Dissent

Richard C. Bush's Hong Kong in the shadow of China: Living with the Leviathan (2016) represents an important study on post-"Handover" Hong Kong focusing on the making of the 2014 Occupy Campaign and Umbrella Movement and the impact on the coming development in politics, governance and economy of Hong Kong, taking into consideration China's Hong Kong policy and the response of the Hong Kong people as well as the perspectives ofTaiwan and the United States. This article, while reviewing the book, also provides a detailed analysis of the wider implications of the issues the author of the book has raised as regards Hong Kong-as China's policy approach towards Hong Kong and by extension Taiwan and the struggle of the Hong Kong people, as well as the Taiwan people, to protect the political freedom and democratic rights they aspire to maintain (in the case of Hong Kong) and that they have fought hard to secure (in Taiwan) have impacts that reach far beyond Hong Kong and Taiwan in the light of the PRC's current relentless global projection, riding on the wave of her economic miracle, of her hard and so-called "soft" power in a through an intricate nexus of her domestic and foreign policies that not only serves to strengthen domestic governance and enhance international influence but also involves extraterritorial actions to maintain CCP's one-party authoritarianism. <https://icaps.nsysu.edu.tw/var/file/131/1131/img/2374/CCPS3(2)-Yeoh.pdf> <https://www.dropbox.com/s/dq1z15ggssdld6v/CCPS-V3N2-Yeoh.pdf> Emile Kok-Kheng Yeoh (2017), “Hopes against Hobbes: On Authoritarianism, Regime Legitimation and Soft Power with a Review of Richard C. Bush’s Hong Kong in the Shadow of China: Living with the Leviathan (2016)”, Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal (CCPS), Vol. 3, No. 2, July/August 2017, pp. 889-987. [Scopus]

Jacopo Aconcio (ca.1500-ca.1567) was an Italian philosopher who acquired some fame in Europe for his views on religious toleration. After embracing the Reformed faith, he sought refuge in England. He soon started working in the service of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leices-ter, who also acted as patron to Thomas Blundeville (ca.1522-ca.1606), a prolific translator of Italian moral and philosophical works. The close intellectual relationship between Acon-cio and Blundeville stimulated Blundeville's translation of some of the philosopher's works, including the historiographical treatise Delle osservationi et avvertimenti che haver si debbono nel leg-gere delle historie. Despite scanty scholarly attention, this text is notable as being one of the few treatises on the subject of historiography in early modern England and the first to offer advice on how to read and interpret history. In this paper I argue that the typical sixteenth-century principle of freedom in the re-elaboration of the source was widely employed by Blundeville in order to provide Leicester with a text purged of Aconcio's rhetorics and where his principles of 'method', 'purpose', and 'public utility' might find their full application .

Speech at Australian universities is restricted in various ways. A few of them, such as student protests against visiting speakers, receive lots of attention. Others seldom do, such as defamation threats and cyber harassment. Self-censorship may be more significant than overt censorship. Those who want to raise awareness of hidden limitations on speech can learn from the methods used to raise the alarm about student protests.

This book focus on the group of writers and poets associated with China's leading literary critic of the 1930s and 1940s: Hu Feng. As a disciple of Lu Xun, Hu Feng was responsible to promoting the new literary movement in China during the 1930s and the 1940s, and especially after Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, with a widely influential magazine titled July. He became a target of organized criticism after Yenan's Rectification Campaign, during which Mao stated that art and literature should serve politics. In 1955, Mao began a nation-wide campaign against Hu Feng, often dubbed as "the first literary persecution after 1949". The book focuses on the life and fate of many writers and poets involved, weaving together the author's reflection and citation with first-hand interviews from 84 people, as well as including over 400 images collected from family albums. The author says that her writing method to be influenced by her documentary practice. 

This book is the second volume of a trilogy titled “Three Lives, Three Destinies: A Trilogy of Chinese Intellectuals from Peking University”. The first and third volumes respectively on Hu Feng’s Peking University classmates Wang Shiwei (the most famous victim of Yenan's Rectification Campaign) and Wang Fanxi (leader of a minority party under the umbrella of Chinese Trotskyism).

Explores the use of hats in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England for the expression of either deference or dissent. Changing manners of meeting and greeting testified to slow social changes. Hat honour gradually attenuated from the full flourish to a more limited acknowledgement. The curtsy for women similarly changed into a more cursory bob. A final section identifies too the slow advent of the egalitarian handshake.

The Theses LVI belong to a series of hitherto unpublished early manuscripts of the Dutch humanist and jurisconsult Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) that were acquired by the University of Leiden in 1864. It is not certain when the Theses were written, but preliminary research on the physical manuscript and the sources cited indicate two possible windows. The first is around 1602-1605, that is roughly at a time when Grotius was also working on his Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (De Iure Praedae Commentarius). The second dating places the genesis of the manuscrbipt around 1613-1615.
In the context of Grotius’ writings, the Theses LVI assume an important position for several reasons: They raise questions about state formation, the duty of citizens to the state and the right of political resistance in far greater detail than in any other work of the celebrated Dutch humanist. The Theses LVI also feature important reading notes that yield priceless insights into the sources that Grotius directly consulted and their influence on his ideas. The manuscript grants modern scholars a unique glimpse into the working mind of its author. Evidence points not only to the ferocious haste with which Grotius wrote his works, but also the occasional sloppiness of his reading and research habits."""

This essay reappraises the origins of French Quakerism based on new archival research conducted on both sides of the Channel. It identifies 34 Quaker missionaries in 17th- and early 18C France, sheds new light on the French reception of Quakerism and suggests possible connections with non-violent, charismatic movements in Languedoc.

Представлено на конференции "Личность и творчество А.И. Солженицына в современном искусстве и литературе. К 100-летнему юбилею А.И. Солженицына", 15–17 марта 2017, Государственный Институт Искусствознания.

Presented at "A.I. Solzhenitsyn and his work in contemporary art and literature", 15–17 March 2017, State Institute of Art Studies.

This thesis is the first to focus on grassroots political opposition to fracking development in a city-region. It examines the political space opened by activists in Greater Manchester between 15th November 2013 and 12th April 2014, situating their political struggle in a broader urban terrain of protest. Data collection was conducted between 28th August 2013 and 20th October 2014. The thesis looks beyond simple interpretations of community opposition, toward theoretically grounded understandings of anti-fracking dissent. Paradoxically, in this case a local struggle emerged primarily from social movements unrelated to the development site itself, whose actors converged on the issue of stopping fracking in the cityregion and engaged disadvantaged communities neighbouring the exploratory well. Research illustrates how activists drew on the tactics and organisational practices of radical urban uprisings to open-up and sustain an anti-fracking camp outside the exploratory well for five months, and examines ways that their dissent challenged what was being contested, who could engage in the struggle and which grievances were recognised as legitimate.  Understanding the complexities of the struggle contributes to existing research on the politics of contemporary urban environmental movements by examining how solidarity and an emancipatory politics can emerge from disparate groups that have seemingly discordant perspectives. This has practical as well as theoretical relevance, because the Greater Manchester anti-fracking movement successfully presented a united front against ‘fracking’, despite internal conflict between actors. Using ostensibly horizontal and less-obvious vertical organisational modes of practice to organise the anti-fracking movement, activists sustained a protest camp and limited access to the exploratory well while it was in operation, before leaving of their own volition. This means that analysis contributes to a politics of hope, offering lessons for similar struggles that emerge from disparate, autonomous groups.

Since the end of the absolute monarchy in Thailand on June 24, 1932, the rulers and the ruled have been locked into struggle, often violent, over what form the polity and the people's participation in it should take. This essay examines this struggle, the imagination of justice, and the inability to consolidate democracy, or even a stable government, through the lens of the monarchy, which has remained beyond accountability. Violence committed to preserve the monarchy forecloses democracy and fosters a form of what can be called modern absolutist monarchy, when some lives are visibly placed beyond the law's protection from violence and others are made dispensable by being made subject to repressive enforcement of the law. The emergence in 2020 of a daring challenge to the position of the monarchy beyond the law refracts both the dangers it poses to democracy and the urgency of imagining a new Thai polity.

It is rare to find a book in political philosophy whose arguments successfully utilize both
ideal and non-ideal theory. Rarer still does one find a book in political philosophy that
takes seriously the proposition that the oppressed are not merely passive victims to injustice, but rather rational and moral agents, capable of making meaningful and informed choices concerning those things they have reason to value. Dark Ghettos does both. In this book, Tommie Shelby develops a number of new and provocative arguments for establishing a more just society. His unremitting focus on the ‘basic structure’ puts him firmly in the Rawlsian camp. But Shelby is no ordinary Rawlsian, and Dark Ghettos is no ordinary political analysis. Labeling himself an ‘egalitarian pluralist’, he examines
the challenges of ghetto poverty through a very hybrid theoretical lens, one incorporating
feminist, Black nationalist, and Marxist principles. And, in addressing his principled
arguments to the concerns of Black people, Shelby continues a long conversation among
Black intellectuals dating back to the nineteenth century. Indeed, one hears echoes of
DuBois but also Delany, Garvey, Newton, Boxill, and Wilson among others.

„Lengyel, magyar, két jó barát” – tartja az ismert mondás, amelyet 1981-ben még a Kontroll Csoport is megénekelt. Mégis, mára szinte feledésbe merült, hogy a hetvenes évek második felétől kezdve e hagyományos baráti viszonyt a két ország ellenzéki mozgalmai ápolták leginkább. A Kádár-korszak politikai és kulturális ellenzékére a legjelentősebb külső hatást a lengyelországi események gyakorolták, a magyar ellenzék csodálva tekintett a bátor lengyelekre.

Milyen tapasztalatokkal gazdagították a magyarok tevékenységét a lengyelek? Mikor és hogyan tanulta el tőlük a demokratikus ellenzék a szamizdatkészítés technikáit? Hogyan szerveztek balatoni tábort a szegény sorsú lengyel gyerekeknek? Milyen volt az 1980-ban megszülető Szolidaritás mozgalom magyarországi fogadtatása? Miért kezdett a Ludas Matyi című hetilap otromba lengyelvicceket közölni 1981-ben? Miként formálódtak a magyar ellenzék politikai céljai a lengyel katonai hatalomátvétel után? Mi volt a lengyelek számára az 1956-os magyar forradalom üzenete? És vajon milyen döntő lengyel hatások érték a rendszerváltás hajnalán megalakuló magyar politikai pártokat?

Mitrovits Miklós könyve a fellelhető dokumentumok, a korabeli magyar és lengyel szamizdat kiadványok és az egykori aktív résztvevőkkel készített interjúk segítségével mutatja be, milyen volt a magyar–lengyel ellenzéki kapcsolatok féllegális vagy illegális formája. A hiánypótló kötet nem csupán a magyar ellenzék történetét helyezi új megvilágításba, de a rendszerváltás folyamatának jobb megértésében is segítségünkre lehet.

"In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? When the dominant media declared the existence of WMDs in Iraq, did that make it a fact? Today, the "social web" (sometimes known as Web 2.0, groupware, or the participatory Web)—epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube—creates new pathways for truths to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. In Digital Media and Democracy, leading scholars in media and communication studies, media activists, journalists, and artists explore the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between truth and power today: the fact that the radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices made possible by digital media coexists with the blatant falsification of information by political and corporate powers.

The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. The contributors discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of Web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays by noted media scholars but also interviews with such journalists and media activists as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera.

Contributors and Interviewees:
Shaina Anand, Chris Atton, Megan Boler, Axel Bruns, Jodi Dean, Ron J. Deibert, Deepa Fernandes, Amy Goodman, Brian Holmes, Hassan Ibrahim, Geert Lovink, Nathalie Magnan, Robert McChesney, Graham Meikle, Susan D. Moeller, Alessandra Renzi, Ricardo Rosas, Andréa Schmidt, Trebor Scholz, D. Travers Scott, R. Sophie Statzel, Stephen Turpin.

About the Editor

Megan Boler is a Professor in Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and a graduate of the History of Consciouness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her other books include Feeling Power: Emotions and Education and Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silence. Her essays are published in such journals as New Media and Society, Cultural Studies, and Women's Studies Quarterly."

In this article Sarah Stitzlein highlights an educational right that has been largely unacknowledged in the past but has recently gained significance given renewed citizen participation in displays of public outcry on our streets and in our town halls. Dissent is typically conceived of as a negative right — a liberty that guarantees that the government will not interfere with one's public self-expression. Stitzlein argues that, insofar as the legitimacy of the state depends on obtaining the consent of the governed, the state must allow the lively proliferation of dissent. Attending to this negative rights perspective, Stitzlein explores the educational implications of reframing the right to dissent as a positive right. This includes discussing the state's obligation to cultivate the skills of dissent in its young citizens and, correspondingly, student entitlement to this training. These educational implications, especially for civics education, are far more substantial than the thinner implications of the negative right to dissent.

Joseph Yu-shek Cheng and Emile Kok-Kheng Yeoh (focus issue editors) (2018), Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal (CCPS), Vol. 4, No. 2, July/August 2018 (Focus – Dissent, Political Freedom, Civil Liberties and the Struggle for Democracy: Essays in Honour of Liu Xiaobo), pp. 283-764 (482 pp. + xiii). [Scopus] <https://rpb115.nsysu.edu.tw/p/404-1131-192155.php?Lang=en> <https://icaps.nsysu.edu.tw/var/file/131/1131/img/2375/462206506.pdf> <https://www.dropbox.com/s/0n08xkg54tz98ai/CCPS-V4N2-full-issue.pdf>

‘Stamped all over the King’s Head: Defaced Coins and Women’s Suffrage’, British Numismatic Journal, 86 (2016), pp.238-245.

Using the British Museum's 'Votes for Women' penny as its starting point, this article conducts an analysis of a group of similar coins.  It attempts to answer how they were made, how many were made, their purpose and place in suffragette historiography.

Contemporary epistemology of peer disagreement has largely focused on our immediate normative response to prima facie instances of disagreement. Whereas some philosophers demand that we should withhold judgment (or moderate our credences) in such cases, others argue that, unless new evidence becomes available, disagreement at best gives us reason to demote our interlocutor from his peer status. But what makes someone an epistemic peer in the first place? This question has not received the attention it deserves. I begin by surveying different notions of ‘epistemic peer’ that have been peddled in the contemporary literature, arguing that they tend to build normative assumptions about the correct response to disagreement into the notion of peerhood. Instead, I argue, epistemic peerhood needs to be taken seriously in its own right. Importantly, for epistemic agents to count as peers, they should exhibit a comparable degree of reflective awareness of the character and limitations of their own knowledge.

This paper addresses such scholarly questions as: Was there any interesting racial component to the BLM protests, especially given COVID disparities in health care for Black patients? Did the emotional and mental effects of quarantine have an effect on BLM protest attendance? If so, how? Were there distinct aspects of certain cities that made protests more highly attended and more common? Through directly engaging with such scholarly questions, it can be better understood how COVID-19 affects and has affected the occurrence of BLM protests and demonstrations. A comprehensive study through the administering of a 25-question hybrid survey-interview protocol to 418 individuals living in the United States with diverse demographic backgrounds who attended or would have attended BLM protests (both for and against BLM) serves as the basis of scholarly evidence for this composition. This research is intensely important as an intersection of social efficacy, activism, and dissent that serves as an informative, unstudied source of how social protest is affected in a time of epidemiological crisis.

„The fear Totalitarianism feels in face of the words is not a legend” argued Romanian dissident Dorin Tudoran. The Communist regime used words to control and alter human consciences. But words were also responsible for challenging the regime. The first part of this study discusses the words of the political power, meaning the evolution of ideological discourse in the 1970’s and the 1980’s. The second part of our study revisits the cases of Romanian dissident writers who engaged the Communist regime in the 1980’s. By their dissidence, words regained the power to tell the truth and to contribute to the overthrowing of the Communist regime.

This article argues that the use of sexual infiltration by police and criminal collaborators represents a strategic deployment of surveillance technology by the state with the aim of creating Foucault’s “docile bodies” through the development of totalising omnipresence. The insertion of police into the private sphere of activists’ sexual relationships – a site presumed to be outside of state gaze – serves to not only disrupt the target communities but also to reverberate throughout social networks and create inactivity. By exposing informants from within one’s own “family”, the state is able to collect intelligence, spread insecurity and display totalising disciplinary power to the social movement under observation.

In her seminal work on citizens’ media in Latin America, Clemencia Rodriguez points out the pivotal role that alternative media practices have in empowering citizens to develop new understandings and images of themselves outside the corporate space of mediation created by mainstream media channels and outlets. The expression “citizen media”, however, is only one of the many labels employed to speak about alternative media at large. For many years a marginal field of investigation, in recent decades many monographs, special journal issues and edited volumes have been devoted to alternative media. The emancipation of this subject, which is today considered a respectable academic topic across many disciplines, has gone hand in hand with the flourishing of terms and expressions related to those media messages, outlets and channels which are created and diffused outside commercial informational circuits (Atton 2007). In the academic literature, various labels are used to name the grassro...

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my paper ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’, I once again reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics, but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.

Loadenthal, Michael. “‘Eco-Terrorism’: An Incident-Driven History of Attack (1973-2010).” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 11, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 1–106.

Abstract:
The animal and earth liberation movements (i.e. “eco-terrorists”), are characterized by autonomous cells of activists utilizing a diverse tactical array to cause financial disruption and damage to businesses, governments and individuals seen to be contributing to animal exploitation and ecological degradation. Though the movement has produced an extremely limited amount of “violence,” and despite its strong tendency to target property, authoritative labeling has termed such actions terrorism. This study adds to the discourse concerning the political violence of “eco-terrorism” by examining the movement’s historical timeline through a statistical analysis of more than 27,000 events drawn from nearly three hundred sources including movement ephemera, government reports, academic articles and books, media accounts, and security briefings produced by besieged industries. This historical analysis demonstrates the atypicality of violent attacks qualifying as terrorism, and establishes that “eco-terrorism” is far more frequently a defamatory political label applied to small-scale criminal acts targeting property that present no risk to human life. This incident-based historical analysis, attempts to correct methodological flaws grounded in incomplete datasets which serve to skew findings through an over representation of attacks involving arson and explosives.