Men’s Activism to End Violence Against Women

Using case studies from Europe and the UK, this book highlights those men who are taking action to eradicate violence against women. Examining the factors that support men to take a public stance, the authors also demonstrate what we can learn from their experiences to help build the movement to end violence against women. This important study will inform grassroots movements working to involve and engage men and boys in building gender equality.

‘A new power structure will be built from the grassroots’: The challenge of radical democracy in Allende’s Chile

Chilean history in the twentieth century poses a number of unresolved questions about the limits of liberal capitalist democracy to effectively include the interests of non-elite sectors. The origins of the contemporary crisis for Chile’s political elites – as well as of neoliberalism more broadly – can be found in the chasm between political parties and their social bases. The parallels faced by Chilean activists and protestors in 2019 invite a closer look at the possibilities for and restraints on popular sector participation during Chile’s experiment with democratic socialism. As an act of radical democracy, the 1972 People’s Assembly in Concepción represented a vital attempt to create new mechanisms for citizen participation within an unfolding revolutionary process. Today, as Chileans grapple with how to construct an alternative to neoliberal democracy, past historical experiments in radical democracy and building grassroots movements can offer important lessons for the present.

On Care for Our Common Home: Ecological Materiality and Sovereignty over the Lempa Transboundary Watershed

For over a decade, Salvadorean grassroots movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) pursued legal innovations with the aim of protecting their water sources from potentially polluting industrial activities such as mining. They initially drafted bans on mining that would preclude the extractive-based development path embraced by neighbouring countries. Eventually, they scaled up their approach and devised a draft proposal for a transboundary waters treaty that addressed the challenges that the ecological materiality of international watercourses poses to national de jure sovereignty. In so doing, the transboundary watershed has become a useful heuristic, a spatial trope to which Salvadoreans have turned to substantiate their claims to sovereignty over the Lempa River waters that El Salvador shares with pro-mining Guatemala and Honduras – claims imbued with an ethics of care rooted in wartime politics and Catholic morality.

The power of terrain: The affective materiality of planet Earth in the age of revolution

This commentary analyzes Stuart Elden’s contributions to a theory of terrain and proposes to further politicize them through a bodily, materialist, and non-anthropocentric examination of the severity of the climate crisis and of the ways in which grassroots movements struggling for radical change are empowered by their engagement with terrain. In particular, I argue in dialogue with Elden that this perspective requires an affective and non-Eurocentric examination of ‘the power of terrain’: that is, the irreducible capacity of the terrain of planet Earth, on the one hand, to severely disrupt human places and territories amid global warming and, on the other, to facilitate collective mobilizations for social, climate, gender, and racial justice.

Minority Activism and Citizenship

This chapter shows how minority activists took advantage of political de-Stalinization and the Thaw to advance national claims and interests. It recounts the 1950s, in which new grassroots movements emerged and challenged nationalizing policies and practices in the republics. It also illustrates the evolving political atmosphere in the USSR after Joseph Stalin's death and mentions minority activists that engaged in rights negotiations with the state and regained access to national rights lost in the 1930s. The chapter reviews the successes and failures of minority activists that expose the possibilities of the ongoing debates about the meaning and limits of Soviet constitutional guarantees of national equality and Leninist nationality politics. It discusses petitioning that is commonplace in Russian administrative and legal cultures before the Soviet period has long been a feature of historical analysis.

Presence of think tanks in the Spanish digital press

The study of think tanks in Spain has been growing in the last few years with an equally increasing number of social and grassroots movements. This article offers content analysis results from a selection of eight Spanish think tanks in the digital press during a seven-year period, adding new conclusions to previous literature for the same period. Not only does this research explore the appearance on the media, but also the type of mentions and authorship of the articles and blogs included in the digital press, contributing to a deeper study of think tanks. The objective of this study is to analyse the limited presence of Spanish think tanks in media outlets and whether their appearance is ideologically motivated. The article built a constructed week sampling and followed a content analysis methodology to gather quantitative and qualitative elements from the selected sampling (n=1,101). The paper concludes that the presence of think tanks in the Spanish digital press is limited, causing not only a lack of knowledge of their existence but also raising questions about how they try to impact on the policymaking process.

NEEDED: Grassroots Leaders to Lead Systems Change Efforts that Reduce Infant Mortality

The death of an infant devastates a mother, family and community. The United States has one of the highest infant mortality rates among the world’s high income nations. Infant mortality is a key indicator of a population’s health and societal well-being, yet interventions aimed at improving societal well-being are rarely a priority when devising infant mortality reduction strategies. Historically, grassroots movements have been critical in advancing social change to improve women’s health and empowerment in marginalized communities. Understanding strategic and infrastructure elements of these grassroots movements is a critical first step to efficiently growing USA grassroots movements to address social systems associated with poor birth outcomes. We provide an analysis of the diverse array of grassroots structures and strategies utilized to improve maternal and child health outcomes. It is time for grassroots movements to form and be recognized as vital players in efforts to sustainably reduce infant mortality in the United States. It is essential to foster grassroots leaders and movements that improve long standing social structures that contribute to poor birth outcomes. The personal and community knowledge of these leaders and community members are desperately needed to save women and infants in our nation.