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Intro -- Contents -- Preface Political and Social Protest in Egypt -- 2 Protest against a Hybrid State Words without Meaning? -- 3 Exploding into the Seventies Ahmad Fu'ad Nigm, Sheikh Imam, and the Aesthetics of a New Youth Politics -- 4 Kefaya at a Turning Point -- 5 Judges as Reform Advocates A Lost Battle? -- 6 When " Enough" is not Enough Resistance during Accumulation by Dispossession -- 7 Worker Protests under Economic Liberalization in Egypt -- 8 A Feminist Movement in Egypt? -- 9 The Radical Turn of Coptic Activism Path to Democracy or to Sectarian Politics? -- 10 The Muslim Brotherhood Contradictions and Transformations -- About the Contributors.

"Most scholars have focused on The Second Sex and Simone de Beauvoir's fiction, concentrating on gender issues but ignoring her broader emancipatory vision. Though Beauvoir's political thinking is not as closely studied as her feminist works, it underpinned her activism and helped her navigate the dilemmas raised by revolutionary thought in the postwar period. In Emancipatory Thinking Elaine Stavro brings together Beauvoir's philosophy and her political interventions to produce complex ideas on emancipation. Drawing from a range of work, including novels, essays, autobiographical writings, and philosophic texts, Stavro explains that for Beauvoir freedom is a movement that requires both personal and collective transformation. Freedom is not guaranteed by world historical systems, material structures, willful action, or discursive practices, but requires engaged subjects who are able to take creative risks as well as synchronize with existing forces to work towards collective change. Beauvoir, Stavro asserts, resisted the trend of anti-humanism that has dominated French thinking since the 1960s and also managed to avoid the pitfalls of voluntarism and individualism. In fact, Stavro argues, Beauvoir appreciated the impact of material, socio-economic, institutional forces, without foregoing the capacity to initiate. Employing Beauvoir's existential insights and understanding of embodied and situated subjectivity to recent debates within gender, literary, sociological, cultural, and political studies, Emancipatory Thinking provides a lens to explore the current political and theoretical landscape."--

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, disability rights found a place on the U.S. policy agenda. However, it did not do so because social movement groups pressured political elites or because politicians were responding to changes in public preferences. Drawing from recent work in neo- institutionalism and social movements, namely the theory of strategic action fields, I posit that exogenous shocks in the 1960s caused a disability policy monopoly to collapse giving way to a new policy community. Using original longitudinal data on congressional commit- tees, hearings, bills, and laws, as well as data from the Policy Agendas Project, I demonstrate the ways in which entrepreneurs pursued a new policy image of rights within a context of increasing committee involvement, issue complexity, and space on the policy agenda, and the consequences this had on policy.

The recent wave of protests, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement and austerity protests, have reinvigorated hopes for the democratic potential of the Internet, and particularly social media. With their popular appeal and multimodal affordances social media such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have generated both media and scholarly interest in their possibilities for granting visibility to and facilitating the organization of activism. However, the role of social media in sustaining civic engagement beyond protest and fatalism remains under-explored. How can social media contribute to sustaining longer-term involvement of civil society? What is the potential of social media for making available alternative social imaginaries? And what role may social media play in facilitating social change through cooperation with business? This volume offers answers to these questions by providing empirical examples of civic engagement and social media in different societal contexts that explicitly address conceptions of civic engagement.

Over the last decade, the digital technologies in everyday life have multiplied. Our lives have been gradually taken over by digital devices, networks, and services. Although useful, they have also become invasive additions to our personal, professional and public lives. This process has occurred in a globalized and deregulated economy and a few US-based start-ups transformed into an oligopoly of multinationals that today govern the informational infrastructure of our societies. This book offers an analytical framework of the contemporary internet studied through the lens of history and political economy. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are examined as emblematic products of a new capitalist order that is resolutely opposed to the original project of the internet. The author retraces the process of commodification that resulted in financial rationales taking over from collective and individual emancipation and uncovers how this internet oligopoly uses its exorbitant market power to eliminate competition; take advantage of global financialization to exploit human labour on a global scale and to avoid taxation; and how it implements strategies to control our communication methods for accessing information and content online, thus increasingly controlling the digital public sphere. The book reveals how the reshaping of society via private company business models impact on the place of work in future societies, social and economic inequalities, and, ultimately, democracy.

This article focuses on the activism of members of youth party organisations (YPO). The purpose is to explore the explanatory power of three different models of party activism: civic voluntarism model, general incentives model and socio-psychological model. The original dataset used is members of youth sections in Spain (n=2144) including demographic items, social background and some measures of attitudes, motivations and party activism. The findings reveal: (i) some similarity among members of youth sections in relation to activism levels and in a great number of the independent variables used; (ii) a positive impact on party membership and party activism of associationism and expressive attachment to the youth section; (iii) passive and active modalities of activism are related to the possession of money (having a job); and (iv) a good fit of the socio-psychological model with regard to civic voluntarism and general incentive models in active modalities of activism. ; Este trabajo se centra en el activismo de los miembros de las organizaciones juveniles de los partidos políticos. El propósito es examinar tres diferentes modelos de activismo partidista: voluntarismo cívico, incentivos generales y socio-psicológco. Se utiliza una encuesta original realizada a los miembros de las organizaciones juveniles de los partidos políticos españoles (n=2144) con información sociodemográfica, antecedentes sociales y medidas sobre actitudes, motivaciones y activismo partidista. Los hallazgos revelan: (i) cierta similitud entre los miembros de las organizaciones juveniles en relación a los niveles de activismo y en el mayor número de variables independientes contempladas; (ii) un impacto positivo en la afiliación y activismo del asociacionsimo y de la identificación con la orga-nización política juvenil; (iii) las modalidades de activismo, pasivo y activo, están relacionadas con la posesión de re-cursos como dinero (vía empleo), y (iv) un buen desem-peño del modelo socio-psicologico en comparación con el modelo de voluntarismo cívico y el de incentivos generales en la explicación en las modalidades de activismo activo.

Global capitalism is a transnational "operational space" (Sassen) which is (re)produced by the practices of states, policy- and issue-specific government networks, and private organizations such as transnational corporations, global law firms, and standard-setting agencies. This "operational space," which I call the transnational constellation, works through and beyond distinct spatial settings (i.e. local, glocal, national, global), endowing them with a global financial capitalistic logic and limiting the scope of democratic self-determination. In the second section, I analyze political protest against this transnational constellation in terms of democratic theory. I argue that transnational protest and activism have to be appreciated for their reshaping of spaces of the political, for developing and delivering a genuinely global perspective on political problems, and for their politicization of the transnational constellation by revealing and contesting structures and strategies of domination. However, it would be misleading to conceive of protest against the transnational constellation as constituent power. Instead, as I argue in the third part of the article, this kind of protest enacts a parallel world which very often lasts only for a fleeting moment, but where alternative political and social life forms are exercised and experienced. Perhaps their time is yet to come.

A review essay on books by (1) Ondrej Cisar, Politicky aktivismus v Ceske republice ([Political Activism in the Czech Republic] Brno: CDK, Center for Democracy and Culture, 2008); (2) Radim Marada, Kultura protestu a politizace kazdodennosti ([Brno: CDK, Center for Democracy and Culture, 2003); (3) Jiri, Priban, Pravi symbolismus: O pravu, casu a evropske identite ([Legal Symbolism: On Law, Time and European Identity] Prague: Filosofia, 2003); (4) Jacek Raciborski [Ed], Elty rzqdowe III RP 1997-2004 ([Government Elites of the Third Polish Republic 1997-2004] Warsaw: Trio, 2006) & (5) Jadwiga Staniszkis, O wladzy i bezsilnosci ([On Power and Powerlessness] Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006).

"Today we often hear academics, commentators, pundits, and politicians telling us that new media has transformed activism, providing an array of networks for ordinary people to become creatively involved in a multitude of social and political practices.But what exactly is the ideology lurking behind these positive claims made about digital publics? By recourse to various critical thinkers, including Marx, Bakhtin, Deleuze and Guattari, and Gramsci, Digital Publics systematically unpacks this ideology. It explains how a number of influential social theorists and management gurus have consistently argued that we now live in new informational times based in global digital systems and new financial networks, which create new sbjectivities and power relations in societies.Digital Publics traces the historical roots of this thinking, demonstrates its flaws, and offers up an alternative Marxist-inspired theory of the public sphere, cultural political economy and financialization.The book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural studies, critical management studies, political science and sociology"--

A significant body of literature demonstrates that the discourse of laïcité has become steadily more politicised in recent years (Gidley and Renton 2017; Hajjat and Mohammed, 2016). A series of value-laden discursive constructs have come to be coupled with the normative rulings of secularism (Kahn 2007). This has led to an omerta around Islamophobia in the French political sphere. Based on 20 months (October 2015–May 2017) of ethnographic research in the tense context of Parisian civil society due to austerity and insecurity, this paper shows how interfaith initiatives and faith-based social action figure into a new landscape of state-enforced values under a state of emergency, where one religion in particular is under scrutiny. The first argument is that while interfaith education and outreach are dialogical vectors for combating discrimination, they are constrained by the discourse of laïcité and the implicit targeting of Muslims in the state of emergency (état d'urgence). Seldom explicit, the approach to dialogue between religions of many of these interfaith associations--voluntary organisations--lack a critique of laïcité and its epistemological correlation to anti-clericalism. By contrast, faith-based social action, and its inevitable multi-faith encounter, generates more personal understandings about discrimination. Therefore the second argument, is that it is through social action that the recognition of religious identity as a factor acting in favour of a shared secular-religious common good can come about.

Brazilian Black feminism has changed and grown more influential and diverse in the past two decades. One of the major challenges is to understand what these changes mean for women's agency in the different contexts in which they emerge, both rural and urban. To examine the transformations of Black feminism in Brazil, this article investigates three generations of activists over the periods of re-democratization, democratic expansion and crisis of democracy, bringing focus to Black women in the quilombola movement, young Black feminists on the Internet and intersectional feminism. The article analyses traditional and new activist networks that claim multiple identities for themselves, as well as public status as collective action strategies to seize traditional spaces for political activism, grounding themselves in feminism and anti-racism against the multiple forms of oppression in urban and rural spaces.

Abstract This paper explores antifa activists' use of doxing on Twitter against individuals perceived as alt-right militants. Following the principles of Grounded Theory, we collected 4690 tweets published by antifa users between September 2019 and September 2020 and analysed a random subsample of 1638. Results show that antifa users perceive alt-right activists as a serious threat to their worldview and seek to neutralise their activism even at the cost of making them social pariahs. To achieve that goal, antifa activists collect personal data on persons they suspect of being alt-right activists to "build a case" and then disseminate that information through different virtual social networks to the largest audience possible. The aim of doxing is to encourage other social actors to react and take actions that could be detrimental to the individual targeted. The article discusses practical and ethical implications of this kind of political-based harassment and suggests that future research on doxing could focus on antifa blogs and websites, which include sensitive information forbidden on Twitter.