This [Temple] is an illegal construction, a typical case of land-grabbing. People do this to get power and earn money. This is not the right type of temple [...] 99% of the temples are constructed illegally [...]. The people don’t build houses but temples because they know that in this case no one can do anything against it and they can simultaneously earn money with it. Behind the shrine they can build their house in peace. All this happens because people are uneducated.'1 This statement by a top bureaucrat in the Bhopal administration summarises a widely felt sentiment among urban planners in India. For many bureaucrats, temples are nuisances, traffic obstructions, acts of landgrabbing, or means of political assertion that contribute to inter-religious tensions. By contrast, builders, trustees or worshippers defend temples as spaces of divine manifestation, as responding to religious needs and providing space for religious festivals and community activity. In this article, I use the case study of the establishment of a controversial goddess temple in Bhopal to shed light on a fundamental rift between two ideal-type approaches to the city – as a secular place and as religious territory. This is an abiding theme of my research on urban temples, which was undertaken in Bhopal, the capital city of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, over a total of twenty months between 1995 and 2001.2

In der vorliegenden Forschungsarbeit nehme ich einen Aspekt der aktivistischen Bildung unter die Lupe, nämlich die Frage nach der Diversität und Inklusivität im Bildungsbereich der linken sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland. Trotz der scheinbaren Selbstverständlichkeit, dass die linke Bildung weit zugänglich und egalitär sein sollte, scheinen die Ausschluss- und Hierarchisierungsmechanismen der öffentlichen und privaten Bildungssysteme sich im aktivistischen Bildungsbereich zu wiederholen und zu reproduzieren. Wegen der illusorischen Gleichheit und Einheit in den linken Einsichten und im Lebensstil bleiben diese internen Logiken der linken sozialen Bewegungen meistens unsichtbar und unreflektiert. Mit diesem thematischen Schwerpunkt oszilliert meine Forschungsarbeit an der Schnittstelle zwischen Bewegungsforschung, emanzipatorischer Pädagogikforschung und einer Untersuchung zu sozialen Diskriminierungen und zur Inklusion. Den theoretischen Kontext meiner Recherche bildet der Bereich der politischen Bildung und des informellen Lernens. Ich nehme dabei sowohl die Debatten zu den Beteiligungsstrukturen und sozialer Ungleichheit im Bildungsbereich in den Blick, als auch die Forschung zu sozialen Bewegungen in Bezug auf interne Machtverhältnisse und bewegungsinterne Debatten zu Hierarchien sowie der Umverteilung von Wissen und Ressourcen innerhalb von aktivistischen Kreisen. / In this dissertation, I take a closer look at one aspect of activist education, namely the question of diversity and inclusivity in the educational work of left social movements in Germany. Despite the apparent truism that left education should be widely accessible and egalitarian, the mechanisms of exclusion and hierarchization proper to the public and private education systems seem to be replicated and reproduced in the activist education sector. Because of the illusions of equality and unity associated with leftist insights and lifestyles, the internal logics of left social movements remain mostly invisible and unreflected. With this thematic focus, my research oscillates at the interface of movement research, emancipatory pedagogical research and an investigation of social discrimination and inclusion. The theoretical context of my research is the field of political education and informal learning. I focus on debates about participation structures and social inequality in education, as well as on research into social movements, their internal power relations and movement-internal debates on hierarchies and the redistribution of knowledge and resources within activist circles.

This thesis is focused on the issue of violence in civil society. Using Charles Tilly's political theory, it attempts to point out that the emergence of collective violence can be well understood by tracing small scale causes (mechanisms), rather than large causes (poverty, extremism etc.). This argument is empirically studied in the context of anti-Roma riots that took place in Šluknov Hook, Czech republic, in the year 2011. The research is based on a broad concept of civil society, which doesn't assume fixed division between civil and uncivil subjects, but works with a number of actors, whose identity is unstable and their acting strategy fluently changes from nonviolent to violent and contra. The data show, that radical actors are generally more prone to use force. However, Tilly's theory provides opportunity to explain their influence on majority through the dynamics of relationships that is studied in this paper. The catalogue of events was created on the basis of news and document analysis and the incidence of theoretically defined mechanisms is identified by process tracing method: Boundary activation between us and them (mainly network-based escalation, signaling spirals), polarization, competitive display, selective retaliation, containment, monitoring, certification/decertification and...

Concern of this master thesis are action repertoires of czech feminist organizations. The main goal of this paper is to find out whether there are some types of activism in terms of following characteristics in the Czech Republic: organizational age, political opportunity structure, human and financial resources, and action repertoir to be found. The thesis is devided into two parts - theoretical and empirical. The author introduces evolution of the social movement theory in the theoretical part. Greater attention is given to an advocacy function of civil society organizations and to action repertoire, which social movement organizations use to reach their goals. Subsequently is shown how the literature talks about particular forms of action and its selection. There are characteristics mentioned above used in Hierarchical Cluster Analysis on sample of twenty-nine czech feminist organization in the empirical part. Finally, findings of this paper are being discussed. Keywords: Action repertoires, social movements, social movements organization, non-governmental organizations, feminist organizations, Czech activism.

The aim of the thesis is to study personal identity development of the participants who move from active civic engagement within the civil society to active political participation within the political sphere at the reginal level. The thesis focuses on personal identity and the method of its construction through life stories. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with terms such as civic engagement, political participation and concepts based on narative identity. The second part contains a research methodology. Specifically is presented which presents the narrative approach with the use of narrative interview as a research method. The third part is based on deals with the research itself. The research works with a specific case based on political and socio-historical context of the city of Usti nad Labem. The data is obtained in the form of narrative interviews with local policiticians. The results of the research have shown that there are three different ways in which the actors are self- presenting their identity in relation to the environment. It was the identity of the politician, the identity of the activist / active citizen and the identity of the politician joined with the identity of the activist. Personal identity has completely changed in the case of one person, one person has changed...

(EN) Civil society is made up of committed individuals, non-governmental non-profit organizations, their employees, volunteers, and other supporters, as well as relations among these actors. Civil society activities include community development, advancement of leisure and professional interests, services to vulnerable groups, as well as efforts to intervene in the political process and to support certain legislation and systemic change. This work focuses on the latter, i.e. the ways how civil society actors influence the political process. In the introductory chapter I present an overview of the current research of civil society and political activism in the Czech Republic and other post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In this chapter, I identify five central propositions that can be formulated on the basis of existing scientific discussion and I subject them to a critical assessment. In addition, I argue that against the backdrop of the discussion, two streams of literature can be distinguished which differ in their assessment of civil society's quality in Central and Eastern Europe. I try to clarify the reasons for these contradictions. In the second chapter I offer an overview of social movements theories, thus completing the theoretical basis for the empirical part of this...

In this master thesis I deal with civil society organizations in Tunisia with a focus on women's rights. Firstly, I present the conceptual frameworks I work with and I set the indicators on the basis of which I assess the organization. I present context in which organisations are operating, I describe the history of Tunisia and the state of women's rights in Tunisia. First I focus on the period before the first democratic elections, between 1987 and 2011, when president Zin Abidin bin Ali ruled. Then I move on to the period after the first democratic elections, which took place in 2011, until 2018. Subsequently, I compare the functioning of civil society organisations with a focus on women's rights in these two periods. I discuss what organizations have to deal with during their operation, what influences them and what problems they concentrate on within the framework of women's rights. I collect information and data using document analysis, and then analyze the data with open coding.

The thesis explores the unique structure of political opportunity that emerged in front of Czech civil society organizations during the Czech presidency to the Council of the EU. Case study analyses how the Czech section of Amnesty International (AI CR) influenced public- policy agenda in the area of human rights. The starting point for the thesis is the formulation of the problem which is considered to be the weak influence of civil society organizations over public policy agenda as well as in-adequate use of the structure of political opportunity. Based on the structure of political opportunity theory we sought to determine whether the organization succeeded in mobilization of its internal structure and resources. We also focused on the transnational aspect of the opportunity. We tested the validity of hypotheses in a quantitative way when we measured the indicators of transactional capacity and mobilization capacity. According to the results AI CR was not able to mobilize enough activists. On the other hand, it was able to use the opportunity for transnational mobilization and networking. The most successful methods of activism proved to be those without confrontation. Further, the organizational structure of the organization is affected by bureaucracy which impedes its mobilization potential.

The diploma thesis "Anti-corruption activism of the commercial sector from the point of view of political opportunity structure theory" Abstract The diploma thesis "Anti-corruption activism of the commercial sector from the point of view of political opportunity structure theory" was devoted to the structure of political opportunities in 1998 to 2012 in relation to manifestations of corruption in the Czech Republic and the role of the commercial sector in terms of anti-corruption involvement. This thesis aimed to find out what is the structure of the opportunities, that participants of the commercial sector can be use in order to influence anti-corruption public politics. Two periods were found from the period of time which the thesis focuses on, during which more fundamental manifestations of the commercial sector occurred. The first period was linked to accession of the Czech Republic to the EU, when presentation of the commercial sector most frequently took place via special-interest associations and tools of Commercial ethics and the concept of CSR supported by activities of the European Union. Years of accession talks showed themselves to be an opportunity, above all for international companies operating in the Czech Republic with a dominance of use of political and institutional opportunities. The...

This research seeks to interpret the academic activism of Academics for Peace in Turkey. It argues that the occurrence of the Academics for Peace results from the intertwinement of neoliberal and authoritarian ideology. The writer of this research suggests that Academics for Peace build networks of solidarity based on resistive critique and truth-telling practices. Solidarity (alternative) academies in Turkey are the seeds of this engagement in solidarity, self- adapting practices, activist truth, and parrhesia, and they appear as phenomena that carry out prefigurative-instituent practices. The research suggests that Solidarity academies can be evaluated as a 'threshold' cultivating our understanding of the 'commons' and 'commoning practices.'