Political disillusionment is widespread in contemporary Japanese society, despite people’s struggles in the recession. Our social relationships become entangled, and we can no longer clearly identify our interest in politics. The search for the outside of stagnant reality sometimes leads marginalised young people to a disastrous imaginary for social change, such as war and death. The imaginary of disaster was actualised in March 2011. The huge earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which triggered the largest wave of activism since the 1960s. Based on the author’s fieldwork on the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear movements in Tokyo, this thesis investigates how the disaster impacted people’s sense of agency and ethics, and ultimately explores the new political imaginary in postmodernity. The disaster revealed the interconnected nature of contemporary society. The thesis argues that their regret about their past indifference to politics motivated the protesters into social commitment without any totalising ideology or predetermined collective identity. They also found an ambiguity of the self, which is insufficient to know what should be done. Hence, they mobilise their bodies on to the streets, encountering others, and forcing themselves to feel and think. This is an ethical attitude, yet it simultaneously stems from the desire of each individual to make a difference to the self and society. The thesis concludes that the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear movements signify a new way of doing politics as endless experiments by collectively responding to an unexpected force from an outside in a creative way.

After the Cold War and fall of Communism in the East bloc, a dramatic transformation took place in world geopolitics known as the third wave of democratization. From the 1970s to the 1990s, third wave democracies became a foil to military dictatorships and Marxist-style juntas throughout the Third World (see Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave, 1991 and Larry Diamond et. al, Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies, 1997). The process of democratization in Africa seemed to have attained significant levels by the mid 1990s but the same could not be said for the turn of the twenty first century. What went wrong? The process of transition from military dictatorships to constitutional rule was fraught with problems. A perennial problem was the abuse of electoral systems which provided legitimate ways to political participation. Authoritarian governments in Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Togo and Zimbabwe used multiparty elections to legitimize and entrench their rules. Incumbents brazenly rigged elections and derailed Africa's fragile democratic experiment and return to constitutional rule. Democracy in Africa, nevertheless, was not a lost cause. The successful transition to democracy in Ghana is worth studying because it provided a test case of hope and resilience on the part of citizens who wanted to exercise their rights to political participation and governance. I argue that it is important to shift emphasis from electoral systems to associational life and broad-based political participation because this is how democracy is going to be sustained in Africa. To put an end to contested elections and perennial military intervention, broad-based local solutions were sought in Ghana in the period of political opening. The revival of associational life and broad-based political participation, and an emphasis on civil society from the late 1970s to the early 1990s became the founding stone of Ghana's Fourth Republic. The art of association and the assumed freedom it comes with is one of the founding tenets of liberal and democratic societies, and nowhere is this statement more relevant than in Ghana. Ghana's democratic Fourth Republic is the foster child of Ghana's civil society organs and social forces. In Ghana, civil associations such as the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS), the Ghana Bar Association (GBA), the Movement for Freedom and Justice (MFJ), Christian Council of Ghana (CCG), and the Catholic Bishops' Conference (CBC) generated social movements which were critical to the success of Ghana's democratic experiment. Despite the fact that the political and social activities of the National Union of Ghana Students were crucial and complimentary to the making of Ghana's Fourth Republic, no extensive study has addressed this blatant omission. Sakyi Amoa is the only scholar who has done some substantive work on student movements in Ghana ("Ghanaian University Students," 1969; University Students' Political Action in Ghana, 1979). However, his work did not explore the relations between civil society, social movements, and student movements, and their roles in the making of Ghana's Fourth Republic. This study has a double-edged purpose: to explore and define the place of civil society and social movements in Ghana's democratic experiment; and to point out the importance of the often neglected student movements in making the democratic experiment successful. This dissertation is not just a study of student organizations and their political and social activities, but it is also an analysis of the social forces in Ghana's civil society which agitated for social change and democratization. From the Ghanaian context, I argue that African states embarking on democratization need a functioning and independent civil society which would ensure that at the time of political opening and transition to democracy, the rules of political competition are agreed upon and constitutionally implemented. Also I argue that student movements, along with other social movements, are important to the functioning and independence of civil society. Despite the apparent lack of political maturity by student movements, the student movement in Ghana did perform its functional role in conjunction with other social actors to support Ghana's democratic experiment from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

In 2006, millions of Immigrant Rights Movement (IRM) activists and allies stomped through the streets of cities throughout the United States. Attracting a diverse array of participants, the IRM includes immigrants and non-immigrants and people from varying religious and non-religious traditions. This dissertation focuses on the social cohesion as an element of the collective identity of this multicultural and multi-faith movement. Taking the IRM in San Diego County as a critical case, this study included data from forty-nine extensive formal interviews with movement participants in sixteen organizations, along with countless informal conversations during participant observation in over two hundred activist-organized events from April 2006 until August 2008. By focusing on movement narratives, frames, and patterns of interaction, this study finds that stories of change, a progressively inclusive moral framework, and what I call "multicultural activist etiquette" serve as unifying mechanisms in the IRM. In stories of change, we hear how activists articulated the right to migrate and advocate for worker rights through shared narratives of agitation and hope-generating stories of collective action. A shared sense of injustice and collectively focused movement goals are informed by a belief system about how the world ought to operate that is located at the ideological intersection between religious and non-religious. An inclusive and humanitarian moral framework provided the common ground upon which diverse activists organize, but this progressive moral framework was differently legitimated by the diverse religious and non-religious traditions of the activists. They agreed that all people are inherently equal, and everyone ought to care for one another, upholding an emphasis on marginalized immigrants. This over-arching moral framework moved beyond multicultural and multi-faith rhetoric and helped guide and affirm the way activists interacted in meeting spaces. Together, they constructed a code of collaboration, the multicultural activist etiquette, that facilitated equality within organizational processes, in an emotionally and physically secure meeting space, while focusing on productivity toward movement goals. Finally, this study recognizes immigrant activists as "rule-changers," agents of change collaborating to improve their own quality of life in the U.S. It thus offers an alternative to current perspectives on immigrant assimilation into American society.

The Internet is a new tool for mobilization, communication, and articulation of social movement organizational framings of events and ideologies. The White Supremacist/Separatist Movement has had, and remains, a significant presence on the Internet. There are several hundred sites operating, representing almost every faction of the movement. Hyperlinks between sites allow the ideological resources (content of sites, online libraries, radio shows, etc.) offered by one group to be available to many groups, regardless of geography. Importantly, links are often asymmetrical and more prestigious sites have many "in" links. This movement has considerable diversity of beliefs, goals, tactics, and resources. Movements vary in the richness of symbolic resources available on their web sites. I operationalize "resource richness" as the amount and coverage of content on a website. Groups also exhibit a range of tactical orientations ranging from peaceful (education) to extremely violent (race war). Using network analysis, I investigate the structure of ties in the White Supremacist/Separatist Movement industry on the Internet. Through this method, analyses reveals patterns of sharing of ideological resources. I examine how ideological and tactical affinities structure the scope, density, and patterns of cybernetworks in the White Supremacist/Separatist Movement industry.

Durante as investigações da Conjuração Baiana de 1798, um grupo de homens de muita opulência e luzimento, qualificados por Luís dos Santos Vilhena de corporação dos enteados, fez pronta-entrega de seus escravos à justiça para livrarem-se da acusação de prática sediciosa no final do século XVIII, na capitania da Bahia. Esse episódio foi o ponto de partida para se comprovar a participação de pessoas dos médios e altos setores da sociedade soteropolitana na Conjuração Baiana de 1798, cujas demandas explicitadas nos boletins manuscritos eram inconciliáveis em seus termos, uma vez que o projeto político dos médios setores, os milicianos, vislumbrava a mudança dos hierarquizados critérios sociais que os impediam de participarem do universo político e ascenderem na carreira militar, e o projeto político dos altos setores, a corporação dos enteados, objetivava a conservação das regras do Sistema Colonial, que até então os tratava como enteados nas dinâmicas políticas e econômicas do Império Português. A documentação demonstra que o recrudescimento do pacto colonial anunciado pelas reformas modernizantes de d. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho desencadeou uma tomada de consciência da exploração colonial, fazendo com que os altos setores da sociedade soteropolitana do final do século XVIII reivindicassem a internalização de seus interesses econômicos e a manutenção de seus privilégios ameaçados com a possibilidade do fim dos monopólios, dos morgados, da mudança na forma de arrematação dos ofícios de fazenda e justiça, e da manutenção da prorrogação da arrematação dos dízimos para os negociantes portugueses. Após uma aliança programática com o contingente armado da capitania da Bahia, os médios e altos setores do Partido da Liberdade deflagraram o movimento com a publicação dos boletins manuscritos, explorando ao limite os dois principais medos no horizonte de expectativas da coroa portuguesa naquele conflituoso final de século: a miragem do livre comércio e a invasão francesa. Abertas as devassas para a investigação dos autores dos boletins manuscritos e dos partícipes do movimento, os altos setores recuaram, entregaram seus escravos à justiça e formularam as principais culpas que condenaram à pena de morte homens dos médios setores. Tratam-se, portanto, de elementos que permitem a análise da Conjuração Baiana de 1798 como um movimento de contestação política ocorrido em duas fases, durante o período de 1796-1800, contando com a efetiva participação dos altos e médios setores da sociedade soteropolitana da época. O enforcamento em praça pública dos réus da Conjuração Baiana de 1798, portanto, é paradigmático do fato de que projeto político vencedor foi o conservador, na medida em que a coroa portuguesa empreendeu uma série de soluções de compromisso com a corporação dos enteados, garantindo-lhes a internalização de seus interesses e a manutenção de seus privilégios, que os constituíam no setor dominante daquela sociedade, base social fundamental para a sustentação do poder monárquico português continuar a governar a conflitualidade no interior dos setores dominantes da sua principal colônia. / During the investigations of the Conjuração Baiana of 1798, a group of men with \"opulence and brightness\" qualified by Luís dos Santos Vilhena like the \"corporação dos enteados\", made a \"immediate delivery\" of their slaves to justice to rid themselves of charges of seditious practices in the late eighteenth century, at the captaincy of Bahia. This episode was the starting point to prove the participation of people from middle and higher social sectors of Salvador in the Conjuração Baiana of 1798, whose demands spelled out in manuscript bulletins were incompatible on their own terms, once the political project of the middle sectors, the militiamen, glimpsed the change of hierarchical social criteria that prevented them from participating in the political world and ascend in the military, and the political project of the upper sector, the corporação dos enteados, aimed at keeping the rules of the Colonial System, which until then was treated as \"enteados\" in the political and economic dynamics of the Portuguese Empire. The documentation shows that the intensification of the colonial pact announced by the modernizing reforms of d. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho triggered an awareness of colonial exploitation, making new claims of the higher social sectors of Salvador in the late eighteenth century to the internalization of its economic interests and maintain their privileges threatened with the possibility of the end of monopolies, of the morgados, the change in the auction of justice and treasury permissions, and maintaining the extension of auction of tithes to the Portuguese merchants. After a programmatic alliance with the armed contingent of the captaincy of Bahia, the middle and upper sectors of the Partido da Liberdade sparked the movement with the publication of manuscript bulletins, exploring the limits the two main fears on the horizon of expectations of the Portuguese crown at the end of that turbulent century: the mirage of free trade and the french invasion. With the start of the investigations to define the authors of these manuscripts and from participants of the movement, the higher sectors retreated, delivering their slaves to justice and formulating the main proves that condemned to death those men from the middle social sector. These elements allow the analysis of Conjuration Baiana of 1798 as a movement of political contestation that occurred in two phases, during the 1796-1800 period, with the effective participation of upper and middle social sectors of Salvador at the time. The hanging in public square of the defendants of the Conjuração Baiana of 1798, therefore, is paradigmatic of the fact that the winners political project was the conservative, in that sense that the Portuguese crown undertook a series of compromises with the corporação dos enteados, ensuring them to internalize their interests and maintain their privileges, which allows them to constitute the dominant sector of that society, and was fundamental to sustaining the continuance of Portuguese monarchy to govern the conflict within the dominant sectors of its main colony.

There exists a scholarly debate on the cultural impact of globalization and how and to what extent it is affecting indigenous people in particular. Three theoretical standpoints can be discerned from the debate; the homogenization-perspective which holds that globalization is making world cultures more similar, the hybridization-perspective which emphasizes that it is fragmenting cultural boundaries and the differentiation-perspective which implies that globalization is augmenting differences and making humanity as a whole more diverse. As regards the cultural impact of globalization on indigenous peoples, many question marks can be raised. The objective of this research is to contribute to the debate by bringing to light the perspective of the indigenous movement in Ecuador, CONAIE. An analysis is made on how they perceive globalization affecting the maintenance of indigenous identities and culture among today’s youth. That information is then used as a foundation to analyze CONAIE’s level of success regarding their main objective; to preserve Ecuador’s indigenous nationalities and peoples. The study, which has a qualitative ethnographic approach and is based on semi-structured interviews, was carried out during an eight weeks long field study in Quito and in San Pedro de Escaleras, Cuenca, Ecuador. The research has an abductive approach and the theoretical debate on globalization’s cultural impact on indigenous peoples sets the analytical frame of the study. The three theoretical standpoints; globalization as homogenization, globalization as differentiation and globalization as hybridization play central roles in the analysis of the empirical material. The findings show that there are many elements that obstruct the maintenance of indigenous culture and identity among youth in contemporary Ecuador. There is a connection between youth being exposed to cultural globalization and that they lose cultural characteristics for the indigenous identity. Hybridization of identities due to globalization is presented as a possible factor to play a role in this. Indigenous youth tend to drop characteristics for the indigenous identity as they adopt features from the mestizo culture, in case they see no benefit in maintaining the former. This indicates that what ultimately might be at stake is cultural homogenization. Light is also shed on that CONAIE lacks strategies and possibilities to reinforce the indigenous identity among the youth that is in a process of identity change. The findings thus point at that despite efforts for cultural revival by the indigenous movement in Ecuador, the maintenance of rigid frontiers between the ethnically diverse nationalities in the country is threatened. Seen to a larger picture, this implies that globalization’s impact on indigenous culture among youth is very difficult to counteract. It appears as if the move towards more cultural similarity in Ecuador cannot be hindered.

Magister Artium (Development Studies) - MA(DVS) / This study revealed the key role that social, historical, economic and political networks play in initiating and maintaining service delivery protests. While networks help in communicating service delivery problems among protestors and in mobilizing, protests that ensue are a means of communicating anger at the municipal authorities’ actions and or inactions. Using a reference to a hostage situation that occurred, I argued that there is a progression and intensification of protest tactics especially after ‘peaceful and legal’ means of engagement fail. Also, my research findings show that networks used for protest purposes can be used for other purposes. In light of this, I suggested that a better understanding, by protestors, of networks at their disposal and how they can use such networks for other community building projects is needed. Additionally, such an understanding by protestors may prove helpful for protestors to better organize and utilize their network resource and stage more effective but peaceful protests. Municipalities may use this information (networks) to communicate and connect with the communities they serve in a better way. In sum, the study further found that networks are important before the protest, during the protest and after the protest

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study investigates workers’ perceptions of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) practices on elections and living wage issues from a social movement perspective from the Apartheid (South Africa) and Unilateral Declaration of Independence (Zimbabwe) eras to 2009. The trade union social movement perspective refers to labour movements that develop a socio-political character, and concern themselves not only with workplace issues but with broad social and political issues. A study of COSATU and ZCTU practices in South Africa and Zimbabwe at this time in the field of social movements is consistent with current calls for a conceptual shift, away from looking for invariant causes and effects to looking for mechanisms and processes that occur in many different kinds of movements and that lead to different outcomes depending on the specific contexts within which they occur. The study draws insights from social movement unionsm theory to understand mechanisms and processes pursued by COSATU and ZCTU in seeking to influence policy outcomes. This study used a qualitative approach and a case study strategy. In the study, questionnaire and in-depth interview responses were drawn from COSATU secretariat, two affiliates, the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) and National Union of Mine Workers (NUM). Questionnaire and in-depth responses were also drawn from the ZCTU secretariat, two affiliates, the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GPWUZ) and the Zimbabwe Urban Municipal Workers Union (ZUMWU). The objective was to gain insights from a broad cross-section of union members – blue-collar workers, professionals, state or semi state institution workers and ordinarily low income farm workers. The study concludes that workers’ perceptions of the two labour social movements is that they can influence changes in the political system (through elections) as a means to securing living wages by engaging in five practices, namely, disruption mechanisms, public preference mechanisms, political access mechanisms, judicial mechanisms and international access mechanisms. However, while the study noted that workers perceive COSATU and ZCTU practices as essential in influencing elections and living wage issues, the popularity of the mechanisms was lower in Zimbabwe where workers often face persecution. In South Africa, utilisation of these practices is also affected by the less militant public sector affiliates and non- standard forms of work such as subcontracting, casualisation, informalisation, externalisation and the ballooning informal sector. Given these problems, social movement trade unionism remains a viable means of representing the interests of the working poor. Establishment of these challenges leads to areas of possible further research such as how the unions can effectively represent the unorganised workers of the informal sector. A broader research on the impact of the exponential growth of non-standard forms of work is also relevant at this time in the two countries.

This research looks at the change in ethical sensibilities towards a mangrove in a fishing colony in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at how they may have changed as the mangrove became a protected area and entered the environmental assemblage. Formerly called Z-1, this was the first of 800 cooperative fishing colonies founded along the Brazilian coast in 1920 as part of a government initiative. The study unveiled the following pattern around the mangrove: from being a source of livelihood and place for communal activities up until the 1970s, it became the locus of an environmental movement in the 80s and 90s after it was devastated by a big fire. The concrete outcome of the movement was the creation of the APARU, Area of Environmental Protection and Urban Regeneration, which meant that after more than seventy years under a system of tutelage by the Navy, the colony and the mangrove were subjected to an environmental form of governance administered by the City Council, and the mangrove went from being a taken-for-granted thing to an environmentally-oriented concept. It finally fell silent and isolated as it became increasingly polluted, even if ‘protected’ by a municipal decree. The main argument presented is that, as the mangrove passed from nature to environment, which implied a change in governance from the Navy to the Department of Environment, people found creative ways of holding on to its thingness, and to ethical values that at times conflict with the broader environmental assemblage. Those local ethics forge the links that sustain an ecological assemblage, and the ethics prescribed by the environmental governance currently in place can be undermined by more embedded values. That said, local knowledge and practices are environmentally informed, and different ways of being political emerge. This community was not only created literally on a mangrove, but it was also symbolically and politically reproduced through the mangrove, and even more so after it became a protected area. The dialectical outcomes of the relationships between human beings and the mangrove, and between human beings as they multiply, transform the landscape continuously, just as the mangrove in its perpetual unfolding impresses itself upon human matters and sustains the social ordering of things. As new elements are assembled around the mangrove, from discarded utensils to stories of environmental activism, the mangrove is enacted as heritage, as nature, as a biome, as culture, as pollution, as an institution, and as environment. This thesis hopes to contribute towards the broader body of literature on environmental anthropology, political ecology, and anthropology of moralities, by focusing on ‘human-disturbed environments’ (Tsing 2013) and bringing attention to the value of local perceptions in policy making.

This thesis seeks to analyse the role of the Gambian diaspora activists in Gambian politics particularly during the December 1st, 2016, Presidential election in which the long-time dictator Yahya Jammeh was defeated by the less experienced and known Adama Barrow. Despite an extensive mobilization effort over the past twenty-two years, spanning across continents, the fragile and disorganized Gambian diaspora has been unable to exert influence in Gambian politics due to unfavourable domestic conditions such as the unwillingness of the opposition to unite as well as state repression. However, the formation of coalition 2016 provided the diaspora activists an opportunity to engage effectively in mobilizing against the Jammeh regime through their online media platforms as well as financial contribution.  By using a multi-level research design using interviews and document analyses, the thesis explores the mobilization strategies of the Gambian diaspora as means of influencing at both the homeland and international levels.