What is the relationship between economic crises and protest behaviour? Does the experience of austerity, or economic hardship more broadly defined, create a greater potential for protest? With protest movements and events such as the Indignados and the Occupy Movement receiving a great deal of attention in the media and in the popular imaginary in recent times, this path-breaking book offers a rigorously-researched, evidence-based set of chapters on the relationship between austerity and protest. In so doing, it provides a thorough overview of different theories, mechanisms, patterns and trends which will contextualize more recent developments, and provide a pivotal point of reference on the relationship between these two variables. More specifically, this book will speak to three crucial, long-standing debates in scholarship in political sociology, social movement studies, and related fields: The effects of economic hardship on protest and social movements. The role of grievances and opportunities in social movement theory. The distinction between 'old' and 'new' movements. The chapters in this book engage with these three key debates and challenge commonly held views of political sociologists and social movement scholars on all three counts, thus allowing us to advance study in the field.
This book provides a novel approach to unemployment as a contested political field in Europe and examines the impact of welfare state regimes, conceived as political opportunity structures specific to this field, public debates and collective mobilizations in unemployment politics.
Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition is a compelling justification of a liberal,procedural conception of recognition. This conception is built upon a convincing conception of moral equality, but it does not offer a full theoretical discussion of recognition. I argue that the liberal recognition provided by Patten is too formal and narrow to address all relevant issues regarding conflicts of recognition in democratic societies. In particular, it does not consider the political and democratic preconditions that should be granted to minority groups or immigrants in order to provide them fair opportunities to effectively (and not only formally) reach equal recognition.
Citizens may respond to economic crises and to policy responses to such crises in a variety of ways. This special issue focuses on collective responses as they express themselves in the public domain, in the form of social movements or other types of interventions. The special issue originates in a large-scale comparative research project funded by the European Commission and titles “Living with Hard Times: How Citizens React to Economic Crises and Their Social and Political Consequences” (LIVEWHAT). The eight articles all use a common dataset and adopt a common method, known as political claims analysis, which has proven fruitful in previous work on social movements and contentious politics, consisting in retrieving interventions in the public domain on a given issue, or range of issues, drawing from media sources, most often newspapers. The data stem from a systematic content analysis of newspapers in each of the countries under study.
We challenge the common wisdom that the Great Recession has produced radical changes in political behavior. Accordingly, we assess the extent to which the crisis has spurred protest activities and given socioeconomic issues a higher saliency in public debates. We also assess how far the crisis has provided a more prominent place for economic and labor actors as subject actors, a more prominent place of economic and labor actors as object actors, as well as a more prominent place of economic and labor actors as addressees in claims making on the economic crisis. Our findings show that the crisis has not produced such radical changes in all these aspects, though it had some impact. At a more general level, our analysis unveils the normative underpinnings of the commonly held view that the economic crisis has fed a grievance-based conflict between capital and labor going beyond specific patterns and configurations in each country.
Cette contribution se propose de traiter de la possible émergence d'une nouvelle norme internationale en matière de politique environnementale, qui viendrait renforcer la norme actuelle de l'environnementalisme libéral. Dans un contexte marqué par un pessimisme croissant quant à la possibilité pour nos sociétés d'éviter les effets les plus négatifs du changement environnemental, et du changement climatique en particulier, le langage des organisations internationales chargées de la gouvernance de l'environnement marque un tournant "adaptatif". Le but de la politique environnementale internationale serait désormais moins de lutter contre les changements environnementaux que de créer les conditions dans lesquelles les individus, les régions, les systèmes socio-écologiques, voire les États, pourraient non seulement "vivre avec" ce changement, mais même en tirer profit. L'émergence de la "résilience" comme éthique est la condition de cette nouvelle manière productive de concevoir les rapports entre changement environnemental et société.
Les transformations de l'Etat providence en Etat animateur ont conduit la puissance publique à limiter ses capacités d'action dans le domaine de la gestion sociale de la ville par l'urbanisme. Les ambitions éthiques au coeur de la constitution des théories et savoirs de l'aménagement des villes au début du XXe siècle ont cédé la place à un "oubli" éthique que porte une vision néolibérale de l'évolution des sociétés. A partir de l'étude du cas français et suisse, le présent article a pour objet d'étudier les conditions de mise en oeuvre de la transition éthique de l'aménagement durable des villes
Anita Allen's Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society was one of the first books to try to work out a feminist perspective on privacy, given long-standing feminist doubts and ambivalences about its effects on women. In contrast to a philosophical literature which largely ignored feminist concerns with privacy, Allen set out to consider privacy from an explicitly feminist perspective, drawing on philosophical and American legal debates in order to do so. The result was a highly readable book, which provided an excellent survey of competing attempts to describe the nature and value of privacy, and a helpful account of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Arguing that feminists should revise, not reject, privacy, Allen showed that the ability to restrict unwanted access to our bodies and thoughts is essential to freedom for women, as for men. I am, then, grateful to have an opportunity to celebrate Allen's work and, in particular, a book which has inspired me over the years. Nonetheless, I must agree with Judith DeCew, in her review of Uneasy Access, that its central claims are not wholly persuasive. In particular, Allen's insistence that decisional and restricted access privacy have nothing to do with each other leaves it unclear how the content of our claims to solitude, anonymity, confidentiality and seclusion are to be determined and, normatively, how we are to decide which forms of privacy are valuable and which are not. Hence, this article uses the secret ballot to suggest how we might develop further Allen's insights into the value of privacy.
Le président Barack Obama cherche le «juste équilibre» entre les besoins de sécurité de la société américaine et la protection de la liberté du citoyen. L'exercice est précaire, des travaux académiques ont montré les limites de l'image de la balance.
