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Americans come together to fight diseases. For over 100 years, they have asked their neighbors to contribute to disease campaigns and supported health policies that target one disease at a time. Common Enemies asks why disease campaigns are the battles Americans can agree to fight, why some diseases attract more attention than others, and how fighting one disease at a time changes how Americans distribute charitable dollars, prioritize policies, and promote health. Drawing on the first comprehensive data on thousands of organizations targeting hundreds of diseases over decades, the author shows that disease campaigns proliferate due to the perception of health as a universal goal, the appeal of narrowly targeted campaigns, and the strategic avoidance of controversy. They funnel vast sums of money and attention to a few favored diseases, and they prioritize awareness campaigns and medical research over preventing disease and ensuring access to healthcare. It’s easy to imagine more efficient ways to promote collective well-being. Yet the same forces that limit the potential of individual disease campaigns to improve health also stimulate the vast outpouring of money and attention. Rather than displacing attention to other problems, disease campaigns build up the capacity to address them.

In the popular imagination, Caribbean islands represent tropical paradise. This image underlies the efforts of many environmentalists to protect Caribbean coral reefs, mangroves, and rainforests. Much less attention is given to environmental conditions in urban areas, where the islands’ poorer citizens suffer from exposure to garbage, untreated sewage, and air pollution. Concrete Jungles explores why these issues tend to be ignored, demonstrating how mainstream environmentalism reflects and reproduces class and race inequalities. Based on over a decade of research in Kingston, Jamaica, and Willemstad, Curaçao, the book contrasts the “Uptown environmentalism” of largely middle-class professionals with the “Downtown environmentalism” of inner-city residents. It combines an original and sophisticated theoretical discussion of the politics of difference with rich ethnographic detail, including vivid depictions of Caribbean “ghettos” and elite enclaves. The book presents a novel approach to environmental injustice, combining a political economy perspective with attention to the cultural politics that naturalize socio-ecological inequalities. One of the first works to extend environmental anthropological theory to explicitly include the study of cities, the book shows how divergent forms of environmentalism articulate class, race, and urban space. Forms of environmentalism that implicitly or explicitly understand cities as opposed to nature, and poor people as a threat to environmental purity, contribute to “urban naturalisms” that naturalize social hierarchies and the unequal distribution of environmental problems.

Framed in debates about the crisis of democracy, the book analyzes one of the most influential social movements of recent times: Spain’s “Indignados” or “15-M” movement. In the wake of the global financial crisis and harsh austerity policies, 15-M movement activists occupied public squares across the country, mobilized millions of Spanish citizens, gave rise to new hybrid parties such as Podemos, and inspired pro-democracy movements around the world. Based on access to key participants in the 15-M movement and Podemos, and extensive participant observation, the book tells the story of this remarkable movement, its emergence, evolution, and impact. In so doing, it challenges some of the core arguments in social movement scholarship about the factors likely to lead to movement success. Instead, the book argues that movements organized around autonomous network logics can build and sustain strong movements in the absence of formal organizations, strong professionalized leadership, and the ability to attract external resources. The key to understanding its power lies in the shared political culture and collective identity that emerged following the occupation of Spain’s central squares. These protest camps sustained the movement by forging reciprocal ties of solidarity between diverse actors, and generating a shared set of critical master frames across a diverse set of actors and issues (e.g., housing, education, pensions, privatization of public services, corruption) that enabled the movement to effectively contest hegemonic narratives about the crisis, austerity, and democracy, influencing public debate and the political agenda.

In recent years, feminists have turned to digital technologies and social media platforms to dialogue, network, and organize against contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. The emergence of feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #BeenRapedNeverReported, and Everyday Sexism are part of a growing trend of digital resistances and challenges to sexism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Although recent scholarship has documented the ways digital spaces are often highly creative sites where the public can learn about and intervene in rape culture, little research has explored girls’ and women’s experiences of using digital platforms to challenge misogynistic practices. This is therefore the first book-length study to interrogate how girls and women negotiate rape culture through digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps. Through an analysis of high-profile campaigns such as Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and the everyday activism of Twitter feminists, this book presents findings of over 800 pieces of digital content, and semi-structured interviews with 82 girls, women, and some men around the world, including organizers of various feminist campaigns and those who have contributed to them. As our study shows, digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and a variety of digital platforms are used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes. Furthermore, although it may be technologically easy for many groups to engage in digital feminist activism, there remain emotional, mental, or practical barriers that create different experiences, and legitimate some feminist voices, perspectives, and experiences over others.

This book advances a theoretical synthesis to explaining radicalization. Treating radicalization as a process along which a member organization of a broad social movement shifts from predominantly nonviolent tactics to predominantly violent tactics, the book moves beyond a focus on dispositions and opportunities for aggression triggered in response to environmental stimuli, or on violence-prone ideologies and cultural templates. It conceptualizes the emergence and intensification of political violence (targeting non-state actors) as unfolding within complex webs of relational patterns that shape and are shaped by interactions among multiple parties involved in contentious politics, as well as by surrounding, at times contingent, events and circumstances. A relational approach, namely, a focus on patterns and trends of contacts, ties, bargaining, negotiation, and exchange of information allows for a dynamic understanding of how and when environmental and/or cognitive factors gain and lose salience in processes of radicalization. Utilizing a mechanism-based research strategy, the book traces processes of radicalization across a diverse set of episodes of contention. It demonstrates how despite undeniable political, cultural, social or geopolitical differences across episodes, prime of which are al-Qaeda, the Red Brigades, and EOKA, similarities are found in the key role of relational mechanisms, such as intra-movement competition for power, social disconnect, or upward spirals of political opportunities. Also offered are analyses of how the relational, comparative framework benefits the identification of meaningful dissimilarities in similarities and how this framework enhances understanding of possibilities of de-radicalization and instances of non-radicalization.

Heartland Blues provides a new perspective on union decline by revisiting the labor movement at its historical peak in the 1950s and analyzing campaigns over right-to-work laws and public-sector collective bargaining rights in the industrial Midwest. The focus on 1950s labor conflicts, including union failures, departs from popular and academic treatments of the period that emphasize consensus, an accord between capital and labor in collective bargaining, or the conservative drift and bureaucratization of the labor movement. The state campaigns examined in Heartland Blues instead reveal a labor movement often beset by dysfunctional divisions, ambivalent political allies, and substantial employer opposition. Drawing on social movement theories, the book shows how many of the key ingredients necessary for activist groups to succeed, including effective organization and influential political allies, were not a given for labor at its historical peak but instead varied in important ways across the industrial heartland. These limits slowed unions in the 1950s. Not only did labor fail to crack the Sunbelt, it never really conquered the industrial Midwest, where most union members resided in the mid-twentieth century. This diminished union influence within the Democratic Party and in society. The 1950s are far more than an interesting side story. Indeed, the labor movement never solved many of these basic problems. The labor movement’s social and political isolation and its limited responses to employer mobilization became a death knell in the coming decades as unions sought organizational and legislative remedies to industrial decline and the rising anti-union tide.

Scholars have been debating the ethics of what is now called human gene editing for more than 60 years. This innovative book examines the historical debate and finds that it is set up as a slippery slope, with the ethically consensual acts of human gene editing at the top and the Brave New World or Gattaca at the dystopian bottom. More importantly, what stops the debate from slipping down the slope into unacceptable acts are agreed upon limits, which this book describes as barriers on the slope. The book describes what makes weak and strong barriers, and it shows how the first barriers were built on the slope. The first barrier was between modifying the existing human body (upslope of the barrier and acceptable) and modifying the species (downslope of the barrier and unacceptable). The second was between modifying to combat disease (upslope) and modifying to enhance a person’s abilities (downslope). The book shows how these barriers were weakened and finally knocked over, potentially allowing people to engage in any human gene editing they desired. The book then turns to describing barriers that could be built on the slope and also shows that many commonly advocated barriers are unstable. The debate about human gene editing, as well as many other debates in bioethics, would be greatly improved if participants would consider the insights of this book and only create defensible barriers.

This book is based on ethnographic fieldwork in three villages in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where Dalit women engage in struggles to secure or protect livelihood entitlements such as housing land or work. The research examines the processes of these women organising and evolving collective action strategies to claim access to and control over livelihood resources in different contexts where they face social exclusion. By analysing the power dynamics between these women and non-state and state actors, centred on intersecting caste, class, and gender structures, the research exposes the multiple enabling and constraining factors that condition these women’s agency. An understanding of agency is thus developed that can adequately take into account multiple, complex power relations. This supports an understanding of human rights as practice, focusing on context and power attendant collective action strategies based on actors’ perceptions regarding their just entitlements. Through exercising their agency to overcome unequal power relations and secure entitlements and freedoms, such actors then generate discourses that are constitutive of human rights. The book thus highlights an important shift required in the focus of human rights: that is, recognition that bottom-up approaches to human rights complement top-down approaches by emphasizing people’s agency and the creation of socio-political environments that enable people to effectively realise both socio-economic and civil-political rights.

From the halls of the Ivy League to the C-suite at Fortune 500 companies, this book reveals the people behind the mindfulness movement, and the engine they built to propel mindfulness into public consciousness. Based on over a hundred interviews with meditating scientists, religious leaders, educators, businesspeople, and investors, this book shows how this highly accomplished, affluent group has popularized meditation as a tool for health, happiness, and social reform over the past forty years. Rather than working through temples or using social movement tactics like protest to improve society, they mobilized by building elite networks advocating the benefits of meditation across professions. They built momentum by drawing in successful, affluent people and their prestigious institutions, including Ivy League and flagship research universities, and Fortune 100 companies like Google and General Mills. To broaden meditation’s appeal, they made manifold adaptations along the way. In the end, does mindfulness really make our society better? Or has mindfulness lost its authenticity? This book reveals how elite movements can spread, and how powerful spiritual and self-help movements can transform individuals in their wake. Yet, spreading the dharma came with unintended consequences. With their focus on individual transformation, the mindful elite have fallen short of the movement’s lofty ambitions to bring about broader structural and institutional change. Ultimately, this idealistic myopia unintentionally came to reinforce some of the problems it originally aspired to solve.

In the post 9/11 world, Islam and feminism are widely viewed as incompatible. Sociologist Rachel Rinaldo’s ethnography of Muslim and secular women activists in Jakarta, Indonesia highlights the diverse ways they engage with Islam and feminism and use them in their activism and their daily lives. Mobilizing Piety compares different forms of women’s activism in a globalizing metropolis. Examining a feminist NGO, Muslim women’s organizations, and women in a Muslim political party, Rinaldo demonstrates that the Islamic revival and democratization in Indonesia are helping to shape new kinds of agency for women activists, some of whom are influenced by both Islam and feminism. Rinaldo shows how these new kinds of agency have emerged from the increasing interactions between the fields of Islamic and gender politics in Indonesian public life since the 1990s. As Islam becomes a primary source of meaning in the Indonesian public sphere, Rinaldo shows how some women activists mobilize Islam to argue for women’s empowerment and equality, while others use Islam to advocate a more Islamic nation. Women activists in Indonesia are transforming global discourses of Islam and feminism, embodying new forms of agency and identity, and creating social change. Mobilizing Piety presents a new conceptual framework for studying religion and politics, showing how an examination of interpretation allows for a more nuanced understanding of how religion can underpin very different visions for the future.

In the late 1990s, a group representing Dalits in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu called the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi—or Liberation Panthers Party—shook the established social and political structures. For over a decade they boycotted elections, questioning the legitimacy of institutions that failed to implement constitutional provisions and allowed casteism to persist. The Panthers conducted mass awareness campaigns for Dalit liberation, instilling a sense of empowerment in a hitherto marginalized population. Eventually, labelled as extremists and alienated by the State, the Panthers were pushed into electoral politics. How the Panthers mobilized themselves and managed to effect changes in Tamil Nadu’s politics is the main premise of this ethnographic account. Looking into the processes of transition therein, the author discusses how caste considerations inform and underpin politics in the state and whether the Panthers will erode or adapt to hegemonic caste power. With its micro-empirical focus on identity politics in Tamil Nadu, the book also explores diverse dimensions of mobilization and ways in which contentious politics alters political regimes.

This comprehensive study of the People’s War in Nepal is deliberately polycentric. It offers an anthropological and historical approach to the movement, combining micro history and long-term ethnography. Leaving aside its single-form narrative, the volume focuses on the local and the social, daily life, and micro events that imperceptibly structure this type of movement. In seeking to explore collectively the conditions of possibility for an armed revolution to develop, extend, and encompass all aspects of life, the contributions examine its antecedents and the ways in which it took root in different contexts within the country’s rural areas. Taking advantage of an exceptional situation, the volume brings together studies by several scholars who carried out fieldwork in the same place both before and during the revolutionary movement, and, therefore, offers an unprecedented level of understanding of the modalities and effects of how a revolutionary movement unfolded within the population.

Lake Baikal is like no place on Earth. More than a mile deep, Baikal contains a fifth of the world’s freshwater. Thousands of endemic species reside in its watershed. It is an ecological treasure trove and a natural reservoir of global proportions. The region is also home to a strong environmentalist community that works tirelessly to protect Baikal from human harm. Environmentalists around Baikal began their campaign in the late 1950s, sparking the first national protest against the Soviet government’s planned industrial development. They have remained active in some form ever since, across the years of chaos, instability, and crisis: from Russia’s opening to the forces of globalization through the authoritarianism of Putin in the present. This book examines the struggle of Baikal environmentalists across these periods in order to develop a new understanding of civil society under conditions of globalization and authoritarianism. Through extended, historically informed ethnographic analysis, the book reveals that civil society is engaged with political and economic elites in a dynamic struggle within a field of power. Understanding the broader field of power helps to explain a number of apparent contradictions surrounding civil society and environmentalism. For example, why does civil society seem to both bolster democracy and threaten it? Why do capitalist corporations and environmental organizations form partnerships despite their general hostility toward each other? And why has democracy proven to be so elusive in Russia? The field of power posits new answers to these questions, as Baikal environmental activists struggle to protect and save their Sacred Sea.

What does it mean for men to join with women as allies in preventing rape and domestic violence? This book, based on life history interviews with men and women antiviolence activists aged twenty to seventy, explores the strains and tensions of men’s work as feminist allies in preventing sexual assault and domestic violence. The book examines the experiences of three generational cohorts: a “movement cohort” of men who engaged with antiviolence work in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the height of feminist antiviolence mobilizations; a “bridge cohort” who engaged with antiviolence work from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, as feminism receded as a mass movement and activists built sustainable organizations; and a “professional cohort” who engaged from the mid-1990s to the present, as antiviolence work has become embedded in community and campus organizations, nonprofits, and the state. Across these time periods, stories from life history interviews illuminate men’s varying pathways—including men of different racial/ethnic and class backgrounds—into antiviolence work. The book explores the promise of men’s violence prevention work in high schools, college sports, fraternities, and the U.S. military. The book also sheds light on the strains and tensions of such work—including the ways male privilege is reproduced in feminist spheres—and explores the ways that men and women navigate these tensions.

This work is a well-researched study of the last few decades of the networks in the Global Justice Movement (GJM) and World Social Forums. It offers a more novel perspective on the traditions of protest, ethics, organizational forms, and visions among activists than is usually presented in the literature on GJM, which largely focuses on Latin America, the United States of America, and Europe. It is an ethnographically rooted account of the two conflicting discourses—one among activists in GJM and the other emanating from the World Bank—that have become intertwined locally within the same circle of activists. The author argues that local and transnational activist networks, no longer spatially and territorially limited, have become entangled with forces understood under the paradigms of ‘neoliberalism’, and relations among activists have changed in unexpected ways. Through a vivid description of transnational movements, this book aims to make evident the not-so-obvious yet intricate links between the World Bank, the United Nations, popular rock stars, and historical knowledge production among activists in South Asia and Japan in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The number of rights organizations worldwide has grown exponentially, as the term “human rights” becomes increasingly common among politicians and civil society activists. As international donors pour money into global human rights promotion, many governments—as well as scores of scholars and activists—fear a subtle, Western-led campaign for political, economic, and cultural domination. This book asks: What do publics in the global South think? Drawing on surveys in India, Mexico, Morocco, and Nigeria, the book finds most people are in fact broadly supportive of human rights discourse, trust local, rights-promoting organizations, and do not view human rights as a tool of foreign powers. Pro-human rights constituencies, rather, tend to be highly skeptical of the U.S. government, of multinational corporations, and of their own governments. However, this generalized public support for the human rights “brand” is not grounded in strong commitments of public effort or money, or in dense social ties to the nongovernmental rights sector. Publics in the global South rarely give to their local rights groups, and few local rights organizations attempt to raise funds apart from foreign aid. This strategy is becoming increasingly untenable as governments crack down on foreign aid to civil society. The book also analyzes the complex relationships between religion and human rights, finding that public or social elements of religiosity are often associated with less support for human rights organizations. Personal religiosity, on the other hand, is often associated with more human rights support.

A well-known name in contemporary sociology, Dipankar Gupta’s wide range of scholarship and popular columns have justly earned him the reputation of being one of India’s leading public intellectuals. Talking Sociology provides a complete panorama of Gupta’s life and works and his contribution to Indian sociology. In this book of conversations, he shares insights into the key areas of Indian sociology, such as the problem of social stratification, citizenship and democracy, and the caste system and ethnic groups in India. In his view, once we understand the discrete nature of caste identity we begin to appreciate the energy behind caste mobilization and, indeed, of the obduracy of this institution itself. It also discusses the influence of prominent thinkers on Gupta’s works, such as Claude Lévi Strauss, Talcott Parsons, André Beteille, and John Rawls. The ninth in the series of Ramin Jahanbegloo’s conversations with the prominent intellectuals who have made a significant impact in shaping the modern Indian thought, this book discusses Gupta’s array of work and its redefinition and reconstruction of the central concepts of sociology, taking it beyond its disciplinary boundaries.

How did activists create a dynamic broad-based movement during NAFTA negotiations that politicized trade, making it a contentious issue for the first time in history? And how did their NAFTA mobilization influence trade policy and set the stage for future battles over trade? Trade Battles answers these questions using data from over 200 in-depth interviews, contributing to a vibrant and burgeoning literature that tries to understand how civil society shapes state policy. Trade Battles shows how activists created a new set of institutionalized and disruptive strategies around trade that leveraged broader cleavages across state and nonstate arenas. Activists exploited these leverage points by mobilizing across them, which enabled them to politicize trade policy and influence the content of the agreement itself. So powerful was activists’ pushback against NAFTA that future administrations closed many state institutional channels in order to thwart public opposition, curtailing public access, participation, and input. This forced activists to try to kill many subsequent trade agreements whole cloth rather than improve them, as they did during the NAFTA struggle. The analysis in Trade Battles therefore shows that the NAFTA battle was less about trade policy than the role of democratic state institutions in policymaking. By exposing the linkages between institutional opportunities and democratic practices, Trade Battles reveals how critical state institutions are for activists’ efforts to shape not only trade policy, but a plethora of international policies from climate change to migration. When the state closes institutions, it effectively severs policymaking from democratic intervention.