Improvisatory Peace Activism?

2018 ◽  
pp. 208-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asif Majid
Keyword(s):  
Peace Activism

Looking backward to the future: Counter-memory as oppositional knowledge-production in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifat Gutman
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Temporal Shift ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Justice ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Future ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
Activist Groups

This article examines a strategy of peace activism that gained visibility in the last decades: memory activism. Memory activists manifest a temporal shift in transnational politics: first the past, then the future. Affiliated with the globally-circulating paradigm of historical justice, memory activist groups assume that a new understanding of the past could lead to a new perception of present problems and project alternative solutions for the future. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis among memory activists of the 1948 war in Israel since 2001, the article examines the activist production of counter-memory during active conflict. Using Coy et al.’s typology of oppositional knowledge-production, the article shows how the largest group of memory activism in Israel produced ‘new’ information on the war, critically assessed the dominant historical narrative, offered an alternative shared narrative, and began to envision practical solutions for Palestinian refugees. However, the analysis raises additional concerns that reach beyond the scope of the typology, primarily regarding the unequal power relations that exist not only between the dominant and activist production of oppositional knowledge, but also among activists.

scholarly journals Bourdieu and social movements theories: Some preliminary remarks on a possible conceptual cross-fertilization in the context of (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and peace activism

Sociologija ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 377-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Bilic
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Institutional Engagement ◽  
Agency And Structure ◽  
Theoretical Considerations ◽  
Cross Fertilization

This paper puts forth and calls for further unpacking of a potentially fruitful conceptual cross-fertilization between various social movements theories and Bourdieu?s sociology of practice. Following some of my most important predecessors, I argue that this theoretical hybridization could accommodate many threads of social movements research that otherwise would not cohere into a rounded theory. Bourdieu?s powerful conceptual armoury is both parsimonious and flexible and seems particularly well-suited to address the problematic issues pertaining to agency and structure in the field of social movements. In the second section of the paper, I call for an exploration of Yugoslav anti-war and pacifist activism immediately before and during the wars of Yugoslav succession. I perceive a number of politically and organizationally heterogeneous initiatives, taking place throughout the demised country, as a case that can be used to empirically test the proposed theoretical considerations. Yugoslav anti-war and pacifist activism has yet to receive the sociological attention that it deserves. It is a complex social phenomenon calling for a sophisticated and systematic examination which should position it between its antecedents - the embryonic forms of extra-institutional engagement during Yugoslav communism - and its divergent posterity, mostly circumscribed within the national fields of non-governmental organizations.

Patriotic Daughters and Isolationist Mothers

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle M. Nickerson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
The Family ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
Nationalist Sentiment ◽  
The Right ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
Warrior Women

This chapter examines how women developed forms of antistatist protest in the first half of the twentieth century that posed an oppositional relationship between the family and government. By the 1950s, anticommunism and antistatism became widespread mechanisms of political protest for women on the right much as peace activism and welfare work came to seem natural for women on the left. But unlike the later generation of Cold Warrior women who exerted themselves most forcefully through local politics, conservative women of the early twentieth century made their strongest impact by attacking that national progressive state. They also demonized “internationalism” as the handmaiden to communism, discovering another foe that women's position in the family obliged them to oppose. Consequently, the earliest generation of conservative organizations adopted the habit of calling themselves “patriotic” groups to contrast their own nationalist sentiment with the internationalism of progressives, which they equated with communism. This pattern continued into the post-World War II era.

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