Internationalist Challenges: Antiglobalisation,Occupy, and Indignados

Subaltern classes' internationalism has a long history. The 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century saw the rise of a new internationalism because of the emergence of the antiglobalisation movement. It was a short-lived movement, but that gave birth to a new set of strong internationalist activity. In 2011, there emerged a new international wave of protest by both the Indignados and the Occupy movements. These new movements, however, have developed relatively low levels of cross-border activity compared to the antiglobalisation movement, although it has brought a new internationalist drive.     

Women Working Worldwide: transnational networks,corporate social responsibility and action research

In this article we trace the history of a new form of labour internationalism that emerged in support of women workers’ organizations, in particular in the garment industry, from the 1980s. We tell the story of the emergence of Women Working Worldwide (WWW), a small UK‐based NGO that provides solidarity and support for a network of women workers’ organizations in the commodity producing zones of the global South. WWW grew along with other organizations that have succeeded in forcing global corporations to take some responsibility for the employment conditions along their supply chains. In what has become corporate social responsibility (CSR), companies now establish codes of conduct and workplace audits of employment conditions in those factories to which they subcontract manufacturing work. WWW played a key part in the establishment of the Clean Clothes Campaign, Labour Behind the Label and the Ethical Trading Initiative that continue to develop such practices today. WWW used the power of transnational networks to ensure that the needs and voices of women workers were put on the agenda for action. The story of WWW demonstrates the potential to effect change through transnational networking, the extent to which different local organizations can find common cause with each other and the benefits of engaging in locally‐focused but transnationally coordinated educational and action research projects.     

Cultural diplomacy and internationalism in regional art institutions

This study posits that current cultural diplomacy practice in UK museums and galleries could be significantly improved. Indeed, cultural diplomacy is commonly viewed as nationalist propaganda. An attempt to theoretically debunk this proposition indicates that greater understanding between peoples can be engendered by unifying the ideologies of internationalism and liberalism in the cultural sector. Liberalism is viewed as the present ideology operating in Museums and Galleries whilst internationalism is considered as a nascent force. Working in symbiosis, liberalism allows for a multiplicity of discourse whilst internationalism allows for a critical reappraisal of the status quo and nation-state hegemony. Indeed, a multiplicity of dialogic discourse is essential for cultural institutions to maintain a non-hegemonic stance. This is, of course, particularly apparent in contemporary art work which can often be subversive of national governments and the very idea of a nation-state. Further to this, a form of localised cultural diplomacy can reach the public at large and question the cultural capital of world centres. Empirically speaking, the exhibition format is used as a means to render cultural diplomacy palatable for public consumption. Hence, the UK case study Art from Elsewhere will be introduced which has rendered the international a normative presence in local art galleries. This 2014–2016 exhibition comprised a tour of recent contemporary art acquisitions in regional permanent collections which were funded by a £5 million pound grant from the UK charitable organisation, Art Fund. Instead of monophonic exhibitions emanating from one nation, Art from Elsewhere engenders a multilateral dialogue catalysed by the polyphonic nature of artists from several different nations whose works are juxtaposed both in conflict, symmetry and contrast to one another.     

Will Economic Crises in Africa Weaken Rural‐Urban Ties? Insights From Child Fosterage Trends in Cameroon*

Abstract The welfare of rural families in many African countries depends on their solidarity ties with urban kin. These ties often channel remittances from urban workers and support the education and economic mobility of children from rural families through fosterage into urban families. The continued operation of these rural‐urban solidarity networks, however, is challenged by recent economic downturns and increased urban poverty. Using Cameroon as a case study, we examine the effects of economic downturns on child fosterage as a component of changes in rural‐urban solidarity. Results show a net decline in rural outfosterage rates during the years of economic decline. Such findings raise concern for the economic mobility prospects for children from rural families, especially in a climate of increased competition for limited formalsector employment.     

Local Solutions to Inequality: Steps Toward Fostering a Progressive Social Movement

Over the past four decades, inequality of income, wealth, and power have become increasingly extreme in the United States. The triumph of a neoliberal agenda to reduce taxes, deregulate the economy, and promote international trade has undermined the economic status of the middle class, increased poverty, and led to a concentration of wealth. This nation has gone through such periods before, followed by progressive movements that have realigned economic and political forces. I argue that we may be at a point where a new progressive social movement is about to emerge and I point out several areas where rural sociologists are working, such as local food systems, that reflect a reorientation of social values supporting such a movement. Promoting local food systems and similar locality‐based enterprises can foster economic relationships embedded in multistranded social relationships and contribute to progressive change through reducing the central role of large corporations in our daily lives. Building on Busch's (1999) concept of Leviathan, I identify the roles of researchers and community activists in which rural sociologists can work to democratize social, economic, and political relationships in society.     

Not Necessarily Solidarity

Since the idea of “women's rights as human rights” emerged, there has been a wave of international donors, organizations and transnational feminist activists successfully delivering pressure and resources in the struggle to mitigate violence against women worldwide. Through these transnational networks, decisions regarding which local problems to address and how to manage them are often made at the international level. Most scholarship has rightly celebrated the advances for women's rights that have been made possible due to the impact of international organizations and transnational advocacy networks. However, there are many dilemmas that arise from this North-centric approach to assigning and managing priorities – especially among development aid organizations. Coordination with international donors is often necessary and has been a major source of advances. However, there are still some potentially harmful impacts of having to engage in these networks in order to address violence against women – including a disproportionate focus on short-term results while neglecting long-term goals. This article articulates these dilemmas and explains how international feminist human rights norms can be more successfully translated into a stronger sense of solidarity across borders and more sustainable advances for women. Examples are drawn from the Central American countries of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.     

Community Solidarity,Political Competitiveness,and Social Rigidity: Relationships With Social and Health Services1

Previous work suggests that solidarity, political competitiveness, and rigidity influence the nature of social and economic change. Hypotheses that these three phenomena affect social well-being at the institutional level of the community beyond the effects of basic socioeconomic and population characteristics are examined in this study. Using data from a sample of North Carolina county-seat communities, a regression analysis with six controls indicates positive relationships of community solidarity and political competitiveness with social and health services. However, there is little indication that social rigidity has any effect on such services. Contrary to theories claiming the relative unimportance of communities, results indicate that community populations with high levels of solidarity and political competitiveness can have a positive influence on institutional growth and structural change.     

SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND RACIAL GROUP INTERESTS AMONG BLACK AMERICANS

ABSTRACT

This study assesses predictions from the dominant ideology thesis and theory of group interest concerning the relationship between socioeconomic status and racial solidarity across three domains of racial ideology. Findings from a local area sample (N = 184) in Cleveland, Ohio, provide considerable support for the theory of group interest. Racial solidarity indicators, such as the perception of discrimination, transcend individual socioeconomic status in constructing a group-based racial viewpoint. Conversely, traditional measures of class position, such as income and education, fail to induce attitudinal variation across the analyzed domains, namely causal attributions, racial politics, and attitudes toward interracial intimacy. In fact, the subjective social class measure, occupational prestige, tends to promote differences favorable to racial solidarity. These findings undermine the long-established conclusion that increased socioeconomic status exerts a conservatizing influence over racially/ethnically-specific attitudes. The implications shed light on the extent to which racial worldviews exist and directions for future research are mentioned.     

Solidarity and conflicts in coresidence of three-generational immigrant families from the former Soviet Union

The article presents findings from a qualitative study of three-generational immigrant families from the former Soviet Union living in Israel in shared households, exploring issues of solidarity and conflict. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 30 respondents from 12 families. Seven central themes reflecting different aspects of solidarity and conflict emerged: (1) division of household chores (reflects functional and normative solidarity), (2) money management, (3) economic and housing (reflect functional solidarity), (4) emotional support, (5) involvement with intimate relations of the other generation (reflect affectual solidarity), (6) space and privacy, and (7) education of children and value transmission (reflect normative solidarity). These themes reflect the dynamics of intergenerational family relations and represent the meaning systems that these families have worked out to make sense of their shared living experiences.     

Integrated Organizational Identity: A Definition of Hybrid Organizations and a Research Agenda

In contemporary societies an increasing number of social needs have to be financed by market activities. In this regard, scholars started to discuss whether ‘Social Innovation’, ‘Social Entrepreneurship’, ‘CSR’, ‘Social Enterprise’, ‘Enterprising Nonprofits’, and ‘Social Business’ are able to provide solutions for financially sustainable social services. Just how these so-called Hybrid Organizations balance the tension between social and economic issues still requires conceptualization. This paper introduces the following definition based on the literature on organizational identity, civil society, and marketized nonprofits: Hybrids are characterized by an organizational identity that systematically integrates civil society and markets, exchange communal solidarity for financial and non-financial resources, calculate the market value of communal solidarity, and trade this solidarity for financial and nonfinancial resources. In other words they “Create Functional Solidarity”. Criteria to empirically observe Hybrid Organizations are also introduced and compared to similar concepts. The paper concludes with an outline of a research agenda.     

Uneven Development and Local Inequality in the U.S. South: The Role of Outside Investment,Landed Elites,and Racial Dynamics

This paper develops a historically contingent understanding of patterns of uneven economic development in the U.S. South. We conceptualize spatial variation in economic development and its consequences for inequality to be embedded in both local and international dynamics. The character of local economic development, it is argued, reflects the organizational base and heterogeneity of local elites, the divisions and relative power of nonelites, and the embeddedness of the local political economy in national and world systems of politics and production. These ideas are developed and made historically and spatially specific through an analysis of uneven development in one Southern state, North Carolina. Our findings suggest that contemporary patterns of uneven development and the resulting income deprivations and inequality reflect conditional interactions between elite economic projects and racial divisions within the working class. We find that outside investment seems to reproduce rather than disrupt local patterns of inequality and poverty.     

Branded Solidarity in Fair Trade Communication on Facebook

The objective of fair trade to achieve economic justice through markets depends on establishing, via moral education, bonds of solidarity between Northern consumers and impoverished Southern producers. Moral education is increasingly realised by commercial brands who take advantage of the opportunities offered by social media. This article analyses the discursive construction of solidarity in the brand communication of Pukka (UK) and Pizca del Mundo (Poland) on Facebook. It identifies 3 discourses of solidarity: ‘solidarity through legitimation’, which presents the rationale for solidarity with Southern producers; ‘solidarity through affinity’, which constructs a moral economy between Southern producers and Northern consumers; and ‘solidarity through lifestyle’, which proposes everyday actions that can be undertaken by consumers to support Southern producers. These discourses are employed by the brands to different extents, with Pizca del Mundo attempting to establish a fair trade market in Poland and Pukka with an aim to increase sales of their fair trade products. The article concludes that primarily the discourses of ‘solidarity through legitimation’ and ‘solidarity through affinity’ serve moral education whose objective is to generate sustained commitment towards Southern producers as distant others.     

The social welfare impact of privatisation in sub‐Saharan Africa: A discussion

Against the background of rising levels of anxiety around the state of the social fabric in South African society, this paper explores the disjuncture between the post-apartheid state’s policy discourse on social cohesion and the local discourses of South African residents in 24 focus groups held in townships around the country, which reveal significant levels of social fragmentation and intense contestation regarding the new regime of rights. The paper argues that the state’s policy discourse on social cohesion is part of an attempt to manage a complex social environment in terms of a project of developmental nation-state building that seeks to constitute the social domain as a normative realm of imagined homogeneity in which citizenship is premised on constitutional values. I argue that while the state’s concern with the ‘social’ relates to the critical question of solidarity in modern democracies, this has led, in the South African context, to the constitution of the social domain as a site of pathology, divorced from the broader political and economic relations of power in which this ‘pathology’ is embedded. At issue in this interaction between state and local discourses on the question of solidarity are the terms of membership in the political community. Who will and will not be part of the ‘new’ nation?     

Economic development and political transformation

Conclusion Social structure and economic development largely influence the nature of social conflicts and political transformation. A combination of low political and economic integration and a high level of consolidation results in reformist conflicts. Low state intervention in the allocation and accumulation of capital reduces the probability that class conflict will be directed against the state. When state intervention is low, depoliticized, abstract market forces determine capital allocation and accumulation. In addition, low political and economic integration may give the state the appearance of serving societal interests rather than the interests of the upper class. This appearance of autonomy is reinforced by the institutions of formal democracy. As a consequence, class conflict is contained within civil society and deflected from the state. When consolidation is high, reformist conflicts against holders of capital may emerge. The United States experienced such movements in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, the state was drawn into some conflicts, but was not attacked by the working class. Today, the United States, like other advanced industrial societies, is less receptive to consolidation because of moderate levels of economic polarization, greater economic resilience, and high social differentiation. When state intervention and consolidation are low, organized groups with resources may gain economic benefits through segmented class conflict, whereas collectivities with weak solidarity and few resources remain inactive. Such is the case in the United States today.The combination of a high level of state intervention in capital allocation and accumulation with a high level of consolidation increases the likelihood of revolutionary conflict. High state intervention in capital allocation and accumulation has crucial social consequences. First, it politicizes other-wise abstract market relations. Second, it clearly reveals the state to be allied with a small circle of upper-class entrepreneurs, thereby discrediting the state's claim to serve societal interest. As a consequence, class conflict can readily assume a political character, expanding its target to include the state. A high level of consolidation enhances the capacity of challenging groups to act collectively to resist repression and seize power. Consolidation is more likely in societies with a high level of economic polarization, highly dependent economies, and low social differentiation. Russia in 1917 and Iran and Nicaragua in 1979 are revealing examples. The Russian and Nicaraguan revolutions were carried out primarily by workers and peasants, which helps explain the socialist orientation of the new leadership. In contrast, in Iran, the revolution was largely based on the conflicts and struggles of the traditional middle class, which eventually led to the formation of the theocratic state. A combination of high state intervention and low consolidation generates segmented conflict directed against the state. Many Third World societies are experiencing such a conflict today.To conclude, Marx's analysis focused primarily on social classes underemphasizing the significance of the state and its relation to society and economy. Skocpol's analysis, on the other hand, primarily focused on the state and the upper class, and failed to specify the proper, determining variables. If the analysis presented here is useful in specifying the conditions and forms of social conflicts, we must pay greater attention to social structural analysis, the nature of the relationship between the state, economy, social classes, and solidarity structures.     

“Their wounds are our wounds”: a case for affective solidarity between Palestine and Kashmir

ABSTRACT

Both Palestine and the Indian held Kashmir have become hallmarks of a postcolonial siege manifest in heavy militarisation, illegal occupation, human rights violations, and an excruciating love born from and for people’s resistance and solidarity. While different, strong overlaps exist between the two conflicts in having been?midwifed?by the waning British Empire in 1947; subsequent internationalisation and fighting against a type of contemporary international politics that subsumes them under so-called ‘Islamic terrorism.’ Also noticeable is the motif of ‘suffering’ that makes the tragedy of Kashmir resonate with the pathos of Palestine. This paper focuses on the vantage from Kashmir, where people herald the Palestinian struggle as pioneering and a beacon of just struggle. I illustrate how Kashmiris, have come to?harbour?for the Palestinians an ‘affective solidarity’ which is evident in their modes of resistance to lend support for the liberation of Palestine and credibility to the Kashmir’s own resistance movement.     

Solidarity as a byproduct of professional collaboration: Social support and trust in a coworking space

This article investigates solidarity arising from economic exchange, by studying a multiplex network of collaboration, trust and social support. After a qualitative pre-study, we performed a full-network survey on a group of independent professionals sharing a coworking space and occasionally collaborating with each other. By running multivariate Exponential Random Graph Models, we showed that successful collaboration might not determine expectations of social support. However, these relationships were related to business-based trust ties, which were predicted by collaboration. Our results suggest that solidarity can emerge as a byproduct of peer economic exchange when trust mediates between professional relationships and expressive ties.     

Envisioning European Solidarity between Welfare Ideologies and the European Social Agenda

This article uses the debates of the Working Group ‘Social Europe’ of the European Convention for the Future of the European Union that drafted the Constitutional Treaty to explore the views on the European social model among representatives of the European political class. The debates within the European Convention on basic social values, social objectives, the Union's competences, the open method of coordination, the coordination of social and economic policies as well as the role of social partners provide insight into the emerging visions of European solidarity at the crossroads between welfare regime ideologies and Europeanization. It is argued that, despite an overall consensus regarding a greater future role of the European Union in social policy, the contours of the European social model and the scope of the Union's competences remain contested. However, the observed cleavages are to be found mainly on the left–right political scale, and this suggests that we might gradually be observing a re-politicization of the social policy discourse at European level. Nevertheless, the holding on to arguments of subsidiarity and especially sovereignty represents a barrier to envisioning European solidarity and developing a stronger European social agenda.     

On the socio-economics of voluntary organisations

This article discusses two aspects of the interconnected social and economic features of voluntary associations. First, it characterises the transformation processes of voluntary associations which make them more similar to bureaucratic busitness organisations. The article's second. endeavour is to discuss how changes in the economic features of an association have an impact on its social elements. The key argument is that changes in economic features of a voluntary association have important negative effects on its social basis. The analysis focuses on how changes in the mode of financing of an association affect the solidarity of its members. This paper draws heavily on an earlier German article (Horch, 1992). I would like to thank the editor of the book where this article was published, Annette Zimmer, for her permission to publish a revised English version.     

当代中东恐怖主义的特点

中东地区一直是国际社会关注的焦点,一个重要原因是该地区有持续不断的恐怖主义活动。中东恐怖主义的危害越来越严重、广泛,几乎没有地区和大国幸免。分析中东恐怖主义外在的一些特点有助于探究其内在和本质的因素。本文主要分析了中东地区恐怖主义的持续性、国际性、宗教性、巴以冲突为核心、三大目标、与战乱相伴生、现代化等几个特点。     

INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT AND OPINION CHANGE IN NEW ZEALAND

Conflict between groups, including nations, seemingly leadsto solidarity among the people in each collectivity. Testingthis proposition at the international level is difficult owingto methodological problems of data gathering. This paper reportsupon the impact of an international controversy upon nationalopinion consolidation. After the New Zealand government bannednuclear-capable ships from the country, the United States retaliatedthrough public denunciation of this action and mild sanctions.Poll information suggests that, as a result of this dispute,New Zealanders put aside their preexisting political and socialdifferences on the issue of nuclear weapons in their countryand rallied behind their government. Over time, however, thisconsolidation effect shows signs of disintegration: social and,especially, political cleavages have begun again to discriminateopinion on the question of nuclear weapons in New Zealand.