Between Grassroots Protest and Green Politics: The Democratic Potential of the 1970s Antinuclear Activisim

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Milder

This article narrates the development of the antinuclear movement from the bottom up, showing how local protests initiated changes in Germans' ideas about democracy and public participation, precipitating the Green Party's emergence. The narrative begins with the pre-history of the 1975 occupation of the Wyhl reactor site in Southern Baden. It shows that vintners' concerns about the future of their livelihoods underpinned protests at Wyhl, but argues that the anti-reactor coalition grew in breadth after government officials' perceived misconduct caused local people to connect their agricultural concerns with democracy matters. It then explains how local protests like the Wyhl occupation influenced the formation of the German Green Party in the late 1970s, showing how the sorts of convergences that occurred amidst “single issue” protests like the anti-Wyhl struggle enabled a wide variety of activists to come together in the new party. Thus, the article argues that particular, local concerns initiated a rethinking of participation in electoral politics. Far from fracturing society, these local concerns promoted diverse new coalitions and shaped an inclusive approach to electoral politics.

Rural History ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Cragoe

One of the most striking aspects of recent scholarship concerning electoral politics in the Victorian countryside is the widespread consensus that has developed that landlords did not – as was so commonly averred by Radical politicians at the time – use the threat of eviction as a weapon with which to terrorise farming tenants into voting as they were instructed. In the work of Norman Gash, Richard Olney and Frank O'Gorman, English tenants are represented as being quite happy to follow the lead offered them by their landlords, both from a ‘semi-feudal’ sense of loyalty and from a sense of gratitude for past favours and the hope of further favours to come. Even in Ireland, where a historiography dominated by Pomfret presented a much bleaker picture of landlord-tenant relations, the process of revision has considerably modified the received view. J. H. Whyte has argued that the landowners were far less tyrannical than had been generally thought, and regards as particularly erroneous the idea that landlords had regular recourse to eviction to punish tenants who had voted contrary to their wishes. This policy was not used, he suggests, because it patently did not work. Whyte's insights, though they have been modified in certain respects, were recently upheld in W. E. Vaughan's study of landlord and tenant relations in mid-Victorian Ireland. The history of politics in the Irish countryside is thus seen as having approximated that of England, and recent scholarship suggests a similar picture for Lowland Scotland, where, outside the Famine years, patterns of eviction were similar to those in Ireland. In only one country do the landowners still retain intact their reputation for electoral tyranny: Wales.


Author(s):  
Rakesh Belwal ◽  
Shweta Belwal ◽  
Omar Al-Jabri ◽  
Fadhil Al-Shizawi

Oman has a well-established history of fishing where most of her citizens depend directly or indirectly on fishing or fishing-related activities. Oman's long coastline is home to several inhabitants involved mainly in artisanal or traditional fisheries. Commercial fishing is largely prohibited in Oman barring a few regions. Batinah coast forms one of the biggest inhabited regions for fishermen in Oman. Although fishermen in the Batinah coast account for approximately 20% of the national catch, they face poor income conditions. This chapter gives a descriptive account of fishermen on the Batinah coast of Oman and the reasons affecting their growth and development. This chapter observes that the situation of Oman is different than the other developing countries. Fishermen face problems in earning a decent livelihood, and their expenses affect their savings and advancement. The Government of Oman is concerned with the state of fishery in the region and has put many efforts into developing a decent infrastructure across the region. However, not much emphasis has been placed on the human resources and enterprise. While fishermen need training and interactions with the government officials, government needs to be more observant and concerned about the not-so-well-off fishermen. The role of facilitators such as training institutions and banks becomes important in imparting fishermen the necessary skills and tools of productivity. All the facilitators and stakeholders need to come closer, sharing a common platform to advance fishing activity and its scope in the region.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Clément Mercier

Responding to the provocative phrase ‘The Age of Grammatology’, I propose to question the notion of ‘age’, and to interrogate the powers or forces, the dynameis or dynasties attached to the interpretative model of historical periodisation. How may we think the undeniable actuality of the event beyond the sempiternal history of ages, and beyond the traditional, onto-teleological chain of power, possibility, force or dynamis that undergirds such history?


Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.


The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis of unprecedented scale in modern times. The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan spread rapidly, affecting other parts of China and soon other countries becoming a global threat. [1] On 11 March 2020, the WHO has declared the ‘Pandemic state’ calling the governments to take ‘urgent and aggressive action’ to delay and mitigate the peak of infection. To respond to COVID-19 public health experts and government officials are taking several measures, including social distancing, self-isolation, or quarantine; strengthening health facilities to control the disease; and asking people to work at home. To safeguard the health of athletes and others involved all forms of organized sport have been either cancelled or postponed. These range from mass participation events such as marathon races to football league and even to the Olympics and Paralympics that for the first time in the history of the modern games, have been postponed, and will be held in 2021. All sport in Italy had been suspended from early March and from April the lockdown measures had been extended to the training session for professional and non-professional athletes within all sport facilities. Unlike Italy, the Swiss government has not imposed a general curfew so athletes continued to train outdoor although training in a group was forbidden. [2,3] Some athletes in this situation will be able to build on existing coping resources while others athletes may experience psychological symptoms including fear of being infected, anxiety of physical recovery if infected, disturbed sleep, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and family conflicts.


Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne

The Introduction outlines the history of the narrow content debate. It introduces the famous thought experiments by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, discusses why the debate only came to prominence in the 1970s, and outlines what is to come.


2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-340
Author(s):  
Kate Rousmaniere

AbstractThis essay examines the history of what is commonly called the town-gown relationship in American college towns in the six decades after the Second World War. A time of considerable expansion of higher education enrollment and function, the period also marks an increasing detachment of higher education institutions from their local communities. Once closely tied by university offices that advised the bulk of their students in off-campus housing, those bonds between town and gown began to come apart in the 1970s, due primarily to legal and economic factors that restricted higher education institutions’ outreach. Given the importance of off-campus life to college students, over half of whom have historically lived off campus, the essay argues for increased research on college towns in the history of higher education.


2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry McMullin

In the late 1940s John von Neumann began to work on what he intended as a comprehensive “theory of [complex] automata.” He started to develop a book length manuscript on the subject in 1952. However, he put it aside in 1953, apparently due to pressure of other work. Due to his tragically early death in 1957, he was never to return to it. The draft manuscript was eventually edited, and combined for publication with some related lecture transcripts, by Burks in 1966. It is clear from the time and effort that von Neumann invested in it that he considered this to be a very significant and substantial piece of work. However, subsequent commentators (beginning even with Burks) have found it surprisingly difficult to articulate this substance. Indeed, it has since been suggested that von Neumann's results in this area either are trivial, or, at the very least, could have been achieved by much simpler means. It is an enigma. In this paper I review the history of this debate (briefly) and then present my own attempt at resolving the issue by focusing on an analysis of von Neumann's problem situation. I claim that this reveals the true depth of von Neumann's achievement and influence on the subsequent development of this field, and further that it generates a whole family of new consequent problems, which can still serve to inform—if not actually define—the field of artificial life for many years to come.


2007 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herwig Wolfram

Throughout the world, historians expand the history of their nations and states into periods when these polities did not yet exist. The French speak of their first dynasty and mean the Frankish Merovingians. Until recently French history textbooks even for students in the French overseas territories started with “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois.” In the German Kaiserreich between 1871 and 1918, let us say, little Jan Kowalski in Poznan had to accept the Germanic peoples as his forefathers, as every textbook on German history dealt with them at length. Needless to say, not only German medievalists speak of Germans long before theodiscus or teutonicus came to mean deutsch. All over the world people search for the roots of their identity. Take, for instance, the present preoccupation with Celtic ancestors. Not only the Irish, Welsh, Scots, and Bretons, but a great many other Europeans also want to be Celts by origin. “Their successors in Brittany, Wales, or Ireland do not threaten anybody with Anschluss or war. The Celtic origins, therefore, fit the Austrian neutrality perfectly well,” as Erich Zöllner ironically put it in 1976 after Chancellor Bruno Kreisky had openly declared that the Celts and not the Germans were our forefathers.


1972 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 220-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
James C. Thomson

When the history of Sino-American relations since 1949 is written in years to come, it will very likely lump together much of the two decades from the Korean War to the Kissinger-Chou meeting as a period of drearily sustained deadlock. Korean hostilities will be blended rather easily into Indochina hostilities, John Foster Dulles into Dean Rusk. The words and deeds of American East Asian intervention, of the containment and isolation of China, will seem an unbroken continuity. And at the end, under most improbable auspices but for commonsense balance-of-power reasons, will come the Zen-like Nixon stroke that cut the Gordian knot and opened a new era.


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