This work examines an art movement that was a direct outgrowth of a populist civil rights movement of the late 1960’s in the Southwest United States. This art, the Chicano Murals created as part of el Movimiento in San Diego, California was intended primarily as a didactic communication medium to reach into the barrios and marginalized neighborhoods for the primary purpose of carrying a resistance message to the semiliterate mestizo population within. Its secondary purpose was to bring a message from within these minority neighborhoods outward to the privileged elite, both Anglo and Hispanic, that within the confines of the barrio there exists a culture and heritage that has value. The Chicano Murals were ubiquitous throughout the southwest United States with concentration of the art in those areas adjacent to the Mexican border. This work examines some of the murals, and the politics associated with their creation principally in San Diego, California, and some activities in Los Angeles, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. This dissertation posits that it has been well established that art in public space is often a contentious matter and when it also carries a contra message, as did the Chicano murals, it may be considered intrusive and abrasive. The social environment into which these murals were insinuated--the public sphere, the intellectual territory of high art and the elite system of private and government cultural patronage, are examined in the context of their effect upon the mural content and conversely, the effects of these murals upon diversity in the high art and museology of the United States.

This thesis focuses on the Kurdish people of Turkey, who have struggled and advocated for a separate nation-state of their own. The Turkish state’s denial of Kurdish identity, and its heavy assimilation and oppression of the Kurdish people have turned some Kurds into political activists, both in Turkey and in the diaspora. In addition, the historical ban and current stigmatization of the Kurdish language have crystallized the importance and centrality of the language, particularly for both Kurdish identity and the Kurdish movement. This thesis explores the forms of political activism in Canada of the Kurds originating in Turkey, and the role of the Kurdish language in their activism. Using a qualitative research design, interviews with activists and participant observations were conducted in the cities of Toronto and Montréal. The findings draw attention to the significance of community centres as umbrella institutions for political activism, and as sites for the enactment of different forms of collective resistance. The study also illustrates that the role of the Kurdish language in activism is more salient at a representational level. That is, the Kurdish language is represented as the main identity marker fuelling activism, implying that speaking Kurdish is an act of resistance and thus political. In daily life, however, the usage of the Kurdish is far more attenuated and nuanced.

In past decades historians have become increasingly focussed on Native political activism in Canada. This has brought greater understanding to Native political issues and a degree of legitimization to Native political activism. Despite historians interest in Native politics, however, some general weaknesses remain within the historiography. In particular, there has been a general tendency to document the political actions only of eras known to be politically prominent. This practice has led to an abundance of studies focussed on the Riel Uprisings and the surge of Native activism in the 1960s but has left other periods such as the interwar era significantly underrepresented. When the interwar era is mentioned, it is generally done in order to frame such political activities as context for other issues. These tendencies have created the impression that Native political activism was sporadic and reactionary, and therefore, not an established and legitimate response to longstanding grievances. This thesis attempts to rectify this gap within the historiography of Native political activism in Saskatchewan by illustrating the extent to which Native peoples during the interwar era were politically active. In establishing that Saskatchewan Native political activism was a force throughout the interwar era, this thesis elucidates the reasons for the rise in political activism within Saskatchewan Native communities, tracing the development of First Nations and Métis political organizations which began in the early 1920s and 1930s. This work then draws attention to the political strategies developed by Natives to achieve their political goals. Highlighting the period between 1922 and 1946 as a politically significant era for Natives in Saskatchewan, this work fundamentally demonstrates that the challenges facing Native political actions did not result in a failure of Native political identities as one might expect, but rather forced adaptation and growth.

Recent decades have seen substantial changes in the U.S. political landscape. One particularly significant development has been the growing influence of a conservative coalition encompassing evangelical Christianity, interventionist foreign policy and neoliberal reform. This study explores the force and internal dynamics of this political assemblage. Based on fieldwork among conservative voters, volunteers and candidates in a small city in northwestern Ohio during a midterm election year, it probes the energy of conservative politics, its modes of attachment and influence, and the organizational forms through which it circulates. Contemporary conservative politics are shown to be centered on a particular epistemological intuition: that to be able to act, one must believe in something. This intuition implies an actively affirmative stance toward “beliefs” and “values.” The study also addresses methodological and analytical challenges that conservative politics pose for anthropological inquiry. It develops a “conversational” analytical attitude, arguing that in order to understand the lasting influence conservatism one has to take seriously the problems that it is oriented toward.

Sir William Macpherson's conclusion - following his public inquiry into the racist murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 - that the Metropolitan Police was 'institutionally racist', was a seminal moment for policing in Britain. The publication of the Macpherson report in 1999 has been rightly regarded as a victory for the Stephen Lawrence Family Campaign (SLFC), whose activities had been crucial in building pressure on the newly-elected Labour Government to hold a public inquiry into the Metropolitan Police's murder investigation. However, to focus solely on the Lawrence case, and the SLFC, is to obscure the existence of a longer struggle waged by black Londoners to expose the racism that had affected their experience of policing since the Second World War. This thesis explores the development of grassroots political activism within London's Afro-Caribbean community around the issue of policing from 1945 to 1993. Using material from local community archives, this thesis represents the first attempt at documenting the history of race and policing in London from the perspective of the capital's Afro-Caribbean population. Moreover, by taking the end of the Second World War as its starting point, it also breaks new ground in charting the way Afro-Caribbean people in London organised politically in opposition to racist policing prior to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Ever since people of Afro-Caribbean descent began to settle in London in increasing numbers in the aftermath of the Second World War, they have continually expressed concern about the way they were policed. While opposition to policing initially emerged in a highly unorganised form, this was fundamentally altered by the arrival of the British black power movement in the late 1960s. Despite its short existence, black power's emphasis upon independent black grassroots political activism outlived the movement and became a feature of the way black Londoners' challenged racist policing during the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, this thesis contends that the grassroots political campaign that developed around the case of Stephen Lawrence cannot be viewed in isolation from the historical efforts of black people in London to expose racism within the Metropolitan Police.

This thesis takes a gender-sensitive approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and asks whether and how Palestinian women’s different formal and informal political activism in ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘resistance’ can make a contribution to positive sustainable social and political change. Taking a bottom-up qualitative approach to conflict research, and deriving data mainly from in-depth interviews, participant observation and textual analyses, I problematise mainstream international conflict resolution and gender development approaches, revealing their mismatch with the Palestinian reality of prolonged occupation and settler colonialism on the ground. I critique in particular two aspects of mainstream gender and conflict approaches: Firstly, the essentialist feminist assertion that women are better ‘peacemakers’ than men due to their (alleged) more peaceful nature, and, secondly, the ‘liberal’ peace argument that dialogue is the best (and only) way to resolve conflict. These two claims are hardly applicable to the Palestinian context, and their implementation through policy programmes can even block genuine political and social change. Through their tendency to trace the roots of conflict in social gender relations and at the level of identity, they tend to give a distorted depoliticised picture of the conflict. Doing so, they risk alienating local constituencies and might even exacerbate social and political fragmentation. My analysis counters such (mostly western-originated) mainstream gender and conflict initiatives by starting from the local. Proposing a contextualised gender-sensitive approach to conflict transformation, which pays attention to intra-party dynamics such as ‘indigenous’ gender constructions and the political culture of resistance, I trace those forms of female political agency that are able to gain societal support and are conducive to sustainable social and political change. Bridging theoretical insights from the fields of conflict resolution and gender theory and questioning some of their widely held assumptions, I hope to contribute to knowledge in both fields.

This thesis examines the political activism of Vietnamese Engaged Buddhism in the 1960s, particularly the Struggle Movement for social justice and democracy of 1963 and the Peace Movement of 1966. It explores the Buddhist leaders' motives and their political means to deal with Saigon military government and senior advisors to the White House. The thesis sets out to prove that socially and politically Engaged Buddhism is inherent in the Buddhist tradition and not alien to Buddha's teachings. It also proves that Vietnamese Buddhism has always been engaged since the dawn of Vietnamese history. The Buddhism Peace Movement is assessed in accordance with Buddhist principles such as non-violence and non-attachment to temporal power. Except a few minor incidents, it was found that the Buddhist leaders strictly adhered to the non-violent principle and Vietnamese Engaged Buddhism could have provided a political alternative, the Politics of Enlightenment, which could avert the unnecessary destruction of the Vietnam War / Master of Science (Hons) Social Ecology

Despite existing literature that demonstrates the relation between an attitude of social responsibility and activism; few studies have examined the underlying factor structure of social responsibility. The current study had two goals. The first goal was to examine the structure of a measure of social responsibility attitude for urban adolescents. The second goal was to examine the associations of social responsibility with civic and political activism. The participants were 221 adolescents from schools and youth serving organizations in metropolitan Atlanta, GA. Confirmatory factor analysis of social responsibility items revealed that a model with a single latent factor explained the data better than a two-factor model with one latent factor representing neighborhood social responsibility and the other representing global social responsibility. There were significant positive relations between social responsibility and civic activism and political activism when controlling for parental activism and peer activism. This study suggests that a social responsibility attitude may exist as a single factor amongst urban adolescents and it has added empirical support to show that higher levels of social responsibility are associated with greater depth of involvement in civic and political activism. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

The central question this thesis poses is how and why the modes of Palestinian political activism have changed from the first to the second intifada. The thesis will explore the underlying major political, territorial and social developments that created a new environment for the second uprising that was no longer conducive to the mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, which had dominated the first intifada in the late 1980s. The decline of civil society, the reassertion of Palestinian political factionalism and the unique geographical dislocation of the Palestinian territories, which created new physical obstacles to resistance but also caused division within society, were the key factors in reshaping the context of the second intifada. In addition, rising support for violent resistance among the population was rooted in the sense of hopelessness and frustration that re-emerged over the Oslo period. Much of the population’s frustration was directed at Israel’s colonial regime but in part it was also a response to the rule of the Palestinian Authority, which had failed to fulfil its commitments to its own population in view of its obligations under Oslo toward Israel. In the absence of alternative non-violent outlets within either politics or civil society, what took root instead was individual activism via militant organisations. As such, this thesis offers an account of the development of Palestinian political action (and in particular political violence) that is indebted to an effort to employ historical and contextual analysis in ways that deepen the insights available from explanations of behaviour drawn from political science.

Cette recherche explore l’articulation entre les « nouvelles gauches » révolutionnaires et les mobilisations argentines pour les droits de l’Homme à partir des années 1970. Mobilisant archives et entretiens, elle se situe entre sociologie politique et histoire des idées politiques pour reconstruire la trajectoire militante d’un collectif informel d’acteurs et en analyser les répertoires discursifs. La première partie met en évidence le rôle pionnier joué par les nouvelles gauches dans l’émergence des droits de l’Homme comme référence du discours militant en Argentine au début des années 1970. On assiste alors à un processus d’hybridation discursive mêlant radicalité politique et recours à un lexique juridique, dans un contexte de dictature. La deuxième partie montre comment, malgré la domination d’une conception libérale des droits de l’Homme, la spécificité de ce discours radical se préserve suite au retour à l’État de droit à partir des années 1980. Il se précise alors via une série de mises à l’épreuve (procès des juntes, incrimination du militantisme révolutionnaire, attaque d’un régiment militaire par un groupe de gauche armée). La troisième partie, enfin, souligne le fait que l’usage actuel de certaines notions (« génocide », « 30 000 disparus ») relatives au récit de la dictature ne peut être compris que s’il est réinscrit dans les trajectoires étudiées au préalable, lesquelles produisent des significations sui generis. Le répertoire discursif contemporain des droits de l’Homme révolutionnaires est en ce sens tributaire d’une longue évolution, qui rend compte de la fondation d’un nouveau sens commun radical démocrate au sein de la gauche argentine. / This research explores the relationship between the Argentinean revolutionary « New Lefts » and human rights mobilizations since the 1970s. Drawing on both archival work and interviews, it combines approaches from political sociology and the history of political ideas to reconstruct the trajectories of political activism of an informal group of actors, and proposes an analysis of their discursive repertoires. The first part shows that the New Lefts were pioneers in the emergence of human rights as a political discourse in Argentina in the early 1970s. This provided the basis for a hybridization process, in which political radicalness and the use of a juridical vocabulary were intertwined in a context of dictatorship. The second part shows how, although a liberal conception of human rights prevailed in the 1980s, this original radical discourse survived after the reestablishment of the rule of law. It developed and became more precise through a series of tests (trial of the juntas, incrimination of revolutionary activism, attack of a military unit by an armed left-wing group). The third part, lastly, underlines the fact that current uses of certain terms for describing and discussing the period of dictatorship (“genocide”, “30 000 disappeared”) can only be understood in line with the previously studied trajectories, which give them a sui generis meaning. In that perspective, the contemporary discursive repertoire of revolutionary human rights is the result of a long evolution and can only be understood in light of that evolution. Moreover, understanding this history sheds fresh light on how a new radical democratic common sense was established among the Argentinean left.