Abortion—The Real Irish Lessons
Tomás Mac Sheoin reviews Road to Repeal, which documents the struggle for abortion rights in Ireland, from its constitutional prohibition to the ban’s repeal in 2018. | more…
Repressing Social Movements
Amory Starr, Luis Fernandez, and Christian Scholl, Shutting Down the Streets: Political Violence and Social Control in the Global Era (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 207 pages, $23.00, paperback.
Shutting Down the Streets is not an ivory-tower book, situated a safe distance from its subject; the first appendix lists the seventeen anti-globalization summit protests which were directly observed by the book’s authors. And just as the authors were participants and not just spectators, they also refrain from merely presenting a comparative analysis of policing and repression at these summits. Examining the existing academic literature on social control, dissent, and social movements, they argue that existing works on repression mainly concentrate on protest policing. Instead they aim to develop a broader framework that examines social control by extending the object of analysis from the policing of protest events to the effects of social control on dissent, while also arguing that the unit of analysis needs to be changed from individual protests to the wider one of social movements. Repression then is not just police violence and coercion at protests but also includes a host of other methods of “soft” repression, such as psyops (psychological operations), infiltration, and surveillance. | more…
Passage to More Than India
Greenpeace International Meets the Movement for Justice in Bhopal
While the recent growth in transnational campaigns and coalitions has been welcomed by many, critics have questioned whether they reproduce existing global inequalities in power and resources. This article, which details a struggle for hegemony in a transnational anti-corporate alliance between a core country non-governmental organization (Greenpeace International) and a peripheral country social movement (the movement for justice in Bhopal), shows that the power in such alliances does not only reside with the core country organization. | more…
Chemical Catastrophe: From Bhopal to BP Texas City
Twenty-five years ago, a runaway chemical reaction in a tank at a Union Carbide (UC) pesticide factory created a poisonous gas which, unimpeded by the factory’s safety devices, spewed out over the sleeping population of the Indian city of Bhopal. Amnesty International estimated that seven thousand to ten thousand died in the catastrophe’s first three days, and that, by 2004, another fifteen thousand died. Prior to Bhopal, concern over toxic chemicals was confined to long-term or chronic effects on human health and the environment. Bhopal, however, showed that the manufacture, storage, and use of toxic chemicals also posed a major, acute risk to the safety of those working in and living around petrochemical plants and complexes | more…