Rio de Janeiro's favelas have become well-known sites of gang and police violence. Since the 1970s, dangerous networks between drug traffickers and corrupt state actors have transformed these poor neighborhoods into sites of armed conflict and political repression, limiting residents' ability to speak out against violence or demand their democratic rights. Despite these challenges, nonviolent politics remains an integral element in Cidade de Deus--City of God--one of Rio's most dangerous and famous favelas. In Activism under Fire, Anjuli Fahlberg provides an original account of how conflict activism operates in Cidade de Deus. Drawing on fieldwork, virtual ethnography, and participatory action research, Fahlberg documents how activists strategically navigate local constraints and opportunities--including gendered governing dynamics and racialized practices of solidarity--to create space for non-violent governance amid armed repression. By working within urban, national, and transnational political networks and social movements, local activists bring resources into their neighborhood and protest violence while avoiding dangerous alliances. Activism under Fire demonstrates that non-violent collective action is possible amid extreme poverty and violence, and shows what strategies enable it to survive and effect political change. In so doing, Fahlberg reveals the possibilities for collective action in violent and chaotic democratic states, not only in Latin America, but throughout the world.

This wide-ranging anthology compares the social, political, and economic situations of women during the civil wars in Sri Lanka and the former Yugoslavia

Donald Trump's presidency offered Americans a dire warning regarding the vulnerabilities in their democracy, but the threat is broader and deeper-and looms still. "January 6th was a disgrace," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell solemnly intoned at the end of Donald Trump's second impeachment trial on February 13, 2021. As to the culprit, Senator McConnell declared that "there is no question that President Donald Trump is practically and morally responsible." Before Trump even ran for President, his disdain for the rules, procedures, and norms of American democracy and the US Constitution was well-known and led prominent Republicans to repudiate him as "unfit" for the GOP nomination. Given the clear-eyed assessment of candidate Trump, why did the Republican Party nominate him as its presidential candidate in 2016 and then stand by him during the next four years? Much of the attention paid to Trump's rise to power has focused on his corrosive personality and divisive style of governing. But he alone is not the problem. The vulnerability is much broader and deeper. The ascendance of Trump is the culmination of nearly 250 years of political reforms that gradually ceded party nominations to small cliques of ideologically-motivated party activists, interest groups, and donors. Trump's rise is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of trends deeply rooted in American history but which accelerated in the last few decades. In Democracy under Fire, Lawrence Jacobs provides a highly engaging, if disturbing, history of political reforms since the late-eighteenth century that over time dangerously weakened democracy, widened political inequality as well as racial disparities, and rewarded toxic political polarization. Jacobs' searing indictment of political reformers concludes with recommendations to restrain the unbridled ambition of politicians who thrive on division and instead generate broad citizen engagement with tangible policy making.

Abramovitz argues that welfare reform has penalized single motherhood; exposed poor women to the risks of hunger, hopelessness, and male violence: swept them into low paid jobs, and left many former recipients unable to make ends meet.".

This book examines the creation of lesbian communities in India from the 1980s through the early 2000s and explores the everyday practices that comprise queer activism in India.

This book serves as an introduction to the extraordinary diversity of women’s activism. Paula Bartley's original research is supported by a range of writing to provide a powerful impression of the actions taken by groups of women from across the social and political spectrum, making the book invaluable to both students and interested readers. These women set out to make a difference to their locality, their country and sometimes the world. The story of women’s activism embodies stimulating accounts of progress and reversals, of commitment and uncertainty, of competing rights and challenging wrongs. The story of women’s activism is not tidy or well-ordered. It is messy and unorthodox. And full of surprises.

This volume of essays, all authored by practicing Jungian psychoanalysts, examines and illuminates ways of working with individual analytic and therapeutic clients in the context of powerful and current collective forces, in the United States and beyond. One of Carl Jung’s central achievements was his clear recognition that the psyche is a locus not only of individual and personal experiences but also of social, collective, and even cosmological experiences. This important insight on Jung’s part both opens broad vistas for psychoanalytic practice and poses potential challenges for the psychoanalytic practitioner attempting to understand and aid the individual client amidst the pressure of intense collective energies, especially amidst collective crises. Among the themes treated in this volume are principles of non-violence, environmental activism, feminism, ecological shifts due to the pandemic, the Chingada complex, mass shootings, industrial farming of animals, and death anxiety. Jungian Analysis in a World on Fire will be of interest to Jungian, psychoanalytic, and depth-oriented analysts and therapists engaged in how best to work with individual clients in a time of social, political, and environmental crisis. It will also be valuable for scholars interested in understanding the impact of contemporary, collective traumas on individual psychology.

This open access book documents and analyses the various interventions – legal, political, and even artistic – that followed the Ali Enterprises factory fire in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2012. It illuminates the different substantive and procedural aspects of the legal proceedings and negotiations between the various local and transnational actors implicated in the Ali Enterprises fire, as well as the legal and policy reforms sparked by the incident. This endeavour serves to embed these legal cases and reform efforts in the larger context of human and labour rights protection and global value chain governance. It also offers a concrete case study relevant for ongoing debates around the role of transnational approaches in making human rights litigation, advocacy, and law reform more effective. In this regard, the book interrogates and critically reflects on such legal campaigns and local and transnational reform work with a view to future transformative legal and social activism.

Nature, Environment, and Activism in Nigerian Literature is a critical study of environmental writing, covering a range of genres and generations of writers in Nigeria. With a sustained concentration on the Nigerian experience in postcolonial ecocriticism, the book pays attention to textual strategies as well as distinctive historicity at the heart of the ecological force in contemporary writing. Focusing on nature, the environment, and activism, the author decentres African ecocriticism, affirming the eco-social vision that differentiates environmental writing in Nigeria from those of other nations on the continent. The book demonstrates how Nigerian writers, beyond connecting themselves to the natures of their communities, respond to ecological problems through indigenous literary instrumentalism. Anchored on the analytical concepts of nature, environment, and activism, the study is definitive in foregrounding the contribution of Nigerian writing to studies in ecocriticism at continental and global levels. This book will be of interest to scholars of African and Postcolonial literature, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.