All forms of popular protest include a category of 'popular intellectuals', who reflect on social reality, speak in the name of popular classes and who articulate ideas that inspire collective action. This volume focuses on these individuals from an original angle: it looks at the experiences of popular intellectuals in non-western societies, who operate within social-movement networks that link local, regional, and international arenas, and connect to a global flow of ideas. Eight case studies on different societies in twentieth-century Asia, Africa, and Latin America highlight specific activist intellectuals.

Against a backdrop of a hegemonic, global economic arrangement that has spawned astounding disparities in wealth, this book foregrounds seventeen intellectuals who are engaged in resisting corporate values and in promoting social justice and human dignity. Ranging from socially engaged professors with a track record in grassroots involvement to popular educators, the interviewees challenge the manufactured consent produced by armies of intellectuals organic to dominant ideologies. Public Intellectuals, Radical Democracy and Social Movements reminds us that strategic silence and/or indifference reproduces a common sense arrangement where critical «reading of the world» (Freire, 1987) is relegated to the periphery.

All forms of popular protest include a category of 'popular intellectuals', who reflect on social reality, speak in the name of popular classes and who articulate ideas that inspire collective action. This volume focuses on these individuals from an original angle: it looks at the experiences of popular intellectuals in non-western societies, who operate within social-movement networks that link local, regional, and international arenas, and connect to a global flow of ideas. Eight case studies on different societies in twentieth-century Asia, Africa, and Latin America highlight specific activist intellectuals.

Learning Activism is designed to encourage a deeper engagement with the intellectual life of activists who organize for social, political, and ecological justice.

Social movements and popular struggle are a central part of today’s world, but often neglected or misunderstood by media commentary as well as experts in other fields. In an age when struggles over climate change, women’s rights, austerity politics, racism, warfare and surveillance are central to the future of our societies, we urgently need to understand social movements. Accessible, comprehensive and grounded in deep scholarship, Why Social Movements Matter explains social movements for a general educated readership, those interested in progressive politics and scholars and students in other fields. It shows how much social movements are part of our everyday lives, and how in many ways they have shaped the world we live in over centuries. It explores the relationship between social movements and the left, how movements develop and change, the complex relationship between movements and intellectual life, and delivers a powerful argument for rethinking how the social world is constructed. Drawing on three decades of experience, Why Social Movements Matter shows the real space for hope in a contested world.

This book offers a new approach to the study of social movements. Integrating American and European approaches, Eyerman and Jamison argue that social movements are forms of activity whereby individuals create new kinds of social identities not only for themselves but for the societies of which they form a part. They examine the success and failure of social movements in comparative terms, both between historical periods and political cultures, giving special attention to the American civil rights movement, environmental movements, and recent form of collective protest in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The result is a study which develops major theoretical innovations as well as integrating a wide range of empirical material.

Discusses the most influential political and social movements and their roles in the history of modern world politics, including liberalism, conservatism, facism, and religious fundamentalism.