When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take to the streets, what do they do? When activists are detained for coordinating protests, are their hands ultimately tied? Based on political ethnography inside both legal and blacklisted labor organizations in China, this book reveals how state repression is deployed on the ground and to what effect on mobilization. It presents a novel dynamic of civil society contention - mobilizing without the masses - that lowers the risk of activism under duress. Instead of facilitating collective action, activists coach the aggrieved to challenge authorities one by one. In doing so, they lower the risks of organizing while empowering the weak. This dynamic represents a third pathway of contention that challenges conventional understandings of mobilization in an illiberal state. It takes readers inside the world of underground labor organizing and opens the black box of repression inside the world's most powerful authoritarian state.

How did activists create a dynamic broad-based movement during NAFTA negotiations that politicized trade, making it a contentious issue for the first time in history? And how did their NAFTA mobilization influence trade policy and set the stage for future battles over trade? Trade Battles draws on hundreds of in-depth interviews with Mexican, Canadian, and U.S. trade negotiators, labor and environmental activists, and government officials, and an extensive analysis of archival materials to understand the role of civil society in shaping state policy.Trade Battles shows how activists politicized trade policy by creating a new set of institutionalized and disruptive strategies around trade that leveraged broader cleavages across state and nonstate arenas. Activists exploited these leverage points by mobilizing across them, which enabled them not only to politicize trade policy with legislators and trade policy officials and among the public, but also to influence the content of the agreement itself. So powerful was activists' pushback against NAFTA that future administrations closed many state institutional channels in order to thwart public opposition, curtailing public access, participation and input. This forced activists to try to kill subsequent trade agreements whole cloth rather than improve them, as they did during the NAFTA struggle.Trade Battles reveals that the NAFTA battle was less about trade policy than the role of democratic state institutions in policymaking. By exposing the linkages between institutional opportunities and democratic practices, it reveals how critical state institutions are for activists' efforts to shape not only trade policy, but a number of international policies from climate change to migration. When the state closes institutions, it effectively severs policymaking from democratic intervention.

How the misuses of Martin Luther King’s legacy divide us and undermine democracy

In the post–civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women’s rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People’s King reveals how, as these powerful groups remake collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate offshoots of remembrance that distort history and threaten the very foundations of multicultural democracy.

In the revisionist memories of white conservatives, gun rights activists are the new Rosa Parks, antiabortion activists are freedom riders, and antigay groups are the defenders of Martin Luther King’s Christian vision. Drawing on a wealth of evidence ranging from newspaper articles and organizational documents to television transcripts, press releases, and focus groups, Hajar Yazdiha documents the consequential reimagining of the civil rights movement in American political culture from 1980 to today. She shows how the public memory of King and civil rights has transformed into a vacated, sanitized collective memory that evades social reality and perpetuates racial inequality.

Powerful and persuasive, The Struggle for the People’s King demonstrates that these oppositional uses of memory fracture our collective understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we go next.

"I looked through the window of my taxi as it pulled over on the street corner. I looked down Jeremiah Road into CDD searching for Esther, past the frenzy of pedestrians, cars, bicycles, produce stands, and storefront awnings with dangling toys and sandals. I knew Esther's calm gait, dark skin, thin legs, and short black hair so well I would have easily spotted her in the crowd. Instead of finding Esther, I spotted a group of five or six drug traffickers stationed at the boca de fumo, or drug sale point, just a block away. Based on my previous trips, I knew there was at least one, if not two, other bocas I would have to pass on the walk to Esther's house. Having just arrived from the airport with two large conspiscuous suitcases that I would need to wheel past the bocas, I wished I could have waited in the car until Esther arrived. I could tell from my driver's anxious glances and exaggerated swiping of my credit card that he was eager to leave the area. I exited the car, grabbed my suitcases as the driver lifted them out of the trunk, and began to make my way down the road and into the neighborhood. It was a path I knew well, as I had been living with Esther off and on for the last eighteen months, along with her younger sister Maria Rita and Esther's sons André and Leonardo. Yet the feeling of fear was always bubbling below, fed by the knowledge that at any moment I could be questioned by a suspecting drug trafficker or get caught in a shootout. I maneuvered down a side street hoping to avoid at least one boca, sighing with relief when I finally spotted André heading my way. He smiled broadly and made his way to me, greeting me with a bear hug and grabbing the handle of the larger suitcase. Though he had not yet turned thirteen, he towered over me. He informed me that Esther had gone to a different corner to wait for me. "She's terrible at reading her phone messages," André reminded me, rolling his eyes in jest. We chuckled and went looking for Esther, whom we found a few blocks away. As we walked to their home together, I tried to shake off the feeling of fear that Cidade de Deus engendered and focus on the people I was so eager to see again"--

A powerful account of Jewish resistence in Nazi-occupied Europe and why such resistance was so remarkable.

Most popular accounts of the Holocaust typically cast Jewish victims as meek and ask, "Why didn't Jews resist?" But we know now that Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. In Hope and Honor, Rachel L. Einwohner illustrates the dangers in attempting resistance under unimaginable conditions and shows how remarkable such resistance was. She draws on oral testimonies, published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and other written materials produced both by survivors and those who perished to show how Jews living under Nazi occupation in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, and Lódz reached decisions about resistance. Using methods of comparative-historical sociology, Einwohner shows that decisions about resistance rested on Jews' assessments of the threats facing them, and somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place only once activists reached the critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival. Rather than ask the typical question of why Jews generally didn't resist, this powerful account of Jewish resistance seeks to explain why they resisted at all when there was no hope for success, and they faced almost certain death.