Hezbollah and the Axis of Refusal: Hamas,Iran and Syria

Hezbollah has acquired a dual and contradictory reputation: as a legitimate political actor in Lebanon and as a terrorist organisation in the USA and Israel. This duality can be explained if we understand that Hezbollah is a nationalist entity that defines itself primarily within the Lebanese polity, as well as an anti-imperialist party intent on countering the regional hegemony of Israel and the USA. Forming alliances with Hamas, Iran and Syria, Hezbollah has become part of a ‘rejectionist’ axis that seeks to oppose perceived imperialism in the Middle East; this stance has become increasingly entrenched in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Characterisations that focus on Hezbollah as a military opponent confirm the organisation's perceived need for a rejectionist stance. International acceptance of Hezbollah as a legitimate political actor within the Lebanese polity, on the other hand, would help to bring the basis of the rejectionist axis into question.     

Geography and the outcomes of civil resistance and civil war

This paper reports the results of the first cross-national examination of the impact of the geography of nonviolent contention on regime transitions. Nonviolent tactics ‘work’ in part by signalling the preferences of non-participants through the symbolism of participants, unlike violent tactics. This opens the way for nonviolent campaigns to exploit variations in social-spatial meaning to enhance the informativeness of dissent. Capital cities are one such symbolic place and the main prediction of this study is a positive relationship between large protests and regime transitions in the capital, but not elsewhere. I also predict a strong direct relationship between the proximity to the capital of fighting in civil wars, and regime transitions; no relationship to the proximity of nonviolent contention; and that the intensity of violent conflict impacts regime transitions in a way that is largely independent of location. Results from an analysis of episodes of violent and nonviolent conflict from 1990 to 2014 generally support these contentions.     

The Essence of Islamist Resistance: A Different View of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas

The Iranian revolution—the political realization of the "Great Refusal" of Western modernization—was a direct consequence a half century later of the forced secularization of the Ottoman Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk. With the superstructure of the Muslim ummah dismantled and replaced by the Turkish nation state, insurgent religious movements, from the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite imams of Qum and Najaf, moved into the vacuum to reclaim Islam from the shadow of Western dominance.
Now, history is turning again. Iran has been seized by violent turmoil as it seeks to reconcile democracy and religious rule. Secular Turkey is governed by an Islamist-rooted party. As they struggle to regain their balance, the global economic meltdown threatens a convergence against globalization that joins the Islamist resistance with populist backlashes elsewhere.
Two legendary intelligence agents, a Hezbollah leader, an Iranian dissident philosopher and Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate, examine this historical turn.     

The Infiltration of Terrorist Organizations Into the Pharmaceutical Industry: Hezbollah as a Case Study

Criminal syndicates and terrorist organizations are inherently different, one motivated by profit and the other by political goals. Yet their difference enables them to cooperate for their mutual benefit. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the drug trade; from harvesting and trafficking in illegal substances, it has been an easy transition to counterfeiting and disseminating medications. Hezbollah, in particular, has become involved in the production, smuggling and distribution of counterfeit medications in North America, Africa and the Middle East as a means of raising immense sums of money to finance its terrorist activities. Hezbollah's infiltration into the pharmaceuticals industry illustrates the danger posed by the marriage of terrorism and crime, which arises both from enhanced resources for terrorism, and from the corruption of a legitimate and necessary industry. Understanding the nature and extent of this danger is the first step in preparing to meet it.     

‘Cultures of healing’: spirituality,interdependence and resistance in the African diaspora

ABSTRACT

Concepts of healing and spirituality have remained crucial to generating agency and empowerment for both black women and black men, especially in their diasporic displacement from Africa to the US. Healing has been consistently deployed to fight against the systemic racism and sexism that has pervaded and continues to persist in the lives of African diasporic subjects. Placing the discussion of healing within the current debates about interdependence and spirituality, the paper traces the notion back to its African roots and enslavement times, and attempts to delineate a genealogy of healing up to the present that grounds interdependence and interconnectedness within an ‘ethics of resistance’.     

Framing the Ghanaian LGBT rights debate: competing decolonisation and human rights frames

This paper investigates how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights movements in Ghana, both anti and pro, framed the debate that captured media attention in 2006 and 2011. Decolonisation and human rights frames were appropriated, challenged, and dominated by opponents of LGBT rights, making it difficult for LGBT activists to use them. The opponents' corruption frame overpowered the LGBT activists' preservation frame. When LGBT activists used a human rights frame (comparing sexual minorities to racial minorities and to persons with disabilities), the countermovement appropriated it in a way that excluded same-sex relations by comparing sexual minorities to “deviants”, persons with mental illnesses, and animals. The interaction between the decolonisation and human rights frames was also problematic: the corruption frame not only rendered the LGBT activists' preservation frame nearly useless, but it also made their use of the human rights frame appear to be cultural imperialism and problematised the help they received from international LGBT organisations.     

Motivations for local resistance in international peacebuilding

This article discusses the complex motivations underlying local resistance to externally led post-war peacebuilding programmes. In examining the land distribution process in post-war Cambodia it proposes a five-part typology of motivations for the resistance that frequently appears in the context of international post-conflict peacebuilding processes. The article also argues that a single campaign of resistance is likely to involve multiple actors with multiple motivations.     

Municipal Activism on Irregular Migrants: The Framing of Inclusive Approaches at the Local Level

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which city policymakers in Europe frame the reasons for provision of welfare services to migrants with irregular status. In the context of restrictive national legal and policy frameworks, the article explores a tendency toward municipal activism in extending access to services, providing a typology of six policy frames used by policy makers that identify the intended beneficiaries and stated policy aims. Drawing on interviews with local policymakers and documentary sources, the article contributes to our understanding of the reasons why some European cities provide services to this particular section of the migrant population.     

The sounds of silence: American history textbook representations of non-violence and the Abolition Movement

In this paper we examine how the Abolition Movement’s approach to non-violent resistance has been silenced in four American history textbooks. Despite extensive research that reveals an extensive network of groups dedicated to the peaceful abolishment of slavery little of this historical record is included in the textbooks. Instead, a skewed representation of the movement is conveyed to the reader, one that conveys an image of a movement that contributes to a climate of social violence. Through a critical discourse analytical approach to the data we carefully deconstruct how this process of misrepresentation occurs. By employing the discursive tools of narrative framing, positioning, and stance we lift up what is often hidden from the reader and demonstrate how language use communicates powerful social messaging to the reader. We argue that student readers are left with an impoverished sense of how non-violent democratic change has occurred when presented with a limited portrayal of the Abolition Movement. We therefore emphasize the importance of equipping students with the skills needed to critically interrogate both historical and contemporary sources that purports to convey the inevitability of war to resolve complex social problems; we maintain this is both an educational imperative and a civic obligation.     

The metagovernance of English devolution

Metagovernance refers to a theory of how governments steer decentralised networks by indirectly shaping the rules and norms of those networks. This article develops metagovernance conceptually and empirically by looking at the use of ‘hands-off’ metagovernance tools in the case of English devolution, which encompass the ‘designing’ and ‘framing’ of local governance networks in the process of their reconfiguration. These concepts provide insights into how a Conservative-led Coalition Government subtly centralised power in the process of devolution to city-regions. Our analysis shows how discursive framing, fiscal conditioning and the recomposition of local governance networks produced a reworking of centre-local and intra-local power relations in a way which allowed the Treasury to shape the priorities of a set of ‘devolution deals’ with regional authorities, emphasising boosting economic growth and improving public services.     

Exu is not Satan – the dialogics of memory and resistance among Afro-Brazilians

ABSTRACT

In 2000s Brazil, an unprecedented number of Brazilian afrodescendentes (Afro-Descendants) have been mobilizing to secure rights and resources for the Brazilian black population. From carnival parading in ‘cultural’ groups to electoral campaigning, from consciousness-raising education to antiracist community outreach, black activists have been aggressively taking a critical stance toward the discursive fabric of Brazilian race relations and national identity. Placing examples of their discursive struggles over Afro-Brazilian history and culture under the lens of intertextual and heteroglossic relations, I illustrate black activists’ efforts to dispute what they see as misconceptions about black people and blackness that have found their way into the dominant narrative conceptions of Brazilian society. In doing so, I argue, they are accomplishing something of broader social significance: They are revising not only the history and collective memory of race relations in Brazil but blackness itself.     

A practical model for the management of resistance to change: An analysis of political resistance in South Africa

Change is usually accompanied by resistance -- a neglected and not well understood facet of applied O.D. and large social system change efforts. The management of resistance, just as the rest of the change intervention, should be a planned, systematic, continuous and actively managed process.

The model described in this paper supplies an approach to actively manage resistance according to a systematic and methodological plan. In South Africa this model has been used for two purposes: as a practical management strategy for dealing with resistance during O.D.-projects in business, industry and also in other social settings; and for purposes such as research and as a framework to come to grips with resistance of political parties and other interes groups in these times of major political and social changes. This model is explained and then applied to analyse the resistance of various groups to political changes in South Africa.     

Genealogies of horror: three stories of slave-women,motherhood, and murder in the Americas

ABSTRACT

This article examines three cases of infanticide committed by slave women in the Americas – Margaret Garner (1856) of Ohio, Ignácia (1868) of Paraná, Brazil, and Justina (1878) of Rio de Janeiro. The article argues that each woman sought to dislodge their own as well as their children's place in what I term slavery's ‘genealogy of horror’, making the act of killing their children into an expression of black female agency, love, and insurgence against slavery. The cases of Justina and Ignácia's, I argue, provide a counternarrative to the myth of Brazil's genteel and harmonious slavery, propagated throughout the nineteenth century, by exposing the violence and desperation in which slave women and their progeny lived. In the second half of the article, I examine how cases of infanticide were depicted and used in the nineteenth-century abolitionist poetry of Brazilian poet Castro Alves and noted African American writer Frances Harper.     

Postsocialist patronage: Expressions of resistance and loyalty

Research on patronage in postsocialist Russia focuses on structural and exchange aspects, but neglects deeper cultural forces that contribute to its reproduction. This study adopts a “bottom-up” approach to understanding the culture of patronage by analyzing the claims of ordinary citizens in “letters to the editor” from a postsocialist Russian locality. The common conventions authors use to legitimize claims share many characteristic features with patronage. Rather than judge authorities based on policy or ability to represent citizen interests, authors evaluate the moral and ethical worth of individuals, making their claims highly personalized. Evidence from these analyses suggests clients help sustain patronage by publicly expressing claims in a language infused with particularlism. Andrew D. Buck is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Reading, England. His interests include social network analysis and postsocialist transitions. He has written on aspects of the privatization process, as well as on the relationship between elite networks and democracy in postsocialist Russia. Research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the international Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). Grateful thanks to Vladimir Levitchev for research assistance. Special thanks to Antonina Bambina for her insightful suggestions and criticisms throughtout different stages of the research. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful comments I received from Roberto Franzosi, Jeff Hass, Jorge Rodriguez, and David Stark on a previous draft.     

Humanism in the autobiographies of Edward Said and Nelson Mandela: memory as action

This paper discusses the concept of memory as a form of humanist activism in the autobiographies of Nelson Mandela and Edward Said. Mandela and Said were chosen because they dedicated their lives to the cause of freedom in South Africa and Palestine. Their engagement with the political causes of their countries turned into a concern with worldwide struggles for human rights and racial equality. While Mandela emerged as a vital force against apartheid in South Africa, Said was a well-known and influential Palestinian critic and intellectual whose writings tackle the Palestinian struggle for justice within the worldwide experience of imperialism and its binary oppositions of white/black, male/female, superior/inferior. I argue that these autobiographies bear witness to the plight of Black South Africans and Palestinians as both a shared memory resistant to erasure and a call for justice. Mandela and Said used their personal memories and life stories to construct a public reading of the meanings of the events that shaped them. Here I focus on the concept of humanist and political activity in the two autobiographies.     

From resistance to military institutionalisation: the case of the peshmerga versus the Islamic State

This study explores differing strategies and tactics employed by the peshmerga forces against the Islamic State (IS). This experience highlights a number of issues which are relevant to contemporary security debates. Firstly, the struggle highlights important aspects of the development of the peshmerga and their strategies as an organised non-state military force (defending as it does the Kurdistan Region in Iraq). Secondly, the peshmerga–IS conflict is an important case study of small wars. The strategy and tactics used here are therefore useful empirical references about the effectiveness of military force in counter-insurgency. Finally, the war against IS united the peshmerga forces, possibly for the first time, and effected a radical change in the Kurdish use of military tactics, including the shift from defensive to offensive strategies. The article examines the methods employed by the peshmerga forces against IS, explains why the cases of Makhmour and Shingal stand out as tipping points, and discusses the evolution of Kurdish defence capacity.     

From Exclusion to Resistance: Migrant Domestic Workers and the Evolution of Agency in Lebanon

In addition to hosting a large population of refugees and displaced persons, Lebanon is home to an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 migrant domestic workers. Under Lebanese law, domestic workers fall under the kafala, or sponsorship, system. Existing literature has focused on the legality of the kafala system and the ensuing human rights violations resulting from workers' exclusion from Lebanese labor law. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2016, this article argues that migrant domestic workers in Lebanon have defied their spatial, social, and legal exclusion by organizing collective resistance, triggered in part by the July 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.     

Writing as resistance: Berber literature and the challenges surrounding the emergence of a Berber literary field in Morocco

This article discusses the development of Berber literature in Morocco and the connections between this literature and Moroccan national identity as well as the pan-Amazigh identity movement. Over the last 40 years, the political conjuncture in Morocco has led Berber writers to affirm an alternative definition of Moroccanness, not exclusively based on Arabness, but one in which Berberity is included. This article aims to shed light on modern Berber literature, and on the social space in which it is embedded. It argues that there is no autonomous Berber literary field, the literature being intrinsically bound up with identity issues, but a Berber literary space, located at the intermingling of several fields (the political field and the field of language production in particular). The article first reconstructs the Moroccan political context by exploring the Amazigh movement, its aspirations and its reality. It then focuses on the relationship between the language issues (alphabet, standardization, etc.) and the emergence of a Berber “neo-literature.” Lastly, it moves beyond Morocco into the wider pan-Berber world – the Maghreb and those countries to which Berbers have emigrated – to question the possibility of a transnational Berber literature.