Hearing about victories from local resistance against large corporations and their exploitation of both nature and…
Posted by Stellan Vinthagen on Sunday, August 2, 2015
Author: vinthagen
Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance, and Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) has started a series of publications on nonviolent action and the…
Posted by Stellan Vinthagen on Tuesday, August 11, 2015
The deadline is Aug 31 and the department is in Italy.
PhD scholarships in e.g. democracy and social movements:
Posted by Stellan Vinthagen on Friday, August 14, 2015
https://www.facebook.com/stellan.vinthagen/posts/10153068027071009?pnref=story
The urban ethnographer Garrett is mapping the public spaces in London and look for how activists are subverting private space by creating temporary autonomous zones.
Posted by Stellan Vinthagen on Saturday, August 15, 2015
Now your new glasses are finally out on the market! These are the ones for every resister to wear:
Posted by Stellan Vinthagen on Saturday, August 15, 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/09/ferguson-michael-brown-shooting-anniversary-protest
The birthplace of the new civil rights movement that has brought sound and fury to the streets of America fell silent on Sunday, as protesters reunited to mark the first anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Judith Pasternak tells a different story from Iraq, one where there is hope and nonviolent resistance by the masses, something our mainstream media has overlooked. Instead we only get the war and terror stories. The brave people that struggle for a nonviolent and popular change in Iraq – or Syria today – need our support. One place to begin is to learn about their struggles.
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/whole-world-watching/
On Friday June 5, Stellan Vinthagen, the Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance and Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was invited to give a talk for Greenpeace via a streamed meeting with the office of Greenpeace Sweden Nordic, in Stockholm. The talk was on “Civil Disobedience, Mass Action and Climate Justice” and focused on the problems and possibilities of doing nonviolent civil disobedience in mass mobilizations. Based on existing research Stellan outlined factors that facilitate mass mobilizations, the risks when organizing mass actions, as well as the experiences of and methods applied by those that have done civil disobedience with thousands of participants. For each of the different problems presented, at least one possibility was suggested. Stellan used the opportunity to also give a specific proposal: that some world leading organization with enough legitimacy and capacity needs to take the initiative to organize the world’s largest civil disobedience action in connection to the COP21 conference in Paris. A way to do this is modeled after how the Catholic Pope is elected – the, hopefully, hundreds of thousands of activists should encircle the conference building and “lock-in” the delegates, until they find an agreement on climate justice that the world needs. The idea is to do the opposite to what activists did in Seattle 1999 at the World Trade Organisation summit. Instead of disturbing the meeting of the representatives of the world, as in Seattle, the idea is that the people shall be waiting outside, gathering on the streets and refusing to let any of the delegates out (but of course letting food inside when needed) until the politicians do their job and act as the representatives of the people and the world by making sure to stop the climate change. After the talk, there was a discussion with the participants, and those that attended the After Work session at the office in Stockholm continued with discussions for several hours. The talk exists online with open access for all interested through Greenpeace Greenwire, or on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgBllXSL1QQ&feature=youtu.be
Direct action works, also against progressive presidential candidates! The recent two dramatic interruptions by Black…
Posted by Stellan Vinthagen on Monday, August 10, 2015