Group Politics and Social Movements in Canada provides a set of case studies that cover a wide range of organized group and social movement activity in Canadian politics. Particularly distinctive is the inclusion of Quebec nationalism and Aboriginal politics as fields of social movement politics. Newer groups that have become more important in recent years are also included: anti-poverty organizing; race, disability, and lesbian and gay politics; Christian evangelical groups; and health social movements. Contributors to the collection employ a number of theoretical perspectives from political science and sociology to describe the evolution of organized groups and movements and to evaluate successes in exercising influence on Canadian politics. The diversity of approaches is one of the strengths of the volume. Each chapter provides an overview of the group or movement along with an account of its main networks and organizations, strategies, goals, successes, and failures. Special Combined Price: Group Politics and Social Movements in Canada may be ordered together with A Civil Society? Collective Actors in Canadian Political Life at a special discounted price. In order to secure the package price, the following ISBN must be used when ordering: 978-1-55402-779-8.

Group Politics and Social Movements in Canada, Second Edition updates and expands its exploration of a wide range of organized group and social movement activity in Canadian politics. Particularly distinctive is the inclusion of Quebec nationalism and Aboriginal politics. Many other areas of collective activity are also included: the Occupy movement and anti-poverty organizing, ethnocultural political mobilization, disability, lesbian and gay politics, feminism, farmers and organized interests in agriculture, Christian evangelical groups, environment, and health movements. Contributors to the collection employ a number of theoretical perspectives from political science and sociology to describe the evolution of organized groups and movements and to evaluate successes in exercising influence on Canadian politics. Each chapter provides an overview of the group or movement along with an account of its main networks and organizations, strategies, goals, successes, and failures.

The Tea Party. The Occupy Movement. Idle No More. Around the world, social movements have taken to new media and the streets to challenge the status quo. At the same time, most democracies have witnessed a sharp decline in voter turnout. Protest and Politics examines this seemingly contradictory shift in political participation, as well as the blurring of social movement and mainstream politics, through the lens of the social movement society (SMS) thesis. Drawing on the long history of social movements in Canada, in comparison to the US and the transnational sphere, the contributors revisit the SMS thesis to determine whether it still applies, to see what insights can be gleaned from Canadian social movements, and to clarify the relationships between movements and mainstream politics. They argue that the SMS thesis must be recalibrated to reflect changes in political participation, to embrace broader political and historical contexts, and to consider the emergence of social movement societies, plural, over a single polity within and across countries.

In the first major study of postwar social movement organizations in Canada, Dominique Clément provides a history of the human rights movement as seen through the eyes of two generations of activists. Drawing on newly acquired archival sources, extensive interviews, and materials released through access to information applications, Clément explores the history of four organizations that emerged in the sixties and evolved into powerful lobbies for human rights despite bitter internal disputes and intense rivalries. This book offers a unique perspective on infamous human rights controversies and argues that the idea of human rights has historically been highly statist while grassroots activism has been at the heart of the most profound human rights advances.

Social movements such as environmentalism, feminism, nationalism, and the anti-immigration movement are a prominent feature of the modern world and have attracted increasing attention from scholars in many countries. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, first published in 1996, brings together a set of essays that focus upon mobilization structures and strategies, political opportunities, and cultural framing and ideologies. The essays are comparative and include studies of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. Their authors are amongst the leaders in the development of social movement theory and the empirical study of social movements.

How can stable, effective social movement organizations be created when, as Marx and Engels put it, "all that is solid melts"? That, says editor Robert Brym in his introduction to this fourth volume of proceedings of the annual S.D. Clark Symposium, is the crucial question faciong social movements and their organizers in today's fluid digital age. Contributors Howard Ramos, Lesley J. Wood, Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Tina Fetner, and Anna Slavina, as well as Brym himself, consider the many facets of mass dissent in the twenty-first century, including movement/counter-movement dynamics in the post-Trump era, the ways that modern activists mobilize in difficult contexts, and the ongoing relevance of social movements. The divergent trajectories of the religious right in Canada and the United States are also examined, while the book's final chapter argues for a deeper consideration of cross-national differences.

"This book addresses many questions in evaluating social movements and is the first in a series being developed by The Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. What lessons can we learn from protest movements and social mobilizations of the past? Do newer movements differ from those of the past in process or outcomes? How have globalization and international events changed and shaped the way Canadian social movements operate? How effective are (and have been) social movements as agents of change: is there validity to the critique that social movement actors somehow lack legitimacy as the self-appointed 'voice' of communities they claim to represent? Are the stated democratic values espoused by these movements borne out in their internal processes and practices? Contributors from the fields of history, political science, education, sociology and women's studies - covering 80 years of social movement activism in Canada -- seek to address these questions."--pub. desc.