The rural arena: The diversity of protest in rural England

In the past 15–20 years, the rural areas of England have been used by a wide diversity of groups as the stage for their protest activities. Some have argued that this is due the rise of a rural social movement; this paper contends that rural areas have become both available and advantageous as the locale of protest through a range of interlocking factors. Firstly, that the rise of the network society has repositioned the societal importance of rural areas. Secondly, that the governance of rural areas has changed, allowing the social stake of rurality to be more widely contested. Thirdly, that opportunities to protest have shifted in favour of rural spaces, in terms of technology and policing. Through a discussion of recent changes in rural England and three case studies, The Land is Ours, Farmers for Action and the Organic Food and Farming Movement, this paper examines these changes and what they mean for the future of rural England.     

Networked discontent: The anatomy of protest campaigns in social media

We analyze the communication network that emerged in social media around an international protest campaign launched in May 2012. Applying insights from network science and the theory of brokerage, we examine the cohesion of the network with community detection methods, and identify the users that spanned structural holes, creating bridges for potential information diffusion. We also analyze actual message exchange to assess how the network was used to facilitate the transmission of information. Our findings provide evidence of fragmentation in online communication dynamics, and of a distribution of brokerage opportunities that was both uneven and underexploited. We use these findings to assess recent theoretical claims about political protests in the digital age.     

The persistence of senescence

Senescence is a potent anticancer mechanism, representing a barrier that most, if not all, would-be tumor cells must traverse on their path to malignant transformation. In this Perspective, I discuss two recent publications (1, 2) that deal with the durability of senescence. These findings are of interest not only to those who study aging, but to those who study cancer as well.     

From connective to collective action: internet elections as a digital tool to centralize and formalize protest in Russia

Over the past decade, an extensive body of literature has emerged on the question of how new communication technologies can facilitate new modes of organizing protest. However, the extant research has tended to focus on how digitally enabled protest operates. By contrast, this study investigates why, how, and with what consequences a heavily digitally enabled ‘connective action network’ has transitioned over time to a more traditional ‘collective action network’ [Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A. (2013). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 47]. Specifically, the article scrutinizes the trajectory of the Russian protests ‘For Fair Elections.’ This wave of street protests erupted after the allegedly fraudulent parliamentary elections of December 2011 and continued into 2013. As is argued, the protests were initially organized as an ‘organizationally enabled connective action network.’ However, after eight months of street protests, Russian activists reorganized the network into a more centralized, more formalized ‘organizationally brokered collective action network.’ In order to implement this transition, they deployed ‘Internet elections’ as a cardinally new digital tactic of collective action. Between 20 and 22 October 2012, more than 80,000 activists voted online in order to create a new leadership body for the entire protest movement, the ‘Coordination Council of the Opposition.’ As the study has found, activists implemented this transition because, within the specific Russian socio-political context, enduring engagement and stable networks appeared crucial to the movement’s long-term success. With regard to achieving these goals, the more formalized collective action network appeared superior to the connective action form.     

The power of a collectivity to act in weighted voting games with many small voters

We analyze the propensity to approve a random proposal of a large committee that makes decisions by weighted voting. The approach is a generalized version of James Coleman’s “power of a collectivity to act”. Throughout the paper it is assumed that the voters are of two kinds: a fixed (possibly empty) set of “major” (big) voters with fixed weights, and an ever-increasing number of “minor” (small) voters, whose total weight is also fixed, but where each individual’s weight becomes negligible. As our main result, we obtain that asymptotically many minor voters act like a modification of the quota for the vote among major voters. The paper estimates the rate of convergence which turns out to be very high if the weight distribution among the small voters is not too skewed. The results obtained are illustrated by evaluating the decision rules for the Council of Ministers of the EU for various scenarios of EU enlargement. I wish to thank Matthew Braham, Sidartha Gordon, Maurice Koster, Moshé Machover, Guillermo Owen and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.     

小城镇--集体建设用地入市的切入点

集体建设用地进入土地市场进行流转,是社会主义市场经济发展到一定阶段的必然趋势,也是我国城乡关系进一步突破的客观要求.自二十世纪五十年代实行城乡分割管理体制以来形成的城乡壁垒,特别是城乡分割的户籍制度和土地制度,已成为改革开放以来,阻碍城乡一体化发展的体制性原因.     

The role of target vulnerabilities in high-technology protest movements: The nuclear establishment at Three Mile Island

Contemporary perspectives on social movements focus primarily upon challenging groups and political authorities, frequently ignoring the importance of vulnerabilities of the target of protest in shaping the outcomes of protracted struggles. The target's own human and technological weaknesses which emerge in the course of the conflict, however, are sometimes critical, as shown in this analysis of citizens' six-year endeavor to prevent the restart of Three Mile Island's Unit 1 reactor after the Unit 2 accident. If, as has been suggested (Perrow, 1984), modern industrial nations can expect an increase in such system accidents, they are likely to precipitate a new genre of social movements pitting local residents against high technology industries. Emergent target vulnerabilities are likely to figure prominently in some of these processes, and social movement analysts' explanatory models should allow for them.     

The digital divide in Sydney

In Australia, there has been limited research into the issue of the digital divide. Even less attention has been given to the social and spatial characteristics of this phenomenon, particularly within metropolitan areas. This paper attempts to fill this gap by examining the social and spatial characteristics of computer and Internet use in Sydney. The findings suggest that those individuals who are socially and economically disadvantaged have lower rates of computer and Internet use, and that these individuals also risk exacerbating their disadvantage status if these demand-side barriers are not addressed. If we are to address disparities in computer and Internet use in Australia we need to consider more fully the social and spatial nature of such disparities that prevent individuals from accessing such technologies in an increasingly 'wired' world.     

Subalternity reloaded: singularity,collectivity and the politics of abstraction

ABSTRACT

This contribution aims at outlining two different trajectories that can be traced throughout Spivak’s works, both of which take the concept of subalternity as their point of departure: the first analyses subalternity as a path to singularity and problematizes its consequences and impasses, while the second focuses on subaltern politics as a process of generalizability to be accomplished through self-synecdoche, namely through a metonymic process of de-singularization that only allows the subaltern to understand itself as a part of a collective whole (i.e. citizenship). The essay attempts to show the mutual complementarity of these two (seemingly) opposite moves in the direction of a possible strategy of desubalternization.     

Not in my backyard: Las Vegas residents protest casinos

Casino gambling is becoming increasingly attractive to jurisdictions facing severe fiscal crises. Evidence suggests that casinos bring jobs and increased government revenues. However, attitudes and concerns of local residents regarding the location of casinos in their community should be considered in decisions regarding casino legalization. This paper analyzes the importance of factors associated with the selection of homes by persons living in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. A random survey of 967 recent home purchasers was analyzed. Proximity to a casino is of some importance to home purchasers. As expected, purchasers of more expensive homes and those with children in the household were more concerned about casino locations than others. But casinos were not the only concern of purchasers. Crime, industrial plants, and potential nuclear waste route locations were of greater concern than casino proximity. On the other hand, casino locations were of greater concern than shopping centers and fast food restaurant locations.This research project was supported in part by funds from Clark County through U.S. Department of Energy project grant # DE-FG08-89NV10819, and the College of Business and Economics (U.N.L.V.) Faculty Research Fund of the First Interstate Bank of Nevada.     

Acts of resistance: the performance of women's grassroots protest in Peru

Creative approaches such as theatre are rarely addressed in analytic terms in the arena of grassroots political protest. In this article, is is argued that theatre can be an effective medium through which to engage with social change, and that theatrical protest articulates in a variety of intricate ways to achieve this. Two cases of political protest events which use theatre are examined, both performed by Peruvian grassroots women's organisations and set against a backdrop of the volatile period leading up to President Fujimori's dismissal in 2000. In a context of state authoritarianism, poverty and gendered inequality, four key aspects of the practice of performance contribute to political resistance. Firstly, the symbolic potency of making one's voice heard in public as an actively participating citizen promotes a process of ‘democratic discourse.’ Secondly, the reversals and inversions of public space and authority figures challenge established discourses of power relations. Thirdly, theatre as a ‘positive’ form of dissent provides a celebratory contrast to the ‘violence’ of traditional forms of protest. Finally, theatre contributes a space for ‘bearing witness’ to state oppression or corruption. This article demonstrates that in these crucial ways, theatrical grassroots protest is a potent tool through which marginalized sectors of civil society can engage in creative political dissent.     

广西集体土地产权制度与征地补偿分配机制关系的政策建议

一、加强集体土地产权建设,开展农村集体土地所有权登记发证工作,明确集体土地所有权主体及权益 开展农村集体土地所有权登记发证工作是落实<土地管理法>规定的农民集体土地的所有权属于乡、村以及村内两个以上的农村集体经济组织或村民小组所有具体的法律行为.