a close examination of
nicknames given to several politicians and political movements from postindependent
Zimbabwe, this paper argues that these names and naming practices
achieve a certain number of objectives. Initially, it allows citizens to discuss
political figures particularly against the background where some politicians such
as the President cannot be easily spoken about. Moreover, the fluidity of nicknames
allows for a ridiculing of politicians especially when they do not live up to the
offices they hold. Drawing on Mehrabian and Piercy’s (1993) theoretical work on
nicknames, this paper concludes that nicknames can be viewed as what James
Scott (1985) terms “weapons of the weak” given that they have a “hidden
transcript” that make it possible for simple citizens to resist, oppose and challenge
those in power.

Focusing on resistance, this article examines naval impressment in British North America from 1775 to 1815. Although neglected in Canadian historiography, press gangs sparked urban unrest and political turmoil in seaports such as Halifax, St John's, and Quebec City. Impressment reached into most coastal areas of British North America by the early nineteenth century and its sailors and inhabitants employed a range of strategies to resist it. They also confronted it directly, sometimes with violent results. Press gang riots in St John's in 1794 and Halifax in 1805 led to a prohibition on impressment on shore for much of the Napoleonic Wars. Popular protest served as the catalyst for official resistance to the British Navy and had a lasting impact on civil-naval relations in the North Atlantic world. While the study of popular disturbances in Canadian history usually begins in the mid-nineteenth century, this paper shows that they were important in earlier generations as well. This was often the result of tensions caused by imperial warfare and quarrels with military personnel.

This article explores the importance of non-capitalist space within the global political economy. The issue of how to categorise and understand space in so-called peripheral regions such as Latin America has been a contentious one. Whilst many radical analyses have focused on the dynamics of capitalism in relation to the geography of development, explaining how it has been able to survive and grow, this article makes the case for a more multi-linear theoretical framework with which to view the socioeconomic landscape. This is inspired not only by the later writings of Marx but also the specific Marxian class analysis of those involved in Rethinking Marxism. Via a focus on Oaxaca in southern Mexico, this article highlights both the survival and the recreation of spaces of non-capitalism, and provides an argument for why we should consider these to be important for transformative action more broadly, whilst also discussing their potential limitations.

Following attempts to make sense of a congeries of global dynamics, and to render legible events that have concomitantly made the world a space of order and disorder, globalization has emerged as a concept that encompasses countless contradictions. Viewed from a historical perspective, globalization has only increased in its complexity and territorialisation, infiltrating webs of spaces that are continually changing. In light of this complexity, this essay aims to examine how globalizing institutions of culture, economy and knowledge have shaped more local forms of society, and how local subjects and communities have reshaped, resisted, or reformulated global influences. The discussion in this paper is primarily centred on the works of Comaroff and Comaroff (1991, 2009), Appadurai (1996), and Bayart (2005), who together offer insightful and varied ways of conceptualizing globalization and its impacts over time.

In the Gallina district, it is still unclear whether the violence originated with domestic (i.e. local) or foreign agents. This analysis will begin with a brief review of the relevant archaeology of the Gallina area. Following this, I set out to understand who the aggressors might be in this region by employing macroregional spatial analyses in two different case studies. Spatial analysis is ideal for understanding the source of violence in a region. For one, it is applicable at various scales. This is especially important in determining violence between local groups versus violence across a regional landscape. It is only by understanding the spatial patterns of violence that researchers can comprehensively demonstrate the difference between local versus regional, internal versus external patterns.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

En partant d’une enquête ethnographique au long cours (2014-2017) portant sur le mouvement « sur la voie 96 » d’Imider, cet article interroge les modalités de politisation des communautés marginalisées. Située au sud-est du Maroc, Imider est une petite commune rurale connue pour abriter le plus grand gisement d’argent en Afrique. L’exploitation du gisement minier par le groupe Managem, filiale de la holding royale, fait face à une contestation forte de la part des communautés locales depuis ses débuts dans les années 1970. Ce faisant, c’est à partir de 2011, que les habitants d’Imider se sont organisés autour d’un mouvement « sur la voie 96 » pour revendiquer d’abord, un droit à l’eau, puis, de manière générale, une juste répartition des richesses. Les militants ont occupé le « Mont Alebban » et fermé, durant les neuf dernières années, la principale vanne de la pompe à eau ravitaillant la mine. En partant d’une description des manières dont le mouvement « sur la voie 96 » a réussi à s’imposer dans l’espace public et plus largement dans le champ politique, l’objectif visé par cet article est d’inscrire l’étude des mobilisations des communautés marginalisées dans une analyse politique plus globale. L’hypothèse défendue vise ainsi à montrer en quoi une étude qui prend au sérieux les ressorts politiques des mobilisations des marges peut aider à comprendre le processus de changement et de transformation socio-politiques en cours au Maroc depuis 2011.

Türkiye, her iki dünya savaşı ertesi köklü dönüşümler geçirdi. İlki 600 yıllık Osmanlı hanedanına son verdi. İkincisi ise Tek Parti döneminin sonu oldu; Türkiye’de siyasi demokrasinin yolunu açtı. İkinci Dünya Savaşı’nda Türkiye tarafsız kaldı. Ancak, savaşın tüm olumsuzluklarını bilfiil yaşadı. Tek Parti döneminin toplumsal dengeleri büyük ölçüde hasar gördü. Milli Korunma Kanunu, Varlık Vergisi, Toprak Mahsulleri
Vergisi, İş Mükellefiyeti gibi uygulamalar toplumsal katmanları iktidara karşı tavır almaya sevk etti. Devletin savaş içinde kararlarını hayata geçirme konusundaki zaafları belirginleşirken; kitlelerin gündelik yaşamda tepki ve direnişleri de çığ gibi arttı. Gerek çok partili sisteme geçişte, gerekse 1940’ların ikinci yarısında gündeme gelen sosyal politika alanındaki reformlarda toplum tabanında gözlenen yılgınlık ve
tepkiler önemli bir rol oynadı.
Murat Metinsoy’un kitabı işte bu zor yılların toplumsal öyküsünü gündeme getiriyor. Olaylar dizinini tabandan irdeleyerek; kitlelerin yaşam deneyimlerini, serzenişlerini, gündelik yaşamdaki direnişlerini vurgulayarak… Otoriter dönemlerde bile toplumun
gündelik mücadelelerinin ve taleplerinin siyasete etki edebileceğini
ortaya koyarak…
Zafer Toprak, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

This article traces the radical devaluation of the phantasm throughout Western civilization. With the help of Nietzsche's critical perspective, I develop a notion of hystery as the series of collective traumas repeated in each individual's growth, whereby the phantasm changes value from psychosomatic interface, to evil incarnate, to disease of learning. Beginning with the Classical episteme represented by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, then moving up through the Christian era, I focus primarily on Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Bacon, who represent the last nail in the imagination's coffin. The next section examines Nietzsche's rediscovery of the phantasm and the theoretical contributions of post-structuralism that follow in Nietzsche's wake. Juxtaposing Bataille and Deleuze, I look at Deleuze's early enthusiasm and ultimate betrayal of the phantasm, and I posit Bataille's emphasis on the affective force of the mythological phantasm as an insurrection to reclaim our experience and life along with it. The article ends with speculation, offering Bruno's art of memory as an ontic and epistemic alternative to dominant Western hystery, other pasts opening to other possible futures, an ungrounding that paradoxically leads to a restoration of the human house in a re-enchanted cosmos.

Vladimiro Giacché, La fabbrica del falso. Strategie della menzogna nella politica contemporanea, 3a ed., Reggio Emilia, Imprimatur, 2016, rist. 2018.

I diritti di pubblicazione appartengono esclusivamente all’autore.
È consentita la riproduzione del testo o di sue parti solo a fini non commerciali.

Indice:
7    Premessa

11  Parte prima. Guerra alla verità:
15  1. Fenomenologia della menzogna
71  2. Menzogna, ideologia, informazione: iluoghi comuni della «guerra al terrore»
101 3. La Democrazia in ostaggio
131 4. La Sicurezza al primo posto
153 5. Mercato: i mille volti di un prestanome
175 6. Totalitarismo: triste storia di un non-concetto
199 7. Dialettica del Terrorismo

229  Parte seconda. La verità del falso:
233 8. Uomini e merci. Cronache dal mondo alla rovescia
261 9. Potere e regressione
291 10. La fabbrica del falso

315  Parte terza. Strategie di resistenza:
321 11. Spiragli
343 12. Dire la verità
365 13. Smascheramenti
385 14. La verità ricordata
405 15. Parliamo di noi

Los zapatistas devienen de comunidades indígenas despojadas de tierras y de la libertad para gobernarse según la cultura de los pueblos originarios; producto de su organización y lucha lograron formar comunidades organizadas en gobiernos autónomos. Cuentan con una caja de herramientas provista de conceptos teóricos y trabajo colectivo que se usan como armas para analizar las entrañas del capitalismo, impulsar la resistencia política y construir la autonomía de los pueblos rebeldes. Ahora sus palabras resuenan con el propósito de reivindicar la autonomía que erigieron al fragor de su gesta social y de advertir sobre la inminencia de la crisis capitalista y los múltiples peligros que representa la Hidra para los pueblos y las organizaciones que se aprestan a luchar.

The term ‘inertia’ is often used to describe a kind of irrational resistance to change in individuals or institutions. Institutions, ideas and power structures appear to become entrenched over time, and may become ineffective or obsolete, even if they once played a legitimate or useful role. In this paper I argue that there is a common set of problems underlying the occurrence of resistance to change in individuals, social structures and the development of knowledge. Resistance to change is not always irrational or problematic; it is also necessary to allow stable personal identities and social structures to survive in a constantly changing world. I offer a historical and theoretical framework for the question of inertia. Finally, I argue that philosophy has often seen its task to be the critique of ossified, inert or obsolete ideas and social structures, but that it has neglected the positive dimension of resistance to change.

Mon texte intitulé "Dans le gueule du loup" publié par Courtes Lignes dans le cadre de l'action "Vos plumes contre la Barbarie"
http://www.courteslignes.com/

Et si les mots pouvaient aider à supporter et penser l'impensable ?
Courteslignes aimerait modestement, à sa mesure, y contribuer en publiant rapidement des textes qui, à leur manière, rendent hommage aux victimes et tentent de soulager notre peine collective en évoquant autrement la tragique actualité.
http://www.courteslignes.com/dans-la-gueule-du-loup/#more-1828

This article stems from a story of arts education advocacy in the midst of a bureaucracy that misunderstood the purpose of art education at the launch of a new elementary school. Contemporary visual arts education practices overlap a unique period of change in neighboring social science disciplines, a turn of the tide that involves the embrace of narrative methods to rewrite prevailing working models and paradigms of social science practice. Here at the start of the 21st century, art education continues to be practiced in the thrall of a scientific paradigm that misunderstands the greater potential of the arts in education, often imposing a ceiling ill-fitted for arts praxis, arts-based research, or arts pedagogy. The author argues that art education is also at a turn of the tide and surmises some of the unexpected outcomes when new and ex-centric stories of learning and a “pedagogy of possibility” are more thoroughly explored, allowing practitioners to fully rethink an art education practice without taxonomic ceilings and within the shelter of the unexplored labyrinth.

Recreational trespass or 'urban exploration' (UE) is the practice of researching, gaining access to and documenting forbidden, forgotten or otherwise off-limits places, including abandoned buildings , construction sites and infrastructure systems. Over the past two decades, a global subculture has coalesced around this activity. More recently, however, the practice has begun to transform along divergent lines. The aims of the present article are threefold: first, to bring UE and its emergent variants to the attention of a criminological audience; second, to interrogate increasingly spectacular visual representations of UE and attendant processes of commodification; and third, to introduce the rhizome as a way of thinking about urban social formations, their development and appropriation.

Un costo laboral que se calcula en derechos conquistados con lucha y organización. Una planta industrial que se conoce como ícono del sindicalismo combativo y de izquierda. Un día de la bandera que pretende izar la revancha burguesa contra el tupé de alzar la vista. Un grupo de obreros y particularmente obreras que resisten en sus puestos de trabajo. Un conflicto que concentra las miradas. Esta nota es sobre PepsiCo.

... Public opinion of violence is dependent on its contextual advertising as a mode of resistance or inherently negative phenomena. Advertisers can preach anti-violence when broaching issues of gender-based or cultural violence, promote violence as a means of ideological preservation, refuse to create any progressive discourse surrounding violence, or mobilize spending power as support against violence. Regardless, it is of the utmost importance that we are able to identify the moralistic basis of marketing violence, discern the nuances within this understanding, and implicate ourselves in both processes: that of advertising, and that of violence.

Of the challenges confronting the nation-building project in Timor-Leste, the " generation gap " is one of the most important. The history of Timor-Leste, characterized by foreign occupations by both Portugal and Indonesia, has produced an emerging national identity founded on the concept of suffering in the name of national self-determination. Official state narratives that outline a national identity based on the recent struggle for independence have privileged the generation of East Timorese whose members led the resistance movement against the Indonesian occupation. This emphasis has not only overlooked youth involvement in the liberation struggle, but it has also estranged the younger generation of East Timorese from the nation-state. The examination of street art, the medium most accessible to members of Timor-Leste's Geração Foun, or " new generation " , permits exploration of the ways that they identify with official notions of an emerging national identity.

This work analyses the resistance of the subjugated on selected examples of Polish peasants' activity in the serfdom period. My assumption, which lies at the heart of the work, is that the resistance of the subjugated manifests itself on many levels and is dependent on material and ideological forms of dominance. The nature of subjugation tends to render overt

This thesis examines the central driver of recent mobilizations to be the need felt by society to seek a reinterpretation of democracy. This need for change is seen to emerge due to the damages caused to the social fabric by the impact of economic globalization. It is argued that every social movement has its own particular reasons. However, in the current globalization era, everything is connected to each other and drivers of recent social movements are dependent on the ‘legitimation crisis’ of the political economy. This aspect is focused through a case study on the Gezi Park movement as part of the recent wave of social movements. While investigating these aspects, it appears necessary to go beyond the new social movement theory in order to observe accurately this even newer wave of mobilizations. These issues must be addressed, and if they would be, it is argued that recent social movements can be the pioneers of an honorable social and political system in the future.

The investigative custody (2008) and judicial proceeding (2010/11) against the Austrian artist Chris Moser on behalf of his animal protection activities in the "Verein gegen Tierfabriken" - "ein rechtsstaatlicher Wahnsinn" (DDr. Michael Dohr, Rechtsanwalt in Wiener Neustadt).

To refuse is to say no. But, no, it is not just that. To refuse can be generative and strategic, a deliberate move toward one thing, belief, practice, or community and away from another. Refusals illuminate limits and possibilities, especially but not only of the state and other institutions. And yet, refusal cannot be cast merely as a response to authority, or an updated version of resistance, or a concept to subsume under already existing scholarly categories. Instead, the contributors to this Openings collection find refusal to be about the social as much as the political, to be a concept in dialogue with exchange and equality. In The Gift, Marcel Mauss (1967) discusses refusal as the cutting of social relations, or in some instances as the raising anew of obligations and rituals. We seek to theorize refusal in this collection as concept to both think with and think about. We approach refusal as ethnographic subject and mode, recognizing each as making its own set of moral claims, including claims about how we receive, make sense of, and present (or not) ethnographic worlds. Yet why the concept of refusal now? Why not just use the term resistance (see Theodossopoulos 2014)? A quarter of a century ago, Lila Abu-Lughod (1990,

Indigenous Australian underrepresentation in higher education remains a topical issue for social scientists, educationalists and policy-makers alike, with the concept of Indigenous academic success highly contested. This paper is based on findings of a doctoral study investigating the drivers of Indigenous Australian academic success in a large, public, research-intensive and metropolitan Australian university. It draws on the concept of transformational resistance to illuminate the forms that Indigenous resistance takes and how identities of resistance performed by Indigenous students complicate and speak to the students’ notions of academic success. By drawing on ethnographic data, this paper demonstrates how Indigenous academic success is fuelled by the idea of resistance to the western dominance, where resistance becomes the very cornerstone of Indigenous achievement.

“Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry” imbricates Emanuel Levinas’s ethics of the care-for-the-other and the experience of resistance and capitulation in the context of political prisons.  It responds to basic questions: Why, under the paideia of the totalizing system, do we so often come to lose our ethical bearings, our social identities, such that we capitulate in this way?  Yet again, why is it that we also so often resist when resistance seems impossible? Through textual analysis of publicly documented memoirs, interviews, letters and of my own experiences, this article analyses the paideia of totalizing systems and illustrates with Levinas not only the indispensability, however occluded, but also the living presence of ethics of the other in the political realm.

Este trabajo busca indagar en las condiciones y repercusiones de volver a poner en escena una obra emblemática del teatro de los años de dictadura en Chile, "Tres Marías y una Rosa", tres décadas después y sin ninguna modificación significativa. En palabras de Raymond Williams, ¿qué es lo residual, lo dominante, lo emergente? ¿Qué se gana/pierde con esta reposición? ¿Cómo se percibe (se "lee")? ¿Existen imágenes sociales residuales de la dictadura? ¿Qué representaba la obra hace 30 años; ha cambiado esto hoy? Ineluctablemente, estas interrogantes nos llevan al tema de las arpilleras y las arpilleristas, a nuestro entender, central en la obra, pero que es evadido y olvidado como movimiento de resistencia, al no profundizarse en él en este nuevo montaje.

The present work explores the conditions and repercussions of staging anew an emblematic play of the dictatorship era in Chile: "Tres Marías y una Rosa," three decades after that period, and without significant modifications. In the words of Raymond Williams, what’s the residual, the dominant, the emergent? What is won/lost in this re-staging? How is it perceived ("read")? Are there still residual social images from the dictatorship? What did the play represent 30 years ago, and has that changed today? Inevitably, these questions lead us to the issue of the Chilean textile craft of the "arpilleras" and the women artisans who made these ("arpilleristas"), to our understanding, central to the play, but avoided and forgotten as a resistance movement, as it is not treated in depth in its current staging.

The present article argues that despite growing rates of single living worldwide, alternative representations of the single women who do not necessarily spend their life 'waiting for the one' are regularly absent from public view. By exploring the injunction as well as the option of non-waiting, this paper contributes to time studies by stressing how understandings of waiting inform hegemonic and alternative forms of temporal subjectivity and sociality. In the first part of this paper, I explore the ways in which the injunction to stop waiting is articulated in het-eronormative imagery. This call is regularly expressed with temporal urgency, and from this vantage point waiting comes to represent passivity and immobility. Accordingly, women are expected to 'move on' and be active in their own self-governance, which adapts to conventional norms of femininity. In the second part of this article, I demonstrate how the option of non-waiting dismantles and reworks heteronormative life scripts, and offers new subject positions for single women. These reflections propose alternative timetables that allow single women to reclaim their temporal agency and redefine their own temporal rhythms and life trajectories.

In this paper, I review recent contributions to theories of resistance and agency in the context of anthropology of Egypt. Drawing on ethnography conducted in Egypt after the January
25th Revolution and then after the election of Mohamed Morsi as President, I analyse the mass mobilization movement in Egypt called Tamarod. Tamarod led the effort to have twenty-two million Egyptians sign a call for President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood to step down, and mobilized an estimated twelve million to come on the street for a mass demonstration on 30 June, after which Morsi was removed from power. Rather than critique the notion of Tamarod as resistance, as a dupe of the Military, or as the legitimate voice of the Egyptian people and their agency, I argue that Tamarod
made visible, and rendered available for political goals, a social infrastructure of communicative channels in Egypt. More generally, the paper shows concretely, and as concomitant processes, how agency is embedded in infrastructure and how infrastructure is upended in uprisings.

This chapter looks at female suicde terrorism with reference to critical and post-modern stuides of Islam, the Middle East and gender. By deploying resistance the chapter makes visible women's pariticipation, reclaims women's agency, and explores the power of the symbolic in their actions.

*The pdf is a proof, so still has editors corrections on it.

The identification of universal human qualities that make us more or less resilient to extraordinary events, is the main goal of this thesis. I believe that having an understanding of these universals can be an important contributing factor in the analysis of social capacity and capital in the context of disasters. It is being suggested that there is something innately human in the way we collectively respond to disaster. By understanding the limitations of searching for universals, this thesis uses case studies and an interdisciplinary analysis of human and social phenomena in the context of risk, uncertainties and disasters.

In a recent review of our book Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets (Böhm and Dabhi, 2009), Axel Michaelowa has taken issue with a range of our critiques of carbon markets. In what follows we respond to some of the issues raised and put Dr Michaelowa’s book review into a broader context of the political and economic debates around carbon markets. The review confirms the ever clearer fault lines around which climate policy debates are structured and therefore deserves wider discussion and debate.

Este artículo reconstruye y analiza el rol desempeñado por algunos miembros del catolicismo local (obispo, sacerdotes y laicos) en la conformación y el accionar de las organizaciones de derechos humanos en Neuquén durante la última dictadura militar. Se argumenta que la lucha pro derechos humanos estuvo condicionada tanto por la modalidad represiva como por la historia de la sociedad, generándose obstáculos concretos que influyeron en los niveles de participación así como también en la capacidad y efectividad de las organizaciones para visibilizar su denuncia y hacer llegar su mensaje a los destinatarios. Se destaca que el catolicismo fue un aliado clave y que, a pesar de las tensiones internas, pudo actuar como fuente, facilitador y potenciador del movimiento de derechos humanos a nivel local prestándole sus estructuras de organización y comunicación, dinero, personal y organizaciones mediadoras que comunicaban habilidades, tácticas y visiones.

Voi potete essere di mille colori e io posso essere più bianco di voi…e ugualmente io vi chiamo bianchi, perchè siete di qua…là siamo i bianchi mentre qua siamo i negri (ride) (Edgar, dominicano, 16 anni, IV Eso 2 , da due anni all'Hospitalet de Llobregat).

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.

That author of this study draws attention to a case of resistance against the communist regime, which occurred in a Czech rural district almost 60 years ago. The work deals with peasants’ protest rally in front of the District National Committee building in Dobruška. In December 1949, local private farmers decided to respond to official inspections of their homesteads (which forced them to deliver disproportionately large amounts of produce within the framework of the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s agricultural policies) by organising a protest march to the District National Committee. A Czechoslovak national flag was raised at the head of the procession and around 300 people took part in the event. The state security authorities responded with the mass detention of selected farmers, whom it then portrayed as a group of subversives. This resulted in the political trial of 18 farmers, whom communist propaganda disparagingly described as the “village rich” or “kulaks.” The case was heard before the Prague State Court in Hradec Kralove. Prison sentences ranging from 13 to 25 years were given to six people who were identified as organisers, while sentences of 1 to 9 years were meted out to the others. Fourteen people had all their property confiscated while five were subsequently forced out of their homes as part of a nationwide security clampdown known as Operation K (“kulaks”). The study describes what motivated the farmers to resist and gives an account of what went on behind the scenes during the investigation. It also outlines how the treasonous group was fabricated and provides details of the hardships suffered by those who were convicted as well as the difficulties subsequently experienced in their district. The paper draws on documents from both central and regional archives.