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This book questions the complex relationship between social movements and violence through two contrasted lenses, first through the short-lived radical left wing post '69 revolutionary violence and secondly in the present diffusion of civil disobedience actions, often at the border between non-violence and violence. This book shows how and why violence occurs or does not, and what different meanings it can take. The short-lived extreme left revolutionary groups that grew out of May '68 and the opposition to the Vietnam War (such as the German Red Army Faction, the Italian Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army) are without any doubt on the violent side. More ambiguous are the burgeoning contemporary forms of \"civil\" disobedience, breaking the law with the aim of changing it. In theory, these efforts are associated with nonviolence and self-restraint. In practice, the line is more difficult to trace, as much depends on how political players define and frame political violence and political legitimacy.

Many social workers in England believe that the system that assesses needs for care and support and allocates resources is fundamentally oppressive. The direct evidence bears out that this is, indeed, the case. The process leaves service users feeling disempowered, while the system's design enables it to deny that there is ever a gap between needs and resources. This serves short-term political goals. Delivering the practices required by this system leads social workers to compromise on the profession's ethics to an intolerable degree. This article analyses the political context of policy in relation to needs assessment and resource allocation. It also analyses the legal context. It goes on to set out the action that social workers can take. This includes action to bring about change in policy so that it ceases to be oppressive. It also sets out how social workers can go further and take direct action through their own practice.

Heterogeneous collective actors often select the same form of action, but there is no academic investigation into how and when this happens. This article does so focusing on direct social action, that is, a form of collective action that does not primarily focus upon claiming something from the state but instead focuses upon directly transforming some specific aspects of society. Building on conceptual categories developed by social movements’ scholars (context, organization, and identity) and relying on rich qualitative and quantitative data from collective actors in Italy in a time of crisis, this article identifies four paths toward direct social actions (DSA): the social path, the political-social path, the social-political path, and the political path. In doing so, our analysis shifts from the search for causal factors to the reconstruction of the dynamic, patterned sequences of events by which collective actors progress in adopting a certain form of action. The implications of these findings extend beyond studies of DSA in times of crisis in Italy, to an analysis of collective action in general. Capturing these multiple paths also has important implications for understanding how the same form of action is differently implemented and received when it is adopted by different actors.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how legitimacy is gained, maintained or repaired through direct action with salient stakeholders and/or through external reporting, by using a number of empirical case vignettes within a single case study organisation.Design/methodology/approachThe study investigates a foreign affiliate of a large multinational organisation involved in an environmentally sensitive industry. Data collection included semi-structured interviews with 26 participants, organisational reports and participation in the organisation’s annual environmental management seminar and a stakeholder engagement meeting.FindingsFour vignettes featuring environmental issues illustrate the complexity of organisational responses. Issue visibility, stakeholder salience and stakeholder interconnectedness influence a company’s action to manage legitimacy. In the short-term, environmental issues which affected salient stakeholders resulted in swift and direct action to protect pragmatic legitimacy, but external reporting did not feature in legitimacy management efforts. Highly visible issues to the public, regulators and the media, however, resulted in direct action together with external reporting to manage wider stakeholder perceptions. External reporting was used superficially, along with a broad suite of communication strategies, to gain legitimacy in the long-term decision about the company’s future in New Zealand.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper outlines how episodic encounters to manage strategic legitimacy with salient stakeholders in the short-term are theoretically distinct, but nonetheless linked to continual efforts to maintain institutional legitimacy. Case vignettes highlight how pragmatic legitimacy via dispositional legitimacy can be managed with direct action in the short-term to influence a limited range of salient stakeholders. The way external reporting features in legitimacy management is limited, although this has predominantly been the focus of prior research. Only where an environmental incident damages legitimacy to a larger number of stakeholders is external reporting also used to buttress community support.Originality/valueThe concept of legitimacy is comprehensively applied, linking the strategic and institutional arms of legitimacy and illustrating how episodic actions are taken to manage legitimacy in the short-term with continual efforts to manage legitimacy in the long-term. Stakeholder salience and networks are brought in as novel theoretical extensions to provide a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between these key concepts with a unique case study.

As a subgroup of the environmental movement “Extinction Rebellion,” “Extinction Rebellion Buddhists” are a unique religious community in the United Kingdom. While at first glance the group might seem to align with broader trends occurring in the religious landscape, where Buddhists are increasingly involving themselves in political issues, they in fact encapsulate a distinct phenomenon in contemporary Buddhism: participation in direct-action activism. Through public, collective meditation, the group brings a distinctive emphasis to “mass civil disruption.” Built on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the ways in which Extinction Rebellion Buddhists challenge the perceived limits of Buddhism’s involvement in social concerns, pushing the boundaries of how “engaged” an “engaged Buddhist” can be. This paper aims to situate the group’s practices within the ongoing dialogue surrounding the limits and parameters of engaged Buddhism, arguing that XRB exemplify the ever-diversifying relationship between Buddhism and social change.

This unique study draws on the experience of fifteen countries around the world - South Africa, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, United States, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Covering the high and low points of strike activity over the period 1968-2005, the study shows continuing evidence of the durability, adaptability and necessity of the strike.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, LGBT Latinas/os faced several forms of discrimination. The greater Latino community did not often accept sexual minorities, and the mainstream LGBT movement expected everyone, regardless of their ethnic and racial background, to adhere to a specific set of priorities so as to accommodate a “unified\" agenda. To disrupt the cycle of sexism, racism, and homophobia that they experienced, LGBT Latinas/os organized themselves on local, state, and national levels, forming communities in which they could fight for equal rights while simultaneously staying true to both their ethnic and sexual identities. Yet histories of LGBT activism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s often reduce the role that Latinas/os played, resulting in misinformation, or ignore their work entirely, erasing them from history. Queer Brown Voices is the first book published to counter this trend, documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latina/o activists. Comprising essays and oral history interviews that present the experiences of fourteen activists across the United States and in Puerto Rico, the book offers a new perspective on the history of LGBT mobilization and activism. The activists discuss subjects that shed light not only on the organizations they helped to create and operate, but also on their broad-ranging experiences of being racialized and discriminated against, fighting for access to health care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and struggling for awareness.

Traditional methods often ignore the direct influences of vehicle vibration on the flywheel battery system, which leads to an inaccurate analysis of the dynamic performance of the flywheel battery system and its control effect. Therefore, to make up for the deficiencies of existing studies, a more accurate dynamic performance analysis method and efficient control parameter adjustment algorithm for flywheel batteries based on automotive direct action are proposed in this study. First, the influence of road conditions and vehicle driving conditions on the stability of a vehicle is analyzed primarily. Then, the vibration signal generated by the vehicle is transmitted to the vehicle’s magnetic flywheel battery system for analysis, and the accuracy of the analysis process is realized. Then, according to the stability analysis results for the direct action of the vehicle and the actual PID controller, the control parameter adjustment algorithm is summarized using the curve-fitting method. Finally, a performance test is carried out on the mobile experimental platform. Good experimental results show that the flywheel can quickly return to its equilibrium position and effectively reduce the influence of interference from road conditions and different working conditions and improve the robustness. Therefore, the correctness of the theoretical analysis and parameter adjustment method proposed in this paper was effectively verified.

Whereas optimists see the so-called Arab Spring as similar to the revolutions of 1989, and likely to bring about democratic rule, skeptics fear that protest bringing down dictators may simply give way to new dictatorships, as in the Iranian revolution. Existing research on transitions has largely neglected the role of protest and direct action in destabilizing autocracies and promoting democracy. We argue that protest and direct action can promote transitions in autocracies, and that the mode of direct action, that is, whether violent or nonviolent, has a major impact on the prospects for autocratic survival and democracy. We present empirical results supporting our claim that nonviolent protests substantially increase the likelihood of transitions to democracy, especially under favorable international environments, while violent direct action is less effective in undermining autocracies overall, and makes transitions to new autocracies relatively more likely.