- Western Buddhism, Community Development, Gramsci, Marxism, Participatory Research, Social Activism, and 42 moreIrish Studies, Social movements and revolution, Social Movements (History), Working-Class Studies, Buddhist Studies, Participatory Action Research, Social Movements, New Religious Movements, Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions (ISASR), Countercultural Studies, Counter Culture, Social Justice, Buddhism, Oral history, Celtic Archaeology, Zen Buddhism, World Social Forums, European Social Forum, Social Movements in Ireland Since 2000, Revolutions, Protest, Resistance (Social), Collective Action, Anti-Capitalism, Antiglobalization Social Movements, Antonio Gramsci, New social movements, Anti austerity Protests, Alternative Media, Popular Education, World Systems Analysis, Community Organizing, Protest Policing, Goethean Science, Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf Education, Steiner/Waldorf Education, Camphill Movement, Practical Skills Therapeutic Education, John Ruskin, and William Morrisedit
- Laurence Cox is an engaged social movements researcher interested in the global “movement of movements” and anti-aust... moreLaurence Cox is an engaged social movements researcher interested in the global “movement of movements” and anti-austerity struggles, working-class community organising in Ireland, social movement milieux and counter-cultures, early western Buddhists in Asia, activist theorising and participatory research.
Laurence co-directs the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism for activists “learning from each other’s struggles” at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, where he also runs a PhD research programme of participatory action research in social movement practice. He has been active in popular education for over two decades, having taught for organisations ranging from the Latin America Solidarity Centre to the Dublin Buddhist Centre, written for movement periodicals and co-authored with movement practitioners. He founded and co-edits the open-access, multilingual social movements journal Interface (http://interfacejournal.net), now in its eighth year and sixteenth issue, co-founded the Council for European Studies’ European Social Movements research network and moderates the “social-movements” academic / activist mailing list. Collaborative work is a touchstone of his practice: he has published, organised research events or carried out research projects with over 40 scholars and activists in 7 countries.
Laurence has published widely on the global justice movement, working-class community organising and counter cultures, in refereed journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings and practitioner contexts.
He is co-author, with Alf Nilsen, of "We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism" (Pluto) and co-editor, with Colin Barker, Alf Nilsen and John Krinsky, of “Marxism and Social Movements” (Haymarket); with Cristina Flesher Fominaya, of "Understanding European Movements" (Routledge); and with Ide Corley and Helen Fallon, of "Silence would be treason: last writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa" (Daraja).
In a related field, Laurence is the author of “Buddhism and Ireland” (Equinox) and co-editor, with Brian Bocking, Phibul Choompolpaisal and Alicia Turner, of "A Buddhist Crossroads" (Routledge). He co-organised Ireland’s first academic conference on new religious movements and co-edited the proceedings as “Ireland’s New Religious Movements” (Cambridge Scholars). With Alicia Turner and Brian Bocking, he is currently working on the figure of U Dhammaloka, an Irish migrant labourer who became one of the first western Buddhist monks and a leading figure in Asian anti-colonial Buddhism at the start of the twentieth century. The results thus far are available on dhammalokaproject.wordpress.com.
Laurence’s work is programmatically multidisciplinary. He has published in sociological, geographical, Marxist, social justice, environmental, Buddhist Studies, Irish Studies and adult education journals as well as by historical and religious studies publishers, by NGOs and movement publications. He has been a keynote, plenary or invited speaker at Kyoto University's Institute for Researches in Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the European University Institute's COSMOS institute, the University of Heidelberg's "Asia and Europe" centre of excellence, the College d’Etudes Mondiales / Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Paris, Goteborg's Centre for Civil Society and Social Movement Research, King's College London, Ruskin College Oxford, SOAS London, Lancaster Institute for Advanced Studies, the universities of Oslo, Bergen, Milano-Bicocca and Aarhus, the Reykjavik Academy, Nottingham’s Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, the Popular Education Network conference, Networked Politics / Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the British Sociological Association, the National Museum of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland and most universities on the island.
Laurence has a PhD in Sociology and a BA in European Studies from Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a Scholar of the college. He also received a Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst scholarship, a TCD postgraduate award and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship which he did not take up. He has taught in TCD, in Waterford Institute of Technology (where he directed the Centre for Research on Environment and Community), and has been at Maynooth since 2000, where he is senior lecturer in sociology. In 2016-17 he is also Directeur d'Etudes Associé at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris.edit - Hilary Toveyedit
THESE LETTERS AND POEMS are invaluable fragments of a living conversation that portrays the indomitable power in humans to stay alive in the face of certain death — to stay alive even in death. Reading through the treasure trove of the... more
THESE LETTERS AND POEMS are invaluable fragments of a living conversation that portrays the indomitable power in humans to stay alive in the face of certain death — to stay alive even in death. Reading through the treasure trove of the letters and poems compiled here as The Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa evoked such intense memories of his resolute struggles against an oil behemoth and a deaf autocratic government. His crusade frames one of the most tumultuous periods of Nigeria’s history; his tragic story evokes anger and demands action to resolve the crises that first led the Ogoni people to demand that Shell clean up Ogoni or clear out of the territory. It was his leadership, in great part, that forced Shell out of Ogoni in January 1993. These letters are a testament of hope. Being one side of robust conversations between two persons that many would find unlikely as close friends, we learn the lessons that indeed ‘friends love at all times and brothers (and sisters) are born for adversity’, as a proverb in the Bible states. This is where we must applaud Sister Majella McCarron for preserving and making public these letters that Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote to her between 20 October 1993 and 14 September 1995.
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The year 1968 witnessed one of the great upheavals of the twentieth century, as social movements shook every continent. Across the Global North, people rebelled against post-war conformity and patriarchy, authoritarian education and... more
The year 1968 witnessed one of the great upheavals of the twentieth century, as social movements shook every continent. Across the Global North, people rebelled against post-war conformity and patriarchy, authoritarian education and factory work, imperialism and the Cold War. They took over workplaces and universities, created their own media, art and humour, and imagined another world. The legacy of 1968 lives on in many of today's struggles, yet it is often misunderstood and caricatured.
Voices of 1968 is a vivid collection of original texts from the movements of the long 1968. We hear these struggles in their own words, showing their creativity and diversity. We see feminism, black power, anti-war activism, armed struggle, indigenous movements, ecology, dissidence, counter-culture, trade unionism, radical education, lesbian and gay struggles, and more take the stage.
Chapters cover France, Czechoslovakia, Northern Ireland, Britain, the USA, Canada, Italy, West Germany, Denmark, Mexico, Yugoslavia and Japan. Introductory essays frame the rich material - posters, speeches, manifestos, flyers, underground documents, images and more - to help readers explore the era's revolutionary voices and ideas and understand their enduring impact on society, culture and politics today.
Voices of 1968 is a vivid collection of original texts from the movements of the long 1968. We hear these struggles in their own words, showing their creativity and diversity. We see feminism, black power, anti-war activism, armed struggle, indigenous movements, ecology, dissidence, counter-culture, trade unionism, radical education, lesbian and gay struggles, and more take the stage.
Chapters cover France, Czechoslovakia, Northern Ireland, Britain, the USA, Canada, Italy, West Germany, Denmark, Mexico, Yugoslavia and Japan. Introductory essays frame the rich material - posters, speeches, manifestos, flyers, underground documents, images and more - to help readers explore the era's revolutionary voices and ideas and understand their enduring impact on society, culture and politics today.
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Social movements and popular struggle are a central part of today’s world, but often neglected or misunderstood by media commentary as well as experts in other fields. In an age when struggles over climate change, women’s rights,... more
Social movements and popular struggle are a central part of today’s world, but often neglected or misunderstood by media commentary as well as experts in other fields. In an age when struggles over climate change, women’s rights, austerity politics, racism, warfare and surveillance are central to the future of our societies, we urgently need to understand social movements. Accessible, comprehensive and grounded in deep scholarship, "Why Social Movements Matter" explains social movements for a general educated readership, those interested in progressive politics and scholars and students in other fields. It shows how much social movements are part of our everyday lives, and how in many ways they have shaped the world we live in over centuries. It explores the relationship between social movements and the left, how movements develop and change, the complex relationship between movements and intellectual life, and delivers a powerful argument for rethinking how the social world is constructed. Drawing on three decades of experience, "Why Social Movements Matter" shows the real space for hope in a contested world.
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We live in the twilight of neoliberalism: the ruling classes can no longer rule as before, and ordinary people are no longer willing to be ruled in the old way. Pursued by global elites since the 1970s, neoliberalism is defined by... more
We live in the twilight of neoliberalism: the ruling classes can no longer rule as before, and ordinary people are no longer willing to be ruled in the old way. Pursued by global elites since the 1970s, neoliberalism is defined by dispossession and ever-increasing inequality. The refusal to continue to be ruled like this - "ya basta!" - appears in an arc of resistance stretching from rural India to the cities of the global North. From this movement of movements, new visions are emerging of a future beyond neoliberalism. 'We Make Our Own History’ responds to this crisis. The first systematic Marxist analysis of social movements, this book reclaims Marxism as a theory born from activist experience and practice. It shows how movements can develop from local conflicts to global struggles; how neoliberalism operates as a social movement from above, and how popular struggles can create new worlds from below.
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""Buddhism and Ireland explores the long encounter between Ireland and Buddhism, overturning many common assumptions. Over the past 14 centuries, Buddhism has meant many different things to Irish people: travellers’ tales, information for... more
""Buddhism and Ireland explores the long encounter between Ireland and Buddhism, overturning many common assumptions. Over the past 14 centuries, Buddhism has meant many different things to Irish people: travellers’ tales, information for traders and civil servants, an alternative to Christianity, a form of anti-colonial solidarity, “going native” in Asia or immigration from Buddhist countries - as well as movies, museum pieces, newspaper stories and meditation retreats.
This study uses a world-systems approach to explore the real complexities of the transmission of world religions in a country which (like most) is neither homogenous nor neatly bounded but shaped by colonialism, contested borders, enormous diasporas, competing ethno-religious cultures and widespread immigration and where simple stories of a monolithic past do not hold water. Part I traces how knowledge of Buddhist Asia reached the western end of Europe between the seventh and the nineteenth centuries. Part II explores Buddhism and Theosophy as alternatives to the mainstream ethno-religious allegiances of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. Part III discusses Buddhism’s recent growth from counter-culture via immigration to Ireland’s third-largest religion.
Buddhism and Ireland combines a critical analysis of the politics of religion in Ireland, a detailed exploration of the lives of remarkable and courageous people and an eye for unexpected connections. The only published history of Buddhism in Ireland, it will be widely read by students of Buddhism in the west as well as by those interested in the changing role of religion in Irish society."
See attached flyer for special offer ($22.46 / £14.99 pbk for 320pp plus illustrations)"
This study uses a world-systems approach to explore the real complexities of the transmission of world religions in a country which (like most) is neither homogenous nor neatly bounded but shaped by colonialism, contested borders, enormous diasporas, competing ethno-religious cultures and widespread immigration and where simple stories of a monolithic past do not hold water. Part I traces how knowledge of Buddhist Asia reached the western end of Europe between the seventh and the nineteenth centuries. Part II explores Buddhism and Theosophy as alternatives to the mainstream ethno-religious allegiances of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. Part III discusses Buddhism’s recent growth from counter-culture via immigration to Ireland’s third-largest religion.
Buddhism and Ireland combines a critical analysis of the politics of religion in Ireland, a detailed exploration of the lives of remarkable and courageous people and an eye for unexpected connections. The only published history of Buddhism in Ireland, it will be widely read by students of Buddhism in the west as well as by those interested in the changing role of religion in Irish society."
See attached flyer for special offer ($22.46 / £14.99 pbk for 320pp plus illustrations)"
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""This book offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective on the key European social movements in the past 40 years, including “new social movements” from the 70s to the early 90s, global justice struggles from 1999 to the... more
""This book offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective on the key European social movements in the past 40 years, including “new social movements” from the 70s to the early 90s, global justice struggles from 1999 to the mid-2000s, and contemporary anti-austerity protests. Part I is a ground-breaking analysis of the relationship between European social theory and Europe’s history of social movement struggles. Part II explores new social movements from French anti-nuclear power movements via Italian autonomous politics to British anti-roads protest as precursors to the global justice movement, highlighting historical continuities and national specificities. Part III examines the cultural processes involved in constructing the anti-capitalist global justice movement, including collective memory, processes of international diffusion, activist mobility and the specifics of the East European experience. Part IV looks at the “European Spring” of anti-austerity protest and indignados, including the interaction between the Tunisian revolution and Greek protests, the “saucepan revolution” in Iceland and the dramatic 15-M mobilizations in Spain. The conclusion discusses the European “Occupy” events and the future of movements in Europe. The book stands alone in its combination of historical analysis of European movement development with ethnographic attention to the specifics of national and regional movement contexts.
Download flyer for 20% discount (£64 / $114.40)"
Now viewable through Google Books and Amazon Look Inside."
Download flyer for 20% discount (£64 / $114.40)"
Now viewable through Google Books and Amazon Look Inside."
Research Interests: Social Movements, European Studies, Countercultural Studies, Global Justice, Resistance (Social), and 9 moreProtest, European Politics, Environmentalism, Modern European History, New social movements, Anti-Capitalism, Spanish Indignados (Occupy), Anti austerity Protests и Anti Capitalist Social Movements
Three chapters available under "Papers", below. ""Marxism and Social Movements is the first sustained engagement between social movement theory and Marxist approaches to collective action. The chapters collected here, by leading... more
Three chapters available under "Papers", below.
""Marxism and Social Movements is the first sustained engagement between social movement theory and Marxist approaches to collective action. The chapters collected here, by leading figures in both fields, discuss the potential for a Marxist theory of social movements; explore the developmental processes and political tensions within movements; set the question in a long historical perspective; and analyse contemporary movements against neo-liberalism and austerity.
Exploring struggles on six continents over 150 years, this collection shows the power of Marxist analysis in relation not only to class politics, labour movements and revolutions but also anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, community activism and environmental justice, indigenous struggles and anti-austerity protest. It sets a new agenda both for Marxist theory and for movement research."
Download flyer for 25% discount offer."
""Marxism and Social Movements is the first sustained engagement between social movement theory and Marxist approaches to collective action. The chapters collected here, by leading figures in both fields, discuss the potential for a Marxist theory of social movements; explore the developmental processes and political tensions within movements; set the question in a long historical perspective; and analyse contemporary movements against neo-liberalism and austerity.
Exploring struggles on six continents over 150 years, this collection shows the power of Marxist analysis in relation not only to class politics, labour movements and revolutions but also anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, community activism and environmental justice, indigenous struggles and anti-austerity protest. It sets a new agenda both for Marxist theory and for movement research."
Download flyer for 25% discount offer."
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The letters and poems of Nigerian human rights, environmental and indigenous campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa sent to solidarity activist Majella McCarron before his execution by the military dictatorship. Saro-Wiwa and the other 8 executed men... more
The letters and poems of Nigerian human rights, environmental and indigenous campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa sent to solidarity activist Majella McCarron before his execution by the military dictatorship. Saro-Wiwa and the other 8 executed men were involved in opposing Shell's activities in the Niger Delta.
New and expanded, open-access edition thanks to Firoze Manji (Daraja Press) and Helen Fallon (Maynooth Library).
New and expanded, open-access edition thanks to Firoze Manji (Daraja Press) and Helen Fallon (Maynooth Library).
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"Until recently, Irish religion has been seen as defined by Catholic power in the South and sectarianism in the North. In recent years, however, both have been shaken by widespread changes in religious practice and belief, the rise of new... more
"Until recently, Irish religion has been seen as defined by Catholic power in the South and sectarianism in the North. In recent years, however, both have been shaken by widespread changes in religious practice and belief, the rise of new religious movements, the revival of magical-devotionalism, the arrival of migrant religion and the spread of New Age and alternative spirituality.
This book is the first to bring together researchers exploring all these areas in a wide-ranging overview of new religion in Ireland. Chapters explore the role of feminism, Ireland as global ‘Celtic’ homeland, the growth of Islam, understanding the New Age, evangelicals in the Republic, alternative healing, Irish interest in Buddhism, channelled teachings and religious visions."
This book is the first to bring together researchers exploring all these areas in a wide-ranging overview of new religion in Ireland. Chapters explore the role of feminism, Ireland as global ‘Celtic’ homeland, the growth of Islam, understanding the New Age, evangelicals in the Republic, alternative healing, Irish interest in Buddhism, channelled teachings and religious visions."
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The Buddha and the barcode is a short (85-page) introduction to contemporary Buddhism. Beautifully designed by artist Bernadette Acht, its chapters cover the basics of Buddhism, its rise in popularity in the west, Buddhism and the modern... more
The Buddha and the barcode is a short (85-page) introduction to contemporary Buddhism. Beautifully designed by artist Bernadette Acht, its chapters cover the basics of Buddhism, its rise in popularity in the west, Buddhism and the modern world, the benefits of Buddhist practice and Buddhism as a media phenomenon. Rather than trying to convert readers or give an academic account, the book focusses on what ordinary people across the world do with Buddhism in their own lives.
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This thesis falls into two parts. The first (chapters one to three) states the problematic of the research, develops a critique of the dominant “social movements” literature as unhelpful for understanding the counter culture and argues... more
This thesis falls into two parts. The first (chapters one to three) states the problematic of the research, develops a critique of the dominant “social movements” literature as unhelpful for understanding the counter culture and argues that the latter can more effectively be theorised in terms of the implicit theory of social movement found within agency-oriented Western Marxism and socialist feminism. This latter theory is developed as an understanding of movement as direction, developing from the local rationalities of everyday life through articulated but partial campaigns to a “movement project” which attempts to deploy such local rationalities to restructure the social whole. Within these terms, it argues for an understanding of counter culture as a movement project from below within disorganised capitalism. This mode of analysis is seen as that of a historical sociology geared to the production of open concepts which can be used by participants to theorise the context of their own choices.
The second part (chapters four to eight) theorises the issues involved in researching social movements within this perspective, entailing the need to engage with tacit knowledge, to thematise conflicts and collusion between researcher and participants. The findings chapters use qualitative interviews from a Dublin movement milieu to develop an analysis, grounded in participation, of the local rationalities of the counter culture. In this section the key findings are a rationality of autonomy as self-development, which is shown to underlie processes of distancing and problems of commitment, and a rationality of radicalised reflexivity, which resolves the problem of institutionalisation through the deployment of a wide range of “techniques of the self”. The analysis attempts to locate this reading within the life-histories of participants but also within the historical development of the counter culture, examplifying the ability of the concepts developed in this thesis to engage with the problems facing participants.
The second part (chapters four to eight) theorises the issues involved in researching social movements within this perspective, entailing the need to engage with tacit knowledge, to thematise conflicts and collusion between researcher and participants. The findings chapters use qualitative interviews from a Dublin movement milieu to develop an analysis, grounded in participation, of the local rationalities of the counter culture. In this section the key findings are a rationality of autonomy as self-development, which is shown to underlie processes of distancing and problems of commitment, and a rationality of radicalised reflexivity, which resolves the problem of institutionalisation through the deployment of a wide range of “techniques of the self”. The analysis attempts to locate this reading within the life-histories of participants but also within the historical development of the counter culture, examplifying the ability of the concepts developed in this thesis to engage with the problems facing participants.
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Papers on counter culture in Ireland, other oppositional cultures and the relationship between agency and strategy.
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Much radical writing on academia expresses a disempowering despair grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy appears as “theory from above.” Against this, the article argues for an understanding of... more
Much radical writing on academia expresses a disempowering despair grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy appears as “theory from above.” Against this, the article argues for an understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; as oriented towards practice; as developmental; and as contested between top-down and bottom-up perspectives, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of radical traditions of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means starting from participants’ existing praxis and “learning from each other’s struggles”—using “frozen” movement theory and activist experience—to move towards a wider, more radical understanding. In Ireland such pedagogy is rooted in the remarkable processes of working-class community self-organising, rural environmental justice alliances, women’s and GLTBQ activism, and the anti-capitalist “movement of movements,” encapsulating Audre Lorde’s dictum, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Drawing on the literature on movement learning and knowledge production, the article focusses in particular on a “Masters for activists.” The course supports movement participants to deepen and develop their activist practice but also to situate it within these wider and more radical understandings and emancipatory alliances. Taking movement praxis—rather than “contemplative” knowledge—as a starting point raises very different questions about theory and practice, forms and distribution of knowledge and the purpose and shape of learning.
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In this article we explore the relationship between Marxist theory and social movements, in particular how this relationship works in the specific historical period that we call the twilight of neoliberalism.
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2017 is tense and uncertain. Diagnosing the current moment, with its ecological, political and economic crises, and prescribing strategies for transcending and interrupting these crises are challenges that generate discussion and... more
2017 is tense and uncertain. Diagnosing the current moment, with its ecological, political and economic crises, and prescribing strategies for transcending and interrupting these crises are challenges that generate discussion and confusion. It is in these sorts of moments that Interface seems particularly relevant, as a space to " learn from each other's struggles " as we all, in our different movements and research contexts, attempt to understand the nature of the present crisis.
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This paper uses participant narratives and Marxist social movement theory to analyse resistance to water charges as the driving force of Irish anti-austerity struggles – or " the social movement in general ". It locates this movement... more
This paper uses participant narratives and Marxist social movement theory to analyse resistance to water charges as the driving force of Irish anti-austerity struggles – or " the social movement in general ". It locates this movement within the history of working-class community-based self-organisation in Ireland. Contemporary resistance to metering and refusal to pay are not " spontaneous " , but articulate long-standing local rationalities.
The current situation has seen the crisis of other forms of working-class articulation: union dependence on a Labour Party which enthusiastically embraced austerity in government; the co-optation of community service provision within " social partnership " , under attack from the state since the mid-2000s; and the collapse of far left initiatives for shared parliamentary representation and resistance to household charges. New forms of popular agency are thus developing; community-based direct action has enabled a historic alliance between multiple forms of working-class voice and unleashed a vast process of popular mobilisation and self-education.
Finally, the paper relates the Irish movement to the wider loss of consent for austerity on the European periphery, and asks after the political prospects for effective alliances " within the belly of the beast " .
The current situation has seen the crisis of other forms of working-class articulation: union dependence on a Labour Party which enthusiastically embraced austerity in government; the co-optation of community service provision within " social partnership " , under attack from the state since the mid-2000s; and the collapse of far left initiatives for shared parliamentary representation and resistance to household charges. New forms of popular agency are thus developing; community-based direct action has enabled a historic alliance between multiple forms of working-class voice and unleashed a vast process of popular mobilisation and self-education.
Finally, the paper relates the Irish movement to the wider loss of consent for austerity on the European periphery, and asks after the political prospects for effective alliances " within the belly of the beast " .
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This research note explores some methodological challenges arising from biographical research on early Irish Buddhists in the colonial period. It briefly situates the role of such figures in relation to Asian anti-colonial movements and... more
This research note explores some methodological challenges arising from biographical research on early Irish Buddhists in the colonial period. It briefly situates the role of such figures in relation to Asian anti-colonial movements and highlights the research challenges posed by multiple languages and countries, the variable preservation and digitisation of different kinds of sources, and the polarisation provoked by such figures. Practical solutions include international collaboration, digitisation, and a combination of quasi-philological precision and quasi-ethnographic understanding. The note highlights three relevant findings: a relativisation of the importance of organisations, a greater appreciation of the meanings of failure, and a historical materialist approach to possibility. For generations which have learned to take the problem of standpoint seriously, biography presents two major problems. Firstly, with relatively few exceptions the biographer is unlikely to have had as interesting a life as their subject; in other words, they are likely to be researching someone who has been blessed or cursed with a more dramatic and challenging set of experiences and difficulties around the very things (political activism, for example) which make their life worth writing about. Secondly – if to a lesser extent – there is often a sharp difference in more narrowly demographic experience: the subject has often experienced more generations, bereavements and so on than the biographer. Few biographers of Marx, for example, can have any real sense of what it means to have lost four children in childhood and to see another die as an adult. At the most intimate level, where the biographer seeks to understand and interpret the choices and actions of their subject, this should inject a note of caution: as EP Thompson famously put it, " they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not " (1963: 13). In particular, in an age 1 Many thanks to Brian Bocking, Alicia Turner, Peter Waterman and Lesley Wood for comments on an earlier version of this piece.
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The first westerners recorded as becoming lay Buddhists on Asian terms were members of the Buddhist Theosophical Society in Ceylon who took pansil (refuges and precepts) between 1880 to 1907 or later, tied to their work with the BTS’... more
The first westerners recorded as becoming lay Buddhists on Asian terms were members of the Buddhist Theosophical Society in Ceylon who took pansil (refuges and precepts) between 1880 to 1907 or later, tied to their work with the BTS’ modernising Buddhist schools. This article uses the life of Dr John Bowles Daly as a lens to explore these “conversions” and the BTS’ educational turn. Daly (c. 1844 – c. 1916), an Irish writer and ex-Anglican curate, played an important role in Buddhist schooling in Ceylon in the early 1890s.
The article discusses why western BTS members took pansil and how this was understood, as well as the lack of western bhikkhu (monk) ordinations in Ceylon. The new lay-run schools slowly became established as a suitable object of dana (Buddhist donations) in competition with the traditional temple-run schools, leading in time to the formation of a new lay Sinhala Buddhist elite. These histories show the strong predominance of this elite as against the agendas not only of Daly but the international Theosophical Society.
The article discusses why western BTS members took pansil and how this was understood, as well as the lack of western bhikkhu (monk) ordinations in Ceylon. The new lay-run schools slowly became established as a suitable object of dana (Buddhist donations) in competition with the traditional temple-run schools, leading in time to the formation of a new lay Sinhala Buddhist elite. These histories show the strong predominance of this elite as against the agendas not only of Daly but the international Theosophical Society.
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This article revisits the debate over Barker and Cox’s (2011) use of Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals to contrast academic and activist modes of theorizing about social movements. Often misread as an... more
This article revisits the debate over Barker and Cox’s (2011) use of Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals to contrast academic and activist modes of theorizing about social movements. Often misread as an attack on personal choices in career and writing, the distinction aimed to highlight the different purposes, audiences, and social relationships entailed by these different forms of theorizing. Discourses which take ‘scholarship’ as their starting point position ‘activist’ as a personal choice within an institutional field, and substitute this moral commitment for a political assessment of its effects. By contrast, few academics have undergone the political learning curve represented by social movements. This may explain the widespread persistence – beyond any intellectual or empirical credibility – of a faith in ‘critical scholarship’ isolated from agency, an orientation to policy makers and mainstream media as primary audiences or an unquestioned commitment to existing institutional frameworks as pathways to substantial social change. Drawing on over three decades of movement participation and two of academic work, this article explores two processes of activist training within the academy. It also explores the politics of different experiences of theoretical publishing for social movements audiences. This discussion focuses on the control of the “means of mental production” (Marx, 1965), and the politics of distribution. The conclusion explores the broader implications of these experiences for the relationship between movements and research.
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(with Cal Andrews and Lesley Wood)
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Serious discussion about controlling the petroleum industry requires analysis of the balance of power between corporations, states and social movements. The article examines the “toxic hegemony” constructed by corporations and the state... more
Serious discussion about controlling the petroleum industry requires analysis of the balance of power between corporations, states and social movements. The article examines the “toxic hegemony” constructed by corporations and the state and explores two related movement alliances aimed at controlling the industry, in Ogoniland (Niger Delta) and Erris (NW Ireland). It asks how we can understand the relationship between states and petroleum interests and how movements can challenge this; examines the goals and operation of state repression and movement strategies to contain this repression; and concludes with a discussion of the wider chances of movement success beyond the local.
Research Interests: Sociology, Social Movements, Political Ecology, Community Organizing, Community Ecology, and 12 morePetroleum, Resistance (Social), Political Legitimacy, Environmental Sustainability, Hegemony, Protest Policing, International political economy of oil and gas, Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony, Repression, Niger Delta, Public order policing и Corrib Gas controversy
Sociology’s marginality to public discussion of the crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors’ interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its... more
Sociology’s marginality to public discussion of the crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors’ interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through its dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue.
Starting from existing discussions of social movements and their knowledge production, the article focuses on the organisational dimension of such knowledge and explores how this is elaborated in the current movement wave. Looking at movement spaces of theoretical analysis, new popular education processes and movements’ knowledge creation institutions, the article highlights potential contributions to renewing sociological processes of theorising, teaching and engaged research respectively, paying particular attention to movement practices of ‘talking between worlds’. It concludes with a call for a dialogue of critical solidarity between public sociology and new forms of social knowledge production.
Starting from existing discussions of social movements and their knowledge production, the article focuses on the organisational dimension of such knowledge and explores how this is elaborated in the current movement wave. Looking at movement spaces of theoretical analysis, new popular education processes and movements’ knowledge creation institutions, the article highlights potential contributions to renewing sociological processes of theorising, teaching and engaged research respectively, paying particular attention to movement practices of ‘talking between worlds’. It concludes with a call for a dialogue of critical solidarity between public sociology and new forms of social knowledge production.
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This article challenges two general assumptions shared by scholars of Western Buddhism: (1) that the earliest Buddhist missions to the West were those established in California from 1899 onwards; and (2) that Ananda Metteyya’s (Allan... more
This article challenges two general assumptions shared by scholars of Western Buddhism: (1) that the earliest Buddhist missions to the West were those established in California from 1899 onwards; and (2) that Ananda Metteyya’s (Allan Bennett’s) London mission of 1908 was the first Buddhist mission to London and thus to Europe. Recent collaborative research by scholars in Ireland and Japan demonstrates instead that the Japanese-sponsored ‘Buddhist Propagation Society’ (BPS) launched in London in 1889 and led for three years by the Irish-born Japanese Buddhist Charles Pfoundes predates both of the above-mentioned ‘first’ Buddhist missions.
In this article we offer a first attempt to document the nature, activities and significance of the London BPS, drawing on Japanese and UK sources to examine Pfoundes’ role and that of his Japanese sponsors. We discuss the nature of Pfoundes’ Buddhism, the strategy and activities of the London BPS and the reasons for its eventual demise. The conclusion examines the links between the BPS and the later ‘first’ Japanese Buddhist missions in California and asks what hidden connection there might be between Pfoundes’ missionary campaign in London in 1889-92 and Ananda Metteyya’s return from Burma as the ‘first’ Buddhist missionary to London, almost two decades later.
In this article we offer a first attempt to document the nature, activities and significance of the London BPS, drawing on Japanese and UK sources to examine Pfoundes’ role and that of his Japanese sponsors. We discuss the nature of Pfoundes’ Buddhism, the strategy and activities of the London BPS and the reasons for its eventual demise. The conclusion examines the links between the BPS and the later ‘first’ Japanese Buddhist missions in California and asks what hidden connection there might be between Pfoundes’ missionary campaign in London in 1889-92 and Ananda Metteyya’s return from Burma as the ‘first’ Buddhist missionary to London, almost two decades later.
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This article uses a world-systems perspective to analyse the development of Buddhism in Ireland, in particular the post-1990 period which saw a tenfold increase in those formally identifying as Buddhist. This shift is a result both of... more
This article uses a world-systems perspective to analyse the development of Buddhism in Ireland, in particular the post-1990 period which saw a tenfold increase in those formally identifying as Buddhist. This shift is a result both of Ireland’s new positioning in global economic and migrant flows, and of the changed ethno-political meaning of religion in Irish society. More broadly, Buddhism has moved from an exotic or counter-cultural positioning to a partial respectability. Nonetheless many practical problems remain in negotiating a Buddhist identity in Ireland.
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This teaching note discusses the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. This is a practitioner course in social movement practice, now in its fourth year of operation.... more
This teaching note discusses the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. This is a practitioner course in social movement practice, now in its fourth year of operation.
The note explains the MA’s origins, discusses how it works in practice and explores some unresolved challenges. It concludes with some reflections on the role of such educational projects in relation to movements.
The note explains the MA’s origins, discusses how it works in practice and explores some unresolved challenges. It concludes with some reflections on the role of such educational projects in relation to movements.
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Recent research on the life of U Dhammaloka and other early western Buddhists in Asia has interesting implications in relation to class, ethnicity and politics. ‘Beachcomber Buddhists’ highlight the wider situation of ‘poor whites’ in... more
Recent research on the life of U Dhammaloka and other early western Buddhists in Asia has interesting implications in relation to class, ethnicity and politics. ‘Beachcomber Buddhists’ highlight the wider situation of ‘poor whites’ in Asia – needed by empire but prone to defect from elite standards of behaviour designed to maintain imperial and racial power. ‘Going native’, exemplified by the European bhikkhu, highlights the difficulties faced by empire in policing these racial boundaries and the role of Asian agency in early ‘western’ Buddhism. Finally, such ‘dissident Orientalism’ has political implications, as with specifically Irish forms of solidarity with Asian anti-colonial movements. Within the limits imposed by the data, this article rethinks ‘early western Buddhism’ in Asia as a creative response to colonialism, shaped by Asian actors, marked by cross-racial solidarity and oriented to alternative possible futures beyond empire.
Research Interests: Buddhism, Asian Studies, Aesthetics, Ethics, Sex and Gender, and 15 moreComparative Philosophy, Globalization, Migration, Class, South Asian History, Latin American literature, Postcolonial Theory, Latin American History, South Asian Literature, Theravada Buddhism, Subaltern Studies, History of Western Philosophy, Colonial Discourse, Race и Buddhism & Hinduism
Research Interests: Social Movements, Political Economy, Ethics, Feminist Theory, Marxism, and 13 moreFeminist Philosophy, Sexuality, Trade unionism, Gender, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Precarity, Work and Labour, Social and Political Philosophy, Solidarity Economy, Theories of Socialism, Antiglobalization Social Movements и Latin American feminisms
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The article provides an introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled ‘U Dhammaloka, “The Irish Buddhist”: Rewriting the History of Early Western Buddhist Monastics’. Traditional accounts of pioneer Western Buddhist... more
The article provides an introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled ‘U Dhammaloka, “The Irish Buddhist”: Rewriting the History of Early Western Buddhist Monastics’. Traditional accounts of pioneer Western Buddhist monastics begin with the 1899 ordination of H. Gordon Douglas (Aśoka), and highlight gentleman scholars writing for a European audience. They consign to obscurity a pre-existing world of Western Buddhist monastics of all social classes. To open a window onto this hidden history, this issue presents new material relating to the extraordinary career of U Dhammaloka (?1856 - ?1914), widely known as "The Irish Buddhist”. A working-class autodidact, freethinker and temperance campaigner from Dublin, Dhammaloka became renowned throughout colonial Asia as an implacable critic of Christian missionaries and tireless transnational organiser of Asian Buddhists from Burma to Japan. The research described in this issue is innovative not only in content but also in method and approach, having advanced through collaborative, international research employing web-based research tools and online resources. These offer new possibilities for other translocative and interdisciplinary research projects.
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This article explores some important aspects of U Dhammaloka's Buddhism, drawing in particular on the work of his Rangoon-based Buddhist Tract Society between 1907 and 1910. It explores his work – in the Society and more generally - as in... more
This article explores some important aspects of U Dhammaloka's Buddhism, drawing in particular on the work of his Rangoon-based Buddhist Tract Society between 1907 and 1910. It explores his work – in the Society and more generally - as in effect a social movement organiser within the Buddhist Revival, looking at his funders, publishers, printers, translators and distributors as well as those who wrote about him, laid down their hair for him to walk on, covered his train or boat fares, put up his friends in monasteries or let them cross borders, etc.
It also looks at what we know about his organisations and involvement in other people's organisations, asking who he intended to mobilise and who his audience was, how his use of confrontation and polemic fitted into this, and how successful he was. Following this, it goes on to discuss the intellectual sources of the free-thinking (atheist) positions espoused in the Society's publications, and asks more generally how his posture can be located in relation to the politics of plebeian free thought in Ireland, Britain, the US and Asia.
These questions arose out of an attempt to shed some light on the missing half-century before Dhammaloka became a public Buddhist figure; while the article can give no definite answers in terms of organising experience, intellectual inheritance or formative backgrounds, it suggests an alternative perspective which highlights a substantial, internationally-connected "Workers' University", grounded in the freethinking cultures of self-taught plebeian radicals, at the roots of western Buddhism.
It also looks at what we know about his organisations and involvement in other people's organisations, asking who he intended to mobilise and who his audience was, how his use of confrontation and polemic fitted into this, and how successful he was. Following this, it goes on to discuss the intellectual sources of the free-thinking (atheist) positions espoused in the Society's publications, and asks more generally how his posture can be located in relation to the politics of plebeian free thought in Ireland, Britain, the US and Asia.
These questions arose out of an attempt to shed some light on the missing half-century before Dhammaloka became a public Buddhist figure; while the article can give no definite answers in terms of organising experience, intellectual inheritance or formative backgrounds, it suggests an alternative perspective which highlights a substantial, internationally-connected "Workers' University", grounded in the freethinking cultures of self-taught plebeian radicals, at the roots of western Buddhism.
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This article explores strategic conceptions within the alter-globalisation movement in Ireland. Based on action research carried out within the left-libertarian (“Grassroots’) wing of the movement, it notes imbalances in participation in... more
This article explores strategic conceptions within the alter-globalisation movement in Ireland. Based on action research carried out within the left-libertarian (“Grassroots’) wing of the movement, it notes imbalances in participation in a very intensive form of political activity, and asks how activists understand winning. It finds substantial congruence between organisational practice and long-term goals, noting social justice and participatory democracy along with feminist, environmental and anti-war concerns as central. Using Wallerstein’s proposed transition strategy for anti-systemic movements, it argues that Irish alter-globalisation activists are realistic about popular support and state power, and concerned to link short-term work around basic needs with the construction of alternative institutions and long-term struggles for a different social order.
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While attention is now being paid to emotions and personal sustainability in social movements, relatively little attention has been paid to difference between social movement situations or broader cultural contexts. This paper locates the... more
While attention is now being paid to emotions and personal sustainability in social movements, relatively little attention has been paid to difference between social movement situations or broader cultural contexts. This paper locates the question in the broader history of thinking about ordinary people’s political engagement since the French Revolution. It explores various literatures relating to the topic, arguing that emotional sustainability is only one aspect of personal sustainability in social movements. Using the example of WB Yeats’ response to the 1916 Easter Rising, it highlights the importance of locating this in place, time and culture. The paper offers a typological approach as a counter-strategy to the assumption of uniformity, focussing on difference in social situation, organising contexts and background cultures.
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This article summarises the history of the encounter between Buddhism and Ireland.
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The first European members of the bhikkhu sangha have normally been identified as Gordon Douglas / Asoka (1899), Allan Bennett / Ananda Metteyya (1901), and Anton Gueth / Nyanatiloka (1903 / 4). However, this note suggests that the first... more
The first European members of the bhikkhu sangha have normally been identified as Gordon Douglas / Asoka (1899), Allan Bennett / Ananda Metteyya (1901), and Anton Gueth / Nyanatiloka (1903 / 4). However, this note suggests that the first westerner to be ordained, in Burma in the mid-1890s, was working-class Dubliner Lawrence O'Rourke / Dhammaloka. The note summarises the evidence for his remarkable life and his free-thinking views.
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This article explores the state of research on the "movement of movements" against neoliberal globalisation. Starting from a general consideration of the significance of the movement and the difficulties inherent in studying it, it... more
This article explores the state of research on the "movement of movements" against neoliberal globalisation. Starting from a general consideration of the significance of the movement and the difficulties inherent in studying it, it discusses the literature on the movement from within social movement studies, and argues that the response from social movement researchers falls short of what could be expected in terms of adequacy to the movement and its own knowledge production. It explores some effects of this failure and locates the reasons for it in the unacknowledged relationship between social movements theorising and activist theorising. The article then discusses the possible contributions that can be made by Marxist and other engaged academic writers, as well as the significance of the extensive theoretical literature generated by activists within the movement. It concludes by stating the importance of dialogue between activist and academic theorising and research in attempting to understand the movement.
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While a powerful strand of both environmental and religious utopianism has been to construct purpose-built communities "somewhere else", usually in rural settings, a combination of lack of resources and doubts about the strategic... more
While a powerful strand of both environmental and religious utopianism has been to construct purpose-built communities "somewhere else", usually in rural settings, a combination of lack of resources and doubts about the strategic usefulness of such projects has led most working-class or left utopias to have a different focus. Typically, these latter grew within the struggle to meet everyday needs, in the course of political campaigns or at the highpoint of society-wide struggles, and were understood strategically, as part of a broader struggle for change. This article explores some aspects of left and working-class utopias in Ireland across the 20th century, and attempts to relate them to broader theoretical questions about working-class self-organisation and strategies for social change.
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Empire is a curious and challenging book. Although it sets out to be a latter-day Communist Manifesto, it lacks the concrete aesthetic, the urgent pace of argument, and the practical cutting edge of the latter. There are sound material... more
Empire is a curious and challenging book. Although it sets out to be a latter-day Communist Manifesto, it lacks the concrete aesthetic, the urgent pace of argument, and the practical cutting edge of the latter. There are sound material reasons for this, some of which its authors would doubtless acknowledge: it is not, after all, the product of the needs and temperature of a radical organisation, written in the midst of a great revolutionary wave. What Empire is not, however, is made up for in some ways by what it is. A closer analogy than with the Manifesto would probably be with the German Ideology. Like that work, Empire offers a "a general theoretical framework and a toolbox of concepts" (p.xvi), still some way detached from the actual use of those tools, and a sustained exposure to a particular way of thought which - just maybe - can help particular kinds of militant to see themselves and their situation in new ways, ways they can then practice in concrete movements. An even closer analogy would be with contemporary socialist science fiction. Caught in this same period where the assured languages and strategies of the mid-century have finally broken down, while new senses of potentiality are stirring on the fringes of what can be articulated, authors like MacLeod (1995 etc.), Miéville (2000), Byrne (1999) or Robinson (1993 etc.) show us successful moments of popular revolt, placed in settings which illuminate the present without being allegories and driven by forms of agency which bear a similarly metaphoric relationship to reality. The richly allusive nature of the book makes this a stronger way to read what Empire has to say on social movements than a formal critique of an analysis of movements which it lacks, in that sense of a neat organisation of propositions. It is not a book which is easy to grasp on first reading; like Starhawk or Le Guin(2), it demands rereading ("front to back, back to front, in pieces, in a hopscotch pattern, or through correspondences" (p. xvi)) to enter into its mental world and find new possibilities there. To keep going in the present, an important resource may be to recognise that we do not know as much as we thought we did: like the barbarian priest or the rebel volunteer, we understand our local struggles but find it hard to grasp their insertion within - and challenge to - Empire. In our own provinciality, of campaigns and jobs, gatherings and books, what do we gain - and what do we not find - in Hardt and Negri's alternate world?
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Overview of the relationship between feminist theory, women's movements and women's involvement in social movements.
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Overview of the relationship between social movements and alternative media.
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Edited version of a plenary lecture to the UCD School of Social Justice / Egalitarian World initiative conference "Equality in a time of crisis". The paper analyses the history of "social partnership" in Ireland and its legacy for social... more
Edited version of a plenary lecture to the UCD School of Social Justice / Egalitarian World initiative conference "Equality in a time of crisis". The paper analyses the history of "social partnership" in Ireland and its legacy for social movements before considering possible ways out of the crisis movements now find themselves in.
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Response to David Harvey's "Theorizing the anti-capitalist transition".
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Survey of the field of relationships between "civil society" and NGOs and popular social movements.
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Overview of issues related to social movement knowledge, learning and research.
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Historical overview of the key network of the Irish anti-capitalist movement.
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Survey of the field and conference report on 'Alternative spiritualities, new religious movements and the New Age in Ireland', NUI Maynooth, 30-31 Oct 2009.
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The 2001 launch of Indymedia Ireland marked a radically different model of media: Internet-based, non-profit, run on a shoestring, democratically produced, open to many different voices, and telling the stories that were firmly kept out... more
The 2001 launch of Indymedia Ireland marked a radically different model of media: Internet-based, non-profit, run on a shoestring, democratically produced, open to many different voices, and telling the stories that were firmly kept out of the nation’s living room. This chapter discusses its context of media politics in Ireland, global Indymedia, how Irish Indymedia was born and what happened next.
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This chapter covers those Buddhist traditions which are largely based in Europe, noting some of the specificities of this history as against the North American with which it is sometimes conflated. While the reception history of Buddhism... more
This chapter covers those Buddhist traditions which are largely based in Europe, noting some of the specificities of this history as against the North American with which it is sometimes conflated. While the reception history of Buddhism in Europe stretches back to Alexander, Buddhist organization in Europe begins in the later nineteenth century, with the partial exception of indigenous Buddhisms in the Russian Empire. The chapter discusses Asian-oriented Buddhisms with a strong European base; European neo-traditionalisms founded by charismatic individuals; explicitly new beginnings; and the broader world of " fuzzy religion " with Buddhist components, including New Age, " night-stand Buddhists " , Christian creolizations, secular mindfulness and engaged Buddhism. In general terms European Buddhist traditions reproduce the wider decline of religious institutionalization and boundary formation that shapes much of European religion generally.
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This paper draws on Antonio Gramsci, and Marxist social movement studies more generally, to understand some of the complexities and peculiarities involved in theorising movements in the Republic of Ireland. Gramsci’s perspective as a... more
This paper draws on Antonio Gramsci, and Marxist social movement studies more generally, to understand some of the complexities and peculiarities involved in theorising movements in the Republic of Ireland. Gramsci’s perspective as a Southern migrant to the Italian north enables him to read Italy’s movement landscape in terms of core-periphery relationships and migration, an approach which can also fruitfully be used to understand the particularities of Irish social movements.
In historical terms, the Irish analogy to the Sardinia-Turin relationship which Gramsci theorised is one in which the core is not Dublin but Birmingham or Boston, meaning that it becomes important to consider the organising activity of the Irish abroad (both in terms of ethnic closure, right-wing Catholicism and in some contexts racism but also in terms of those who became active outside these community structures, often on the left and in the labour movement) and the impact on Irish movements of the Irish diaspora. Furthermore, in the period of ethnic closure from the later 19th century until the 1990s Irish community structure has been such that “blow-ins” (outsiders), whether from elsewhere in Ireland or from Northern societies (in what was until recently a semi-peripheral context) played a disproportionate role in most social movements, NGOs and community organising. In some contexts this remains true today.
The analysis of immigrant self-organising in Ireland starts from noting that the bulk of immigration has taken place within the last two decades, with significant choices being made for many at the onset of the economic crisis. As immigration does not follow previous colonial relationships, migrant populations are extremely heterogenous and for most individual ethnicities small in absolute terms. Hence much effort is still directed towards building informal support networks, community centres, Saturday language schools, religious venues etc., while political orientations are often shaped strongly by those acquired prior to migration and long-distance nationalisms are significant in many cases. Similarly, there is still a largely Irish-dominated NGO sector geared to providing services for migrants in line with state and EU funding policies. Given this, the context of Ireland’s recent history of social partnership and a broader political culture of clientelism, migrant movements have to decide their political orientation at an early stage: whether to tailor their demands to what mainstream political allies present as acceptable and attainable goals in a context of widespread racism, or to test the distinctly colder waters of autonomous self-organising on their own terms.
In historical terms, the Irish analogy to the Sardinia-Turin relationship which Gramsci theorised is one in which the core is not Dublin but Birmingham or Boston, meaning that it becomes important to consider the organising activity of the Irish abroad (both in terms of ethnic closure, right-wing Catholicism and in some contexts racism but also in terms of those who became active outside these community structures, often on the left and in the labour movement) and the impact on Irish movements of the Irish diaspora. Furthermore, in the period of ethnic closure from the later 19th century until the 1990s Irish community structure has been such that “blow-ins” (outsiders), whether from elsewhere in Ireland or from Northern societies (in what was until recently a semi-peripheral context) played a disproportionate role in most social movements, NGOs and community organising. In some contexts this remains true today.
The analysis of immigrant self-organising in Ireland starts from noting that the bulk of immigration has taken place within the last two decades, with significant choices being made for many at the onset of the economic crisis. As immigration does not follow previous colonial relationships, migrant populations are extremely heterogenous and for most individual ethnicities small in absolute terms. Hence much effort is still directed towards building informal support networks, community centres, Saturday language schools, religious venues etc., while political orientations are often shaped strongly by those acquired prior to migration and long-distance nationalisms are significant in many cases. Similarly, there is still a largely Irish-dominated NGO sector geared to providing services for migrants in line with state and EU funding policies. Given this, the context of Ireland’s recent history of social partnership and a broader political culture of clientelism, migrant movements have to decide their political orientation at an early stage: whether to tailor their demands to what mainstream political allies present as acceptable and attainable goals in a context of widespread racism, or to test the distinctly colder waters of autonomous self-organising on their own terms.
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The 2001 launch of Indymedia Ireland marked a radically different model of media: Internet-based, non-profit, run on a shoestring, democratically produced, open to many different voices, and telling the stories that were firmly kept out... more
The 2001 launch of Indymedia Ireland marked a radically different model of media: Internet-based, non-profit, run on a shoestring, democratically produced, open to many different voices, and telling the stories that were firmly kept out of the nation’s living room. This chapter discusses its context of media politics in Ireland, global Indymedia, how Irish Indymedia was born and what happened next.
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Western Marxist writers have long been recognised as major contributors to debates on popular culture, from Antonio Gramsci to Raymond Williams. What is often missed in this reception is the extent to which, as political activists and... more
Western Marxist writers have long been recognised as major contributors to debates on popular culture, from Antonio Gramsci to Raymond Williams. What is often missed in this reception is the extent to which, as political activists and adult educators, their reflection was tied to the experience of popular social movements. This chapter explores some of the dimensions of this literature and attempts to articulate one consistent reading, in which social movements articulate popular culture - both in the sense that they are shaped by it and that they contribute to developing it further.
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Short autobiographical piece on the intersections between social movements and sociological practice
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Under what circumstances are states able to successfully use violence, particularly lethal force, against social movements? Put another way, to what extent can contemporary European movements hope to achieve goals such as reversing... more
Under what circumstances are states able to successfully use violence, particularly lethal force, against social movements? Put another way, to what extent can contemporary European movements hope to achieve goals such as reversing austerity measures, ending neoliberalism or constructing a more real democracy without facing tanks and torture chambers?
This paper explores the question of state legitimacy and the internal use of violence from a historical and theoretical rather than normative standpoint, distinguishing between the rhetoric of violence / non-violence and actual deaths. It starts from the relative decline in the use of lethal force by states against internal opposition which characterises some parts of Europe since the 1950s by comparison with earlier decades. It does this not in order to write an irenic narrative or to minimise the continuing reality of state violence on many levels, but rather to ask what prevents states from killing when entrenched interests face serious challenges to the status quo – from an activist perspective in which our ability to challenge the structures of power without being shot or tortured is an immediate, practical concern and not something that can be taken for granted.
While social actors whose fundamental interests are threatened are regularly willing to kill in order to prevent social change, their ability successfully to deploy lethal violence is another matter and depends on the willingness of other actors to support them. The successful use of violence is not simply a matter of coercion but involves the successful construction of consent for its use among a hegemonic alliance. Social movements do not hold most of the cards in this respect, but the process of restricting the state’s ability to kill goes hand in hand with movements’ other concerns of constructing counter-hegemonic alliances for social change. This is important not only to contemporary movements but to all political actors who value the possibility of engaging in democratic struggles – most particularly in contexts where constraints on state violence are weaker. The paper draws on historical and contemporary examples and a range of European countries to situate its analysis.
This paper explores the question of state legitimacy and the internal use of violence from a historical and theoretical rather than normative standpoint, distinguishing between the rhetoric of violence / non-violence and actual deaths. It starts from the relative decline in the use of lethal force by states against internal opposition which characterises some parts of Europe since the 1950s by comparison with earlier decades. It does this not in order to write an irenic narrative or to minimise the continuing reality of state violence on many levels, but rather to ask what prevents states from killing when entrenched interests face serious challenges to the status quo – from an activist perspective in which our ability to challenge the structures of power without being shot or tortured is an immediate, practical concern and not something that can be taken for granted.
While social actors whose fundamental interests are threatened are regularly willing to kill in order to prevent social change, their ability successfully to deploy lethal violence is another matter and depends on the willingness of other actors to support them. The successful use of violence is not simply a matter of coercion but involves the successful construction of consent for its use among a hegemonic alliance. Social movements do not hold most of the cards in this respect, but the process of restricting the state’s ability to kill goes hand in hand with movements’ other concerns of constructing counter-hegemonic alliances for social change. This is important not only to contemporary movements but to all political actors who value the possibility of engaging in democratic struggles – most particularly in contexts where constraints on state violence are weaker. The paper draws on historical and contemporary examples and a range of European countries to situate its analysis.
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Research Interests: Social Movements, Psychoanalysis, Irish Studies, Ethics, Feminist Theory, and 16 moreMarxism, Literary Criticism, Community Organizing, Feminist Philosophy, Sexuality, Labour history, Gender, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Social and Political Philosophy, Solidarity Economy, Theories of Socialism, Antiglobalization Social Movements, Marxist History, Philosophy and Theory, Contemporary Political Thought и Latin American feminisms
This chapter argues that conventional accounts of “European” new social movement theory constitute part of an origin myth for social movement studies rather than an accurate representation of European contributions in the field. The first... more
This chapter argues that conventional accounts of “European” new social movement theory constitute part of an origin myth for social movement studies rather than an accurate representation of European contributions in the field. The first part of the chapter shows how European social theory has been centrally shaped by an engagement with social movements, in ways which are not represented within subdisciplinary contexts. The second re-examines European debates on movement developments between 1965 and 1985 and shows that the canonical account severely misrepresents a far more complex and interesting set of debates.
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Research Interests: Social Movements, European Studies, Critical Geopolitics, Political Ecology, Postcolonial Theory, and 9 moreEnvironmental Justice, Critical Development Studies, Indignados, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), Climate Politics, Global (North/South) Environmental Politics, 15 M, Anti austerity Protests и European Spring
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This chapter explores the sensitive topic of police violence at political protests in Ireland in more recent times and in particular the question of when and how it is legitimised. Long experience of discussing the matter with students,... more
This chapter explores the sensitive topic of police violence at political protests in Ireland in more recent times and in particular the question of when and how it is legitimised. Long experience of discussing the matter with students, colleagues, journalists and members of the public makes it clear that many people see police acts using force as per se legitimate and therefore not ‘violent’, a term thus reserved for illegitimate acts. Yet police behaviour can be contested publicly and on occasion found to be illegitimate (by expert opinion, by media commentators, by internal inquiries or indeed by courts of law). The question of how the use of force is legitimised – and what conditions make this achievement of legitimacy more or less likely – is then an interesting one, as is the broader question of why a police decision is made to use force in the first place, and at what level.
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Survey of the field of migrant religion, new religious movements and the New Age in Ireland.
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Ireland lies on the margins of the Buddhist world, far from its homeland in northern India and Nepal and the traditionally Buddhist parts of Asia. It is also in various ways "peripheral" to core capitalist societies, and Irish encounters... more
Ireland lies on the margins of the Buddhist world, far from its homeland in northern India and Nepal and the traditionally Buddhist parts of Asia. It is also in various ways "peripheral" to core capitalist societies, and Irish encounters with Buddhism are structured by both facts. Buddhism, for its part, has been a central feature of major Eurasian societies for over two millennia. During this period, Irish people and Asian Buddhists have repeatedly encountered or heard about each other, in ways structured by many different kinds of global relations – from the Roman Empire and the medieval church via capitalist exploration, imperial expansion and finally contemporary capitalism.
These different relationships have conditioned different kinds of encounters and outcomes. At the same time, as succeeding tides of empire, trade and knowledge have crossed Eurasia, each tide has left its traces. In 1859, Fermanagh-born James Tennent's best-selling History of Ceylon could devote four chapters to what was already known about the island in ancient and medieval times – by Greeks and Romans, by "Moors, Genoese and Venetians", by Indian, Arabic and Persian authors and in China. Similarly, the Catholic missionary D Nugent, speaking in Dublin's Mansion House in 1924, could discuss encounters with China from 1291 via the Jesuits to the present.
The Ireland that was connected with the Buddhist world was not, of course, a separate and coherent entity. Like many or most contemporary states, the majority of what was nineteenth-century "Ireland" has only become a separate state within living memory, and one whose cultural and political boundaries remain contested. If authors discussing the arrival of Buddhism in Britain or America (Almond 1988, Tweed 2000) have written as though Victorian Buddhism there was largely an outgrowth of American or British culture, peripheral societies like Ireland have been in no position to remake Buddhism in their "own" (intensely debated) image.
For most of the last five hundred years, Irish encounters with Buddhism have been mediated through competing international affiliations – most powerfully, the British empire and the Catholic church – through shared Anglophone or European publishing spaces, and (going further back) through languages spoken both here and elsewhere. More recently, they have
1 This paper reworks material previously published in the Journal of Global Buddhism (Cox and Griffin 2009, Cox 2009), which contains a full acknowledgements list. Thanks are due to Cristina Rocha and the Journal for permission to reuse this material.
2
been structured by Ireland's constant cycle of emigration and immigration: until recently it has been rare for Buddhists to be both Irish and in Ireland.
Thus the history of "Buddhism and Ireland" is not a separate national analysis but a window into global histories (comparable to Rocha's 2006 account of Brazilian Zen), where the effective unit of analysis is whatever "world system" (Wallerstein 1988) connects economic, political and cultural activities, from the Roman empire to global capitalism.
These different relationships have conditioned different kinds of encounters and outcomes. At the same time, as succeeding tides of empire, trade and knowledge have crossed Eurasia, each tide has left its traces. In 1859, Fermanagh-born James Tennent's best-selling History of Ceylon could devote four chapters to what was already known about the island in ancient and medieval times – by Greeks and Romans, by "Moors, Genoese and Venetians", by Indian, Arabic and Persian authors and in China. Similarly, the Catholic missionary D Nugent, speaking in Dublin's Mansion House in 1924, could discuss encounters with China from 1291 via the Jesuits to the present.
The Ireland that was connected with the Buddhist world was not, of course, a separate and coherent entity. Like many or most contemporary states, the majority of what was nineteenth-century "Ireland" has only become a separate state within living memory, and one whose cultural and political boundaries remain contested. If authors discussing the arrival of Buddhism in Britain or America (Almond 1988, Tweed 2000) have written as though Victorian Buddhism there was largely an outgrowth of American or British culture, peripheral societies like Ireland have been in no position to remake Buddhism in their "own" (intensely debated) image.
For most of the last five hundred years, Irish encounters with Buddhism have been mediated through competing international affiliations – most powerfully, the British empire and the Catholic church – through shared Anglophone or European publishing spaces, and (going further back) through languages spoken both here and elsewhere. More recently, they have
1 This paper reworks material previously published in the Journal of Global Buddhism (Cox and Griffin 2009, Cox 2009), which contains a full acknowledgements list. Thanks are due to Cristina Rocha and the Journal for permission to reuse this material.
2
been structured by Ireland's constant cycle of emigration and immigration: until recently it has been rare for Buddhists to be both Irish and in Ireland.
Thus the history of "Buddhism and Ireland" is not a separate national analysis but a window into global histories (comparable to Rocha's 2006 account of Brazilian Zen), where the effective unit of analysis is whatever "world system" (Wallerstein 1988) connects economic, political and cultural activities, from the Roman empire to global capitalism.
Research Interests:
A social movements analysis of the alterglobalisation / anticapitalist movement in Ireland.
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This chapter explores the cultural dimensions that underlie social movement mobilisation, with particular reference to those underlying the anti-capitalist movement, then on the brink of emergence.
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This paper explores the politics of a remarkable, if minor, conjuncture in world history. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Ireland saw a combination of (partially) successful land reform pushed by massive peasant resistance and a... more
This paper explores the politics of a remarkable, if minor, conjuncture in world history. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Ireland saw a combination of (partially) successful land reform pushed by massive peasant resistance and a (partially) successful breaking away from the world's leading imperial power. This dramatic transformation, with few parallels close in place or time, was closely associated with processes of ethno-religious sectarianism and intensifying conflict between a declining Anglo-Irish imperial service class and a conservative Catholic nationalism, which marginalised labour and women's movements as well as alternative cultural discourses.
As is well known, a number of defectors from the Anglo-Irish caste (such as WB Yeats) explored the universalist new religious movement of Theosophy as an alternative way of positioning themselves in Irish (or, occasionally, Indian) nationalist politics and culture. What is less well known is that a number of Irish people, some Anglo-Irish and some Catholic plebeians by upbringing, "went native" and became actively involved in Asian anti-imperialist and anti-missionary politics in Burma, Japan, Ceylon and the young Soviet Union.
As Buddhists or Buddhist sympathisers, they were typically organisers and writers within Asian-led organisations, and in some cases played significant roles in the development of local anti-colonial cultural nationalisms, framed in religious and anti-missionary terms at a point when the relationship between Christian missionary activity in Asia and British imperial policy was at its height. This anti-colonial religious nationalism paralleled and, perhaps, drew on the experience of Irish Catholic nationalism.
This paper attempts to understand something of this experience, situating it in the context of other kinds of anti-colonial and anti-racist solidarity of the period, and comparing it to contemporary international solidarity movements. In particular, it focusses on the unexpected relationship between one of the most effective of these activists, the anti-missionary polemicist, international Buddhist organiser and working-class Irishman U Dhammaloka, and plebeian freethinking (atheist) movements in the west. It situates this relationship in the complexities of radical anti-clericalism in Ireland, plebeian spiritualism and radical free-thought in Britain, America and Germany during this period, and the positioning of Buddhism as "a philosophy not a religion".
The paper concludes by exploring the extent to which this politics represented an "alternative future" or utopianism, the limitations and collusions involved in these experiences, and what if anything can be learnt for the contemporary politics of international solidarity with radical religious movements in the majority world, from the role of Buddhism in dalit liberation struggles in India, anti-colonial politics in Tibet and democratic movements in Burma to the role of indigenous cultural nationalisms in North America, Mexico and the Andes.
As is well known, a number of defectors from the Anglo-Irish caste (such as WB Yeats) explored the universalist new religious movement of Theosophy as an alternative way of positioning themselves in Irish (or, occasionally, Indian) nationalist politics and culture. What is less well known is that a number of Irish people, some Anglo-Irish and some Catholic plebeians by upbringing, "went native" and became actively involved in Asian anti-imperialist and anti-missionary politics in Burma, Japan, Ceylon and the young Soviet Union.
As Buddhists or Buddhist sympathisers, they were typically organisers and writers within Asian-led organisations, and in some cases played significant roles in the development of local anti-colonial cultural nationalisms, framed in religious and anti-missionary terms at a point when the relationship between Christian missionary activity in Asia and British imperial policy was at its height. This anti-colonial religious nationalism paralleled and, perhaps, drew on the experience of Irish Catholic nationalism.
This paper attempts to understand something of this experience, situating it in the context of other kinds of anti-colonial and anti-racist solidarity of the period, and comparing it to contemporary international solidarity movements. In particular, it focusses on the unexpected relationship between one of the most effective of these activists, the anti-missionary polemicist, international Buddhist organiser and working-class Irishman U Dhammaloka, and plebeian freethinking (atheist) movements in the west. It situates this relationship in the complexities of radical anti-clericalism in Ireland, plebeian spiritualism and radical free-thought in Britain, America and Germany during this period, and the positioning of Buddhism as "a philosophy not a religion".
The paper concludes by exploring the extent to which this politics represented an "alternative future" or utopianism, the limitations and collusions involved in these experiences, and what if anything can be learnt for the contemporary politics of international solidarity with radical religious movements in the majority world, from the role of Buddhism in dalit liberation struggles in India, anti-colonial politics in Tibet and democratic movements in Burma to the role of indigenous cultural nationalisms in North America, Mexico and the Andes.
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Overview of the role of social movement cultures and social change in Ireland in recent decades.
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‘From castles and palaces and churches to prisons and workhouses and schools; from weapons of war to a controlled press’, Raymond Williams writes, ‘any ruling class, in variable ways though always materially, produces a social and... more
‘From castles and palaces and churches to prisons and workhouses and schools; from weapons of war to a controlled press’, Raymond Williams writes, ‘any ruling class, in variable ways though always materially, produces a social and political order’. This productive activity constitutes the essence of what can be referred to as social movements from above.
This paper explores social movements from above as the organization of multiple forms of skilled activity around a rationality expressed and organized by dominant social groups, which aims at the maintenance or modification of a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities in ways that reproduce and/or extend the power of those groups and its hegemonic position within a given social formation.
Starting from a theoretical conception of social structure as the sediment of struggle between social movements from above and those from below, the paper discusses the relevance of a conception of social movements from above to activist experience – in particularly as a way of avoiding the reification of exploitative and oppressive social structures.
The paper moves on to an outline of a model of the fields of force animated by movements from above and below in understanding the major ‘epochal shifts’ and ‘long waves’ in capitalist development. This model is then put to work in a prolegomenon to an analysis of global neoliberal restructuring as a social movement from above aiming to restore the class power of capital over labour.
This analysis aims to discern the hegemony of neoliberalism not as an accomplished and monolithic state of affairs, but as an unfinished process riddled by internal contradictions which the movement of movements might exploit in its efforts to impose an alternative direction and meaning upon the self-production of society.
This paper explores social movements from above as the organization of multiple forms of skilled activity around a rationality expressed and organized by dominant social groups, which aims at the maintenance or modification of a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities in ways that reproduce and/or extend the power of those groups and its hegemonic position within a given social formation.
Starting from a theoretical conception of social structure as the sediment of struggle between social movements from above and those from below, the paper discusses the relevance of a conception of social movements from above to activist experience – in particularly as a way of avoiding the reification of exploitative and oppressive social structures.
The paper moves on to an outline of a model of the fields of force animated by movements from above and below in understanding the major ‘epochal shifts’ and ‘long waves’ in capitalist development. This model is then put to work in a prolegomenon to an analysis of global neoliberal restructuring as a social movement from above aiming to restore the class power of capital over labour.
This analysis aims to discern the hegemony of neoliberalism not as an accomplished and monolithic state of affairs, but as an unfinished process riddled by internal contradictions which the movement of movements might exploit in its efforts to impose an alternative direction and meaning upon the self-production of society.
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Social movement activists have their own theories of social movements, whose goals and structure often diverge radically from those of academic social movement studies. This paper explores the example of Marxism, as a theory developed... more
Social movement activists have their own theories of social movements, whose goals and structure often diverge radically from those of academic social movement studies. This paper explores the example of Marxism, as a theory developed outside the academy, primarily on the basis of the experience of the nineteenth-century workers’ movement in Europe. If society consists of socially organised human practice, then social movements contend to direct this “historicity”, in Touraine’s words: they are struggles over how society creates itself.
This paper attempts to do two things. Firstly, it offers a rough-and-ready typology of how grassroots activists experience their opponents in “social movements from above”, the ways in which dominant social groups attempt to maintain or extend ways of organising human practice that sustain their power. We explore defensive and offensive movements from above, the political choices and alliances involved, and the ways in which movements from above impact on activists in movements from below.
Secondly, we attempt to theorise the collective agency of subaltern social groups, making the links between their situated experience of their lifeworld, the conflicts between “common sense” and “good sense”, and the development out of these of militant particularisms, large-scale campaigns and social movement projects aiming to restructure human practice on a large scale. We are interested in particular in how this process is experienced and shaped by activists themselves. In conclusion, we use the categories of neo-liberalism and the “movement of movements” to discuss the current shape of the conflict between movements from above and from below.
This paper attempts to do two things. Firstly, it offers a rough-and-ready typology of how grassroots activists experience their opponents in “social movements from above”, the ways in which dominant social groups attempt to maintain or extend ways of organising human practice that sustain their power. We explore defensive and offensive movements from above, the political choices and alliances involved, and the ways in which movements from above impact on activists in movements from below.
Secondly, we attempt to theorise the collective agency of subaltern social groups, making the links between their situated experience of their lifeworld, the conflicts between “common sense” and “good sense”, and the development out of these of militant particularisms, large-scale campaigns and social movement projects aiming to restructure human practice on a large scale. We are interested in particular in how this process is experienced and shaped by activists themselves. In conclusion, we use the categories of neo-liberalism and the “movement of movements” to discuss the current shape of the conflict between movements from above and from below.
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Over the last decade or so, an increasing degree of sophistication has been devoted to the projects of theorising 'social movements' and 'the voluntary sector', two approaches which clearly overlap in subject matter, but rarely in theory.... more
Over the last decade or so, an increasing degree of sophistication has been devoted to the projects of theorising 'social movements' and 'the voluntary sector', two approaches which clearly overlap in subject matter, but rarely in theory. Despite dramatic changes in the organisation of politics from below in recent years, these parallel projects have been primarily a matter of developing and 'synthesising' previously existing approaches, rather than asking after their ultimate value and purpose. The net effect has been the reproduction of prior assumptions which remain within the given boundaries of would-be subdisciplines. Most importantly, these involve a definition of what is relevant in terms of its relationship to the state; a tendency to ahistorical definitions of 'fields', and methodological individualism.
In this paper, we use the case of community politics - one of the largest forms of voluntary or movement activity in Ireland, as in Latin America - to illustrate the weaknesses of both 'problematics'. We contrast the approaches of these two literatures with the perspective of working-class community activists in Ireland as a starting-point towards identifying other ways of thinking about these issues. These we find particularly within Marxist traditions of thinking about working-class self-activity. In these terms, the intersection with the state, while important, is by no means the central aspect of community politics. The 'fields' defined by the movement and its organisations are subject to large-scale historical changes. Finally, participants' own theorising rejects comprehensively any form of methodological individualism in favour of interactive and developmental understandings of collective needs.
The conclusion discusses some of the methodological problems we've encountered in trying to theorise this movement in conventional terms, and asks after their theoretical implications. In particular, what appears as relevant is a conflict between the 'colonisation' of movements by the state on the one hand and the reassertion of human needs in new forms on the other. In this context, the 'hidden discourses' of movement participants become as important as their public engagement in the process of negotiation over language and institutions, and form part of the 'political economy of labour', which appears as opposed to conventional theory's implicit identification with the state's viewpoint, its acceptance of existing institutional organisation as definitive, and its collusion with capitalism's positing of individuals as originally isolated and self-seeking.
In this paper, we use the case of community politics - one of the largest forms of voluntary or movement activity in Ireland, as in Latin America - to illustrate the weaknesses of both 'problematics'. We contrast the approaches of these two literatures with the perspective of working-class community activists in Ireland as a starting-point towards identifying other ways of thinking about these issues. These we find particularly within Marxist traditions of thinking about working-class self-activity. In these terms, the intersection with the state, while important, is by no means the central aspect of community politics. The 'fields' defined by the movement and its organisations are subject to large-scale historical changes. Finally, participants' own theorising rejects comprehensively any form of methodological individualism in favour of interactive and developmental understandings of collective needs.
The conclusion discusses some of the methodological problems we've encountered in trying to theorise this movement in conventional terms, and asks after their theoretical implications. In particular, what appears as relevant is a conflict between the 'colonisation' of movements by the state on the one hand and the reassertion of human needs in new forms on the other. In this context, the 'hidden discourses' of movement participants become as important as their public engagement in the process of negotiation over language and institutions, and form part of the 'political economy of labour', which appears as opposed to conventional theory's implicit identification with the state's viewpoint, its acceptance of existing institutional organisation as definitive, and its collusion with capitalism's positing of individuals as originally isolated and self-seeking.
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This paper argues for a socialist feminist theorisation of social movements that starts from the “hidden knowledge” of situated social relations, needs and struggles. In this perspective, social movements are a constant presence in the... more
This paper argues for a socialist feminist theorisation of social movements that starts from the “hidden knowledge” of situated social relations, needs and struggles. In this perspective, social movements are a constant presence in the social world, although taking different institutional forms; they do not “revive” so much as develop, or “fade away” so much as retreat. This paper discusses one example.
Community politics in the Irish Republic, largely and significantly powered by women’s activism, spans the urban working class and the rural marginalised in a challenge to official “development”. These movements use participatory praxis to articulate locally felt needs, adding a second dimension to official nationalist and labour corporatisms. This gendered focus on participation and the hidden dimension of needs makes explicit the connection between public action and private struggle.
These movements currently find their limits in difficulties with alliance-building beyond the local spheres of tacit knowledge and in a tendency to co-optation by the state, converting activists into subcontracted civil servants. An understanding of movements as the organisation of situated skills can both account for this and help activists to push the other way, challenging the official knowledge of market and state on its own terrain.
Community politics in the Irish Republic, largely and significantly powered by women’s activism, spans the urban working class and the rural marginalised in a challenge to official “development”. These movements use participatory praxis to articulate locally felt needs, adding a second dimension to official nationalist and labour corporatisms. This gendered focus on participation and the hidden dimension of needs makes explicit the connection between public action and private struggle.
These movements currently find their limits in difficulties with alliance-building beyond the local spheres of tacit knowledge and in a tendency to co-optation by the state, converting activists into subcontracted civil servants. An understanding of movements as the organisation of situated skills can both account for this and help activists to push the other way, challenging the official knowledge of market and state on its own terrain.
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This (very provisional) paper draws on the Irish experience of counter cultures to think about the shape and direction of movements from below at the end of the century and to find ways of asking "where do we go from here?" It starts by... more
This (very provisional) paper draws on the Irish experience of counter cultures to think about the shape and direction of movements from below at the end of the century and to find ways of asking "where do we go from here?" It starts by trying to make sense of the existing directions of counter cultural movement projects, which it sees as organic challenges to everyday social routines ("ordinary life") that are extended to the point of challenging large-scale power structures ("politics"). It does this by looking at some of the political tensions in the Irish versions of these projects: between strategies of mainstreaming and ghettoising, of consensus and disruption, of populism and elitism, and trying to identify the internal divisions of interest and rationality that underlie these tensions.
If we want to be able to choose our directions well and to bring others along with us, we need to find ways of evaluating these choices that are neither arbitrary nor automatic. This paper suggests that it is possible to develop an immanent critique which asks how adequate different strategies are to the counter cultural project as a whole. This might mean, for example, using comprehensiveness rather than one-sidedness, scope rather than limits, or compatibility rather than contradiction as yardsticks to judge the relationship between a political strategy and a movement. On this basis it suggests that a strategy oriented to the development of counter-hegemony, conflict and popular mobilisation might come closest to being adequate to the existing movement.
If we want to be able to choose our directions well and to bring others along with us, we need to find ways of evaluating these choices that are neither arbitrary nor automatic. This paper suggests that it is possible to develop an immanent critique which asks how adequate different strategies are to the counter cultural project as a whole. This might mean, for example, using comprehensiveness rather than one-sidedness, scope rather than limits, or compatibility rather than contradiction as yardsticks to judge the relationship between a political strategy and a movement. On this basis it suggests that a strategy oriented to the development of counter-hegemony, conflict and popular mobilisation might come closest to being adequate to the existing movement.
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This paper argues that the literature on contemporary social movements is essentially circular, representing a political reductionism within which the analysis of these movements in terms of (individual, collective, societal) instrumental... more
This paper argues that the literature on contemporary social movements is essentially circular, representing a political reductionism within which the analysis of these movements in terms of (individual, collective, societal) instrumental rationality appears both as a premise and as a conclusion. This in effect treats the theorist's own local form of rationality as universal, rather than taking the question of the modes of rationality operating in these contexts as an open question for research. By restricting the analytic and explanatory value of the social movement concept to the narrow field identified as relevant by this methodology, its common use for more wide-ranging analyses of the nature of contemporary social change is fatally undermined.
This tension is strongest in authors representing an "identity paradigm" such as Alberto Melucci, whose work points towards the need to replace social movement activity within the sociocultural contexts from which it proceeds, but who are unable to theorise these contexts in their own terms, analysing them only from the point of view of their immediate contribution to political activity. Even this "culturalist" approach to contemporary movements, then, remains blocked by an ultimate prioritisation of instrumental political action, and thus considerably less flexible than early cultural studies approaches to class movements.
This paper argues that social movement activity as currently conceived is only one element of broader life-world contexts which need to be theorised on their own terms before contemporary movements can be fully understood, and that the modes of rationality operative in these contexts have to be seen as an open question for research, rather than assumed or imputed. Working with a concept of "counter cultures" as historically developed complexes of alternative practices and meanings, this paper suggests that both the role of skills and intellectual activity and the characteristic modes of organisation of contemporary social movements need to be seen in this context. Material from a series of Dublin interviews is used to illustrate the possibility that autonomy may be a key element of this life-world rationality. The conclusion discusses the political implications of this suggestion.
This tension is strongest in authors representing an "identity paradigm" such as Alberto Melucci, whose work points towards the need to replace social movement activity within the sociocultural contexts from which it proceeds, but who are unable to theorise these contexts in their own terms, analysing them only from the point of view of their immediate contribution to political activity. Even this "culturalist" approach to contemporary movements, then, remains blocked by an ultimate prioritisation of instrumental political action, and thus considerably less flexible than early cultural studies approaches to class movements.
This paper argues that social movement activity as currently conceived is only one element of broader life-world contexts which need to be theorised on their own terms before contemporary movements can be fully understood, and that the modes of rationality operative in these contexts have to be seen as an open question for research, rather than assumed or imputed. Working with a concept of "counter cultures" as historically developed complexes of alternative practices and meanings, this paper suggests that both the role of skills and intellectual activity and the characteristic modes of organisation of contemporary social movements need to be seen in this context. Material from a series of Dublin interviews is used to illustrate the possibility that autonomy may be a key element of this life-world rationality. The conclusion discusses the political implications of this suggestion.
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The western Marxist tradition identifies the active engagement of human beings with their environment and with each other as a central ontological category. This physical, verbal and cognitive engagement is embodied through skill: the... more
The western Marxist tradition identifies the active engagement of human beings with their environment and with each other as a central ontological category. This physical, verbal and cognitive engagement is embodied through skill: the practical availability of what are often prediscursive modes of action, generated in collective learning processes such as conflict or alliance, materially sedimented in experience, practices, language, networks and so on, and thus continually subject to transformation or loss, but also constantly available as a resource for creative action. Movements, from above or below, are then different possible "proto-hegemonic" attempts at developing this potential from different starting-points and mobilising it around shared social projects and against others.
Strategies of research into movement contexts parallel these possible organising modes: given the diversity of participants' orientations and of external interventions, there is necessarily a politics of research characterised by collusion with some participants' knowledge interests and conflict with others. The paper draws on Gramsci's conceptualisation of class consciousness to argue for a critical realism that extends the logic implicit in participants' skilled activity to a more comprehensive standpoint, using the researchers' own standpoint and knowledge interests critically as a part of this dialogue.
Strategies of research into movement contexts parallel these possible organising modes: given the diversity of participants' orientations and of external interventions, there is necessarily a politics of research characterised by collusion with some participants' knowledge interests and conflict with others. The paper draws on Gramsci's conceptualisation of class consciousness to argue for a critical realism that extends the logic implicit in participants' skilled activity to a more comprehensive standpoint, using the researchers' own standpoint and knowledge interests critically as a part of this dialogue.
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Argument around the situation of the Irish alternative press in the immediate run-up to the development of Internet-based alternative publishing in Ireland.
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Conventional accounts of "new social movements", "the Sixties", green parties, "the alternative economy", and some contemporary subcultures often accept the existence of connections between some at least of these developments, but without... more
Conventional accounts of "new social movements", "the Sixties", green parties, "the alternative economy", and some contemporary subcultures often accept the existence of connections between some at least of these developments, but without making the attempt to analyse them as parts of a single historical process or as aspects of a more complex social formation. It may be possible to overcome the (theoretical, methodological, disciplinary) isolation of these subjects from one another in terms of a concept of counter culture which attempts to locate them within the total life-worlds of the participants.
This means treating counter cultures as historically developed complexes of institutions and practices, structures of meaning, forms of consciousness and modes of organisation of everyday life. This also makes it possible to distinguish between networks which are deeply involved in this counter cultural totality, and those which are essentially oriented towards dominant institutions and structures but which are receptive to isolated counter cultural practices or meanings. The argument is illustrated in relation to developments in (West) Germany since the 1960s.
This means treating counter cultures as historically developed complexes of institutions and practices, structures of meaning, forms of consciousness and modes of organisation of everyday life. This also makes it possible to distinguish between networks which are deeply involved in this counter cultural totality, and those which are essentially oriented towards dominant institutions and structures but which are receptive to isolated counter cultural practices or meanings. The argument is illustrated in relation to developments in (West) Germany since the 1960s.
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This paper aims to present the Hamburg sociologist Gerhard Kleining's perspective on the methodology of qualitative social research to an Englishspeaking audience. In a context where methodological discussion seems to have become more or... more
This paper aims to present the Hamburg sociologist Gerhard Kleining's perspective on the methodology of qualitative social research to an Englishspeaking audience. In a context where methodological discussion seems to have become more or less concentrated on specific fields there may be some value in opening up otherwise neglected issues and in presenting unfamiliar perspectives on familiar problems, even if that means seeming a bit naive. By exploring Kleining's central argument, that direct discovery (and not simply interpretation) of social reality can be made possible by a strategy of openness (rather than closure) in research, I want to examine some of the destinations that we might reach by following alternative paths.
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Research Interests:
Academic and activist accounts of the Irish crisis have mirrored the fragmentation of mainstream academic disciplines and the separation of different social institutions, offering analyses that focus whichever aspect which valorises their... more
Academic and activist accounts of the Irish crisis have mirrored the fragmentation of mainstream academic disciplines and the separation of different social institutions, offering analyses that focus whichever aspect which valorises their own intellectual capital and positions their own politics centre-stage, whether this means petitioning elites for a different kind of policy, hoping for a change in voting patterns, describing the progress of poverty or theorising the movements of capital. In taking a part for the whole, it is not only the changing relationships between these parts which is lost but in particular a sense of how radical popular agency can at times break down these neat categorical barriers – as when popular cultures in resistance to state policy on water produce a crisis of authority, transform the space within which movements mobilise and enable hope for a different kind of state. To place the focus on how popular agency has developed across a range of social movements and struggles does not avoid this problem entirely, but does open the door for a greater sense of development, interrelationship and struggle between the different elements.
This paper situates recent Irish movements against austerity in the longer context of movement landscapes since 1968 – themselves shaped by changing class relationships and hegemonic alliances, shifts in popular culture, state incorporation of movement organisations of all kinds and events in the North. The rise of the non-institutional social movement left in the early 2000s marked a significant break with the statist old left; since 2007 an important concern of the latter has been to use the crisis to return discussion to its preferred terrain of economics and state policy while implicitly positioning itself – as social-democratic policy expert, as vanguard party or as various kinds of radical theorist – as central to a resolution of the problem. This, however, has not resolved the underlying problem of agency which the rise of the non-institutional left had made visible, and the results of traditional strategies have been poor, both in terms of effective resistance and in terms of sustaining mobilisation.
In this sense the water charges protests, coming after the collapse of the organisational alliance which was supposed to be organising them, represent a return of movement as against organisations: they have raised much wider issues, seen massive participation and a sharp radicalisation of methods. The complex relationship between this movement and the various bodies – informal community groups, trade unions, left parties and others – involved in coordination remains in flux and subject to the usual logics of “organisational patriotism” as against “the interests of the movement as a whole”. In this context it is important, both theoretically and practically, to find adequate means of articulating the “movement as a whole”, in its diverse and changing aspects, rather than insist on the a priori primacy of one or another moment. The paper concludes with some reflections on a series of events in early 2015 aimed at articulating this wider sense of movement, the differing analyses they represent and the different perspectives they open up.
This paper situates recent Irish movements against austerity in the longer context of movement landscapes since 1968 – themselves shaped by changing class relationships and hegemonic alliances, shifts in popular culture, state incorporation of movement organisations of all kinds and events in the North. The rise of the non-institutional social movement left in the early 2000s marked a significant break with the statist old left; since 2007 an important concern of the latter has been to use the crisis to return discussion to its preferred terrain of economics and state policy while implicitly positioning itself – as social-democratic policy expert, as vanguard party or as various kinds of radical theorist – as central to a resolution of the problem. This, however, has not resolved the underlying problem of agency which the rise of the non-institutional left had made visible, and the results of traditional strategies have been poor, both in terms of effective resistance and in terms of sustaining mobilisation.
In this sense the water charges protests, coming after the collapse of the organisational alliance which was supposed to be organising them, represent a return of movement as against organisations: they have raised much wider issues, seen massive participation and a sharp radicalisation of methods. The complex relationship between this movement and the various bodies – informal community groups, trade unions, left parties and others – involved in coordination remains in flux and subject to the usual logics of “organisational patriotism” as against “the interests of the movement as a whole”. In this context it is important, both theoretically and practically, to find adequate means of articulating the “movement as a whole”, in its diverse and changing aspects, rather than insist on the a priori primacy of one or another moment. The paper concludes with some reflections on a series of events in early 2015 aimed at articulating this wider sense of movement, the differing analyses they represent and the different perspectives they open up.
Research Interests:
Maura Harrington asked me to talk about the history of the idea of community, which is quite a big topic. What I do for a living is basically to work with activists and social movements, and from that point of view community is often very... more
Maura Harrington asked me to talk about the history of the idea of community, which is quite a big topic. What I do for a living is basically to work with activists and social movements, and from that point of view community is often very important, both as something people fight for and as something people fight with, a source of strength.
In Ireland we can see this from the Whiteboys and the Land League up to the struggle here in Erris, the anti-fracking movement or the fight against water charges. Around the world community is central to indigenous struggles from the Ogoni to First Nations and Native American resistance to Keystone XL and other tar sands projects, but also to the movements of shack-dwellers in South Africa, farmers in the Narmada valley, No TAV in Italy and so on.
So in this talk I will look at the difficulties involved, the history and where there might be some hope.
In Ireland we can see this from the Whiteboys and the Land League up to the struggle here in Erris, the anti-fracking movement or the fight against water charges. Around the world community is central to indigenous struggles from the Ogoni to First Nations and Native American resistance to Keystone XL and other tar sands projects, but also to the movements of shack-dwellers in South Africa, farmers in the Narmada valley, No TAV in Italy and so on.
So in this talk I will look at the difficulties involved, the history and where there might be some hope.
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Revolutionaries and scholars alike have noted the recurrence within capitalism of “waves” of large-scale social movement mobilisation and revolutionary situations, including the C18th Atlantic Revolutions, the Latin American wars of... more
Revolutionaries and scholars alike have noted the recurrence within capitalism of “waves” of large-scale social movement mobilisation and revolutionary situations, including the C18th Atlantic Revolutions, the Latin American wars of independence, the events of 1848 in Europe, the events of 1916-23 in Europe and North America, resistance to fascism in Europe and Asia, anti-colonial uprisings in postwar Asia and Africa, the events of 1968 across the northern hemisphere and the events of 1989 in the Soviet bloc and China. At present the overlap of a global “movement of movements” with the Latin American “pink tide”, the anti-war movement of 2003, anti-austerity and Occupy movements in the global North and the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa suggest that another such wave is underway. This paper attempts to understand the broad historical experience in ways that are relevant to the present and enable effective action.
It proposes an analysis of such waves as occurring within one or more regions of the capitalist world-system and involving an organic crisis of a particular regime of accumulation – entailing a growing popular capacity for action, the detachment of subaltern elements of the previously hegemonic coalition and a declining elite capacity to either offer significant concessions or to mobilise effective repression. By placing the analysis at this level it avoids the superficial requirement that such waves share a common popular actor or set of demands – what similarities exist in terms of leading popular actors and modes of organisation are to be explained by this broader situation (notably, the difficulties experienced by the existing regime of accumulation in accommodating given needs and social groups). It also makes it clear that a revolutionary outcome is by no means a given, nor is it a requirement for a “real” wave. However the historical experience has often been that even where a given regime was able to recover temporarily in the longer term a new set of hegemonic arrangements, incorporating some movement demands, has been necessary.
In relation to the present crisis, with its multiple popular actors, this analysis suggests particular attention to the weaknesses of neoliberalism in securing continued hegemony – and to demands, and popular institutions, which accentuate this. It notes in particular the length of this crisis, which is historically unusual and politically encouraging, as is the narrowness of neoliberal orthodoxy and the difficulties experienced in finding new modes of organisation to incorporate popular pressures. It concludes with some suggestions as to what movements can do in this situation.
It proposes an analysis of such waves as occurring within one or more regions of the capitalist world-system and involving an organic crisis of a particular regime of accumulation – entailing a growing popular capacity for action, the detachment of subaltern elements of the previously hegemonic coalition and a declining elite capacity to either offer significant concessions or to mobilise effective repression. By placing the analysis at this level it avoids the superficial requirement that such waves share a common popular actor or set of demands – what similarities exist in terms of leading popular actors and modes of organisation are to be explained by this broader situation (notably, the difficulties experienced by the existing regime of accumulation in accommodating given needs and social groups). It also makes it clear that a revolutionary outcome is by no means a given, nor is it a requirement for a “real” wave. However the historical experience has often been that even where a given regime was able to recover temporarily in the longer term a new set of hegemonic arrangements, incorporating some movement demands, has been necessary.
In relation to the present crisis, with its multiple popular actors, this analysis suggests particular attention to the weaknesses of neoliberalism in securing continued hegemony – and to demands, and popular institutions, which accentuate this. It notes in particular the length of this crisis, which is historically unusual and politically encouraging, as is the narrowness of neoliberal orthodoxy and the difficulties experienced in finding new modes of organisation to incorporate popular pressures. It concludes with some suggestions as to what movements can do in this situation.
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This paper draws on Antonio Gramsci, and Marxist social movement studies more generally, to understand some of the complexities and peculiarities involved in theorising movements in the Republic of Ireland. In particular, it argues that... more
This paper draws on Antonio Gramsci, and Marxist social movement studies more generally, to understand some of the complexities and peculiarities involved in theorising movements in the Republic of Ireland. In particular, it argues that it is fundamentally mistaken to attempt to analyse movements in isolation, as though they can be understood without relation to their historical and local context.
The paper starts by relating Gramsci’s Sardinia to Ireland and Mayo in particular, in the experiences of peripherality, local nationalism, clientelist power relations and popular culture (as well as noting Gramsci’s few comments on Ireland). It proceeds to discuss two commonly misused Gramscian categories (intellectuals and hegemony) and one underused one (good sense) to sketch out a processual theory of movement capable of accounting for movements-become-states (as in Ireland) as well as movements-from-below and the co-optation of movements.
Exploring the historical formations of Irish hegemony, the paper notes how rarely Irish social movements writing attempts serious comparison of Irish movements with those abroad, and suggests some key specificities which can be accounted for in Gramscian terms. In particular, it notes the combination of movement-become-state (Catholic nationalism), the extent of continued popular mobilisation in nationalist and religious institutions during the “Irish counter-revolution” (historically parallel to continental fascism), the subordination of other movements to developmentalist nationalism (shared with much of Latin America), and the combination of practical cooperation with sotto voce critique - contrasted with the dramatic ruptures of the independence movement.
A shift in hegemonic relations came with the feminist challenge to religious and gendered power structures and the massive local assertions of urban working-class communities in the 1970s and 1980s, along with the ecological confrontation with developmentalism at Carnsore. This broke the localist, religious and mobilising aspects of earlier state policy and ushered in a shift where these movements came to accept the leadership of modernising technocratic elites in return for limited policy gains and (crucially) funding. Irish social partnership thus comes to seem less a late outlier from the continental pattern of Keynesian neo-corporatism and rather a holding pattern parallel to the limited “democratisations” of Latin American states post-dictatorships.
While this period created scope for the development of radical movements outside this consensus, their mobilising power was substantially constrained by the broader pattern of co-optation. The attack on partnership from above, and subsequent recession, is in the process of creating a strange new movement landscape. On the one hand, NGO and union leaderships are keen to retain elements of partnership at any cost, in a dog-eat-dog process shaped by the dependence of professional elites on state funding for survival. On the other hand, radical forces are finding that the attack from above on the earlier hegemony creates scope for enlargement, but in a situation where they lack the organisational capacity to make the necessary connections.
The paper concludes by contrasting three possibilities. One is that of an Irish “M-15”, Icelandic or Tahrir Square experience of mass popular mobilisation against failed elites. The second is that of Ireland following the East European and post-Soviet model of substantial demobilisation following the collapse of authoritarian power structures which claimed to speak for the mass of the people. Finally, the paper returns to Mayo and the Rossport struggle, arguing that as in Latin America over the last ten years it is the direct confrontation with specific nexuses of power relations which is most likely to prove a strategic source of change.
The paper starts by relating Gramsci’s Sardinia to Ireland and Mayo in particular, in the experiences of peripherality, local nationalism, clientelist power relations and popular culture (as well as noting Gramsci’s few comments on Ireland). It proceeds to discuss two commonly misused Gramscian categories (intellectuals and hegemony) and one underused one (good sense) to sketch out a processual theory of movement capable of accounting for movements-become-states (as in Ireland) as well as movements-from-below and the co-optation of movements.
Exploring the historical formations of Irish hegemony, the paper notes how rarely Irish social movements writing attempts serious comparison of Irish movements with those abroad, and suggests some key specificities which can be accounted for in Gramscian terms. In particular, it notes the combination of movement-become-state (Catholic nationalism), the extent of continued popular mobilisation in nationalist and religious institutions during the “Irish counter-revolution” (historically parallel to continental fascism), the subordination of other movements to developmentalist nationalism (shared with much of Latin America), and the combination of practical cooperation with sotto voce critique - contrasted with the dramatic ruptures of the independence movement.
A shift in hegemonic relations came with the feminist challenge to religious and gendered power structures and the massive local assertions of urban working-class communities in the 1970s and 1980s, along with the ecological confrontation with developmentalism at Carnsore. This broke the localist, religious and mobilising aspects of earlier state policy and ushered in a shift where these movements came to accept the leadership of modernising technocratic elites in return for limited policy gains and (crucially) funding. Irish social partnership thus comes to seem less a late outlier from the continental pattern of Keynesian neo-corporatism and rather a holding pattern parallel to the limited “democratisations” of Latin American states post-dictatorships.
While this period created scope for the development of radical movements outside this consensus, their mobilising power was substantially constrained by the broader pattern of co-optation. The attack on partnership from above, and subsequent recession, is in the process of creating a strange new movement landscape. On the one hand, NGO and union leaderships are keen to retain elements of partnership at any cost, in a dog-eat-dog process shaped by the dependence of professional elites on state funding for survival. On the other hand, radical forces are finding that the attack from above on the earlier hegemony creates scope for enlargement, but in a situation where they lack the organisational capacity to make the necessary connections.
The paper concludes by contrasting three possibilities. One is that of an Irish “M-15”, Icelandic or Tahrir Square experience of mass popular mobilisation against failed elites. The second is that of Ireland following the East European and post-Soviet model of substantial demobilisation following the collapse of authoritarian power structures which claimed to speak for the mass of the people. Finally, the paper returns to Mayo and the Rossport struggle, arguing that as in Latin America over the last ten years it is the direct confrontation with specific nexuses of power relations which is most likely to prove a strategic source of change.
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From being the "Celtic Tiger" poster child of neo-liberalism, Ireland has moved first into recession and then into an IMF-EU bailout entailing massive cuts, with unemployment at the highest-recorded levels ever, the historically dominant... more
From being the "Celtic Tiger" poster child of neo-liberalism, Ireland has moved first into recession and then into an IMF-EU bailout entailing massive cuts, with unemployment at the highest-recorded levels ever, the historically dominant Fianna Fail party alternatively in third or fourth place in polls and an unprecedented level of withdrawal of trust. Yet by contrast with the political upheavals in Iceland and Greece and the dramatic protests in countries like Britain, France and Italy, Ireland has seen remarkably little by way of active protest. The few large events have been determinedly single-issue or thoroughly corralled by conservative unions, radical attempts at organising coordinated movement resistance let alone alternative social directions have failed comprehensively to mobilise popular support, and all the indications are that the election will lead to a relatively routine alternation of power with Labour as junior partner in a government committed to a modified version of neo-liberal austerity.
While the Irish left has discussed the economic side of the crisis ad nauseam, little serious attention (in politics or academia) has been given to understanding this situation, which is rather taken as a given. This paper attempts an answer to the question of why responses to the crisis have been so restricted to organisational fixes. It starts with a broad analysis of the shaping of popular agency in Ireland via the long-term effects of nationalism, the channelling of popular hopes through state-led modernisation and the institutionalisation of self-organisation, with particular attention to the unresolved issues of "carceral Catholicism" in the South and war in the North. Discussing left parties, unions, community activism and social movements, the paper explores Ireland's "Piven and Cloward" moment in the failure of organisational substitutionalism through electoralism, social partnership, clientelism and populism.
If modernisation and social partnership together represented a form of passive revolution, constructing a new hegemony in the wake of the collapse of nationalist autarky, the underlying relations constructed in this period seem remarkably unshaken by state withdrawal from this programme. In this context it argues that casual reference to counter-hegemony as a simple collection of moments of cultural opposition is a wilful misunderstanding of the problem, politically and intellectually, and that the real challenge is to construct a coherent alternative which has the capacity of becoming hegemonic in its turn in both these dimensions.
Given this analysis of the context of Irish movement activity, what can or should organisers do, in the historically new situation created after the end of the "Celtic Tiger"? The paper argues that simple alliances between the leaderships of organisations which in practice privilege their engagement with existing institutional arrangements over popular self-organisation will not be enough, and explores the outcomes of attempts at alliance-building in three arenas: unions, social movements and community groups; electoral politics; and street protest.
While the Irish left has discussed the economic side of the crisis ad nauseam, little serious attention (in politics or academia) has been given to understanding this situation, which is rather taken as a given. This paper attempts an answer to the question of why responses to the crisis have been so restricted to organisational fixes. It starts with a broad analysis of the shaping of popular agency in Ireland via the long-term effects of nationalism, the channelling of popular hopes through state-led modernisation and the institutionalisation of self-organisation, with particular attention to the unresolved issues of "carceral Catholicism" in the South and war in the North. Discussing left parties, unions, community activism and social movements, the paper explores Ireland's "Piven and Cloward" moment in the failure of organisational substitutionalism through electoralism, social partnership, clientelism and populism.
If modernisation and social partnership together represented a form of passive revolution, constructing a new hegemony in the wake of the collapse of nationalist autarky, the underlying relations constructed in this period seem remarkably unshaken by state withdrawal from this programme. In this context it argues that casual reference to counter-hegemony as a simple collection of moments of cultural opposition is a wilful misunderstanding of the problem, politically and intellectually, and that the real challenge is to construct a coherent alternative which has the capacity of becoming hegemonic in its turn in both these dimensions.
Given this analysis of the context of Irish movement activity, what can or should organisers do, in the historically new situation created after the end of the "Celtic Tiger"? The paper argues that simple alliances between the leaderships of organisations which in practice privilege their engagement with existing institutional arrangements over popular self-organisation will not be enough, and explores the outcomes of attempts at alliance-building in three arenas: unions, social movements and community groups; electoral politics; and street protest.
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Personal sustainability in social movements is a huge and complex topic, but one which is immediately important to many participants, both in terms of keeping going themselves and of supporting their fellow-activists and preventing... more
Personal sustainability in social movements is a huge and complex topic, but one which is immediately important to many participants, both in terms of keeping going themselves and of
supporting their fellow-activists and preventing burnout. It is also of importance to researchers attempting to understand how movements continue in the face of everything that is thrown at their participants. This paper represents some extended notes attempting to rethink, and restructure, a problematic whose contours are extremely slippery. It may, I hope, also be of some use to activists who are facing these problems but not (currently) overwhelmed by them.
supporting their fellow-activists and preventing burnout. It is also of importance to researchers attempting to understand how movements continue in the face of everything that is thrown at their participants. This paper represents some extended notes attempting to rethink, and restructure, a problematic whose contours are extremely slippery. It may, I hope, also be of some use to activists who are facing these problems but not (currently) overwhelmed by them.
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Many people within the movement of movements, while outraged at the global state of affairs, and determined to bring about large-scale systemic change, are nevertheless reluctant to use the language of winning - that is, to consider what... more
Many people within the movement of movements, while outraged at the global state of affairs, and determined to bring about large-scale systemic change, are nevertheless reluctant to use the language of winning - that is, to consider what it means to bring about that change against determined and powerful opposition. In part this reflects a fear that to think strategically is to act like "the system", and is bound to lead to cynical instrumentalism and the attempt to replace one elite-led system with another.
We start by outlining what is at stake and asking what "winning" means: what actually happens when a social movement project from below achieves its goal of constructing "another world"? We explore the step- by-step processes through which the movement of movements is currently developing the "insurgent architecture" involved in this construction, and noting how this presents a challenge for the powers that be.
We then turn to the massive opposition that the movement has been meeting from above - from multinational institutions, states and corporations. We explore the nature of these responses and argue that while they have failed to defeat the movement, they have brought about something of a temporary stalemate. We ask how the movement can get beyond this stalemate, not by adopting the logic and methods of its opponents, but by taking qualitative steps forward in its own development, according to its own logic.
The paper finishes with some brief discussion of the most important practical steps in constructing another world, and the nature of the moments of confrontation that lie ahead.
We start by outlining what is at stake and asking what "winning" means: what actually happens when a social movement project from below achieves its goal of constructing "another world"? We explore the step- by-step processes through which the movement of movements is currently developing the "insurgent architecture" involved in this construction, and noting how this presents a challenge for the powers that be.
We then turn to the massive opposition that the movement has been meeting from above - from multinational institutions, states and corporations. We explore the nature of these responses and argue that while they have failed to defeat the movement, they have brought about something of a temporary stalemate. We ask how the movement can get beyond this stalemate, not by adopting the logic and methods of its opponents, but by taking qualitative steps forward in its own development, according to its own logic.
The paper finishes with some brief discussion of the most important practical steps in constructing another world, and the nature of the moments of confrontation that lie ahead.
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We want to pose some questions about the relationship between social movements and ’social movement theories’. The questions reflect the sense of unease experienced by some ’academic intellectuals’ who are also activists in movements, and... more
We want to pose some questions about the relationship between social movements and ’social movement theories’. The questions reflect the sense of unease experienced by some ’academic intellectuals’ who are also activists in movements, and the scepticism sometimes expressed by activists about the value of ’social movement theory.’ Both of us having a foot in each camp, we share the unease...
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This paper discusses the long history of popular movements in world-systems terms; distinguishes developments in different global regions with particular reference to Ireland; and discusses the practical implications for activists and... more
This paper discusses the long history of popular movements in world-systems terms; distinguishes developments in different global regions with particular reference to Ireland; and discusses the practical implications for activists and intellectuals.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Social Movements, Anthropology, Political Science, Autobiography, and 10 moreResistance (Social), Social Movements (Political Science), Irish History, Alternative Media, Social movements and revolution, Environmental Sustainability, Environmental movements, Environmentalism, Art and Politics, and Malta
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Research Interests: Sociology, Social Movements, Sociology of Work, Working Classes, Precarity, and 5 moreWork and Labour, Globalisation and the labour market, Social Movement Unionism, Trade unions и Globalization and Gender, Labor market regulation and workers’ rights, Empowerment and inequality, Social and welfare policy
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This is the text of a talk given at the Tenth Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (Johannesburg, June 2015).
Research Interests: History, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Movements, Latin American Studies, and 24 moreAnthropology, Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Globalization, Marxism, Political Science, Revolutions, Collective Action, Politics, Protest, Capitalism, State Theory, Marxist theory, Neoliberalism, Gramsci, Hegemony, Antonio Gramsci, Financial Crisis of 2008/2009, Karl Marx, The Global Political Economy, Anti-Capitalism, Protest Movements, Contentious Politics, and Eurozone crisis
This is the text of a talk given at a book launch at Ike's Books and Collectables in Durban, 4 June 2015.
Research Interests: Sociology, Social Movements, Political Economy, Globalization, Marxism, and 27 morePolitical Science, Revolutions, Collective Action, Politics, International Political Economy, Global Justice, Resistance (Social), Protest, Marxist theory, China, Neoliberalism, Neoliberal ideologies, Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci, Financial Crisis of 2008/2009, Political Mobilization, India, Accumulation by Dispossession, Anti-Capitalism, South Africa, Protest Movements, Economic Crisis, Resistance, Eurozone, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), Eurozone crisis, and Alterglobalization Movement
My intervention this afternoon will attempt to summarize some of the main ideas put forward in We Make Our Own History – a book that it took my good friend and comrade Laurence Cox and myself well over a decade to write. We Make Our own... more
My intervention this afternoon will attempt to summarize some of the main ideas put forward in We Make Our Own History – a book that it took my good friend and comrade Laurence Cox and myself well over a decade to write. We Make Our own History is intended, above all, to explore the relationship between Marxist theory and social movements, and in particular how this relationship works in the specific historical period that we are calling the twilight of neoliberalism. Or – put slightly differently – I’ll be talking about how we can reclaim Marxism as a theory that can serve activist purposes and knowledge interests in a context where neoliberalism appears to be undergoing a moment of organic crisis.
Research Interests: Social Change, Social Movements, European Studies, Latin American Studies, Political Economy, and 37 moreGlobalization, Marxism, Marxist Economics, World Systems Analysis, Queer Theory, Praxis, Critical Race Theory, Politics, Resistance (Social), Social Activism, European Union, Feminism, State Theory, Marxist theory, China, Neoliberalism, Social movements and revolution, Antonio Gramsci, Marxist political economy, Financial Crisis of 2008/2009, Karl Marx, Activism, Political Mobilization, Revolutionary Theory, Global Financial Crisis, India, Alter-globalization, New social movements, Anti-Capitalism, Mobs, Riots, and Revolutionary Crowds, Contentious Politics, Revolution, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), Austerity Measures, Everyday Resistance, Politics of Austerity, and Postcolonialism
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In this article we explore the relationship between Marxist theory and social movements, in particular how this relationship works in the specific historical period that we call the twilight of neoliberalism. Published in... more
In this article we explore the relationship between Marxist theory and social movements, in particular how this relationship works in the specific historical period that we call the twilight of neoliberalism.
Published in Revista Theomai 35: http://revista-theomai.unq.edu.ar/NUMERO_35/7.%20Cox-Nilsen.pdf
Published in Revista Theomai 35: http://revista-theomai.unq.edu.ar/NUMERO_35/7.%20Cox-Nilsen.pdf
Research Interests: Sociology, Social Movements, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Political Economy, and 13 moreDevelopment Studies, Globalization, Marxism, Political Science, Collective Action, Politics, Protest, Globalisation and Development, Capitalism, Marxist theory, Neoliberalism, Karl Marx и Contentious Politics
This paper reflects on the implications of the contemporary diversity of intellectual approaches to the study of social movements. Sketching some of the key dimensions of difference in the field, it explores the normative intellectual... more
This paper reflects on the implications of the contemporary diversity of intellectual approaches to the study of social movements. Sketching some of the key dimensions of difference in the field, it explores the normative intellectual questions raised by /acknowledging this diversity as well as the intellectual history questions involved in explaining it. In a global perspective, the question of what a “social movement studies of the global South” might mean exemplifies the challenge involved. The paper draws on Aristotle’s typology of knowledge to suggest some ways of handling this situation, before concluding with some open questions.
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Page 1. Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 3 (2): 1 - 32 (November 2011) Motta, Flesher Fominaya, Eschle, Cox, Feminism, women's movements 1 Feminism, women's movements and women in movement Sara Motta,... more
Page 1. Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 3 (2): 1 - 32 (November 2011) Motta, Flesher Fominaya, Eschle, Cox, Feminism, women's movements 1 Feminism, women's movements and women in movement Sara Motta, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Catherine Eschle, Laurence Cox For this issue Interface is delighted to welcome Catherine Eschle as guest editor.
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New call for papers for Interface, volume eight, issue two (November 2016): Social movement auto/biographies The November 2016 issue of the open-access, online, copyleft academic/activist journal Interface: a journal for and about social... more
New call for papers for Interface, volume eight, issue two (November 2016): Social movement auto/biographies
The November 2016 issue of the open-access, online, copyleft academic/activist journal Interface: a journal for and about social movements will focus on the theme of social movement auto/biographies.
As always, contributions on other themes are also welcome.
The deadline for submissions is May 1st 2016.
Please circulate this to anyone you think may be interested.
The November 2016 issue of the open-access, online, copyleft academic/activist journal Interface: a journal for and about social movements will focus on the theme of social movement auto/biographies.
As always, contributions on other themes are also welcome.
The deadline for submissions is May 1st 2016.
Please circulate this to anyone you think may be interested.