Activism With(out) Organisation (PDF)

The world has witnessed many significant large-scale protests, as well as highly effective anonymous and individual forms of direct activism in recent years. A few particularly visible examples of these would include the ongoing anti-government and anti-austerity protests, the Occupy movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and student-led protests against higher tuition fees and the rampant commodification of higher education. By successfully engaging with alternative forms of governance and radical democracy that take place in a meaningful way beyond the state, these different forms of activism and protest continue to inspire new expressions of identity, relationships, resistance and solidarity into being. However, unsurprisingly, the (perceived) success and traction that these popular protests movements have gained and stand to gain can also be demonstrated in the increased forms of (state) surveillance, militarization of police forces, and other highly aggressive and intrusive forms of censorship and repression.This (double) Special Issue hosts a set of diverse papers examining this question through different practices of activism, in a variety of contexts. Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, France, Germany, Spain, Puerto Rico, Mexico, South Africa, Egypt, the United States and Australia are all represented, and activism is documented at the scale of the local, the neighbourhood, the everyday, the nation-state, the international, the global, and through cyberspace communities. Several of these countries are in the midst of significant political and social transition. More than half of the papers' authors are women, and the activists themselves come from several backgrounds: men and women, wealthy and poor, students, middle-class parents, workers, artists, musicians, liberals, anarchists. While we, in our capacity as Editors made every effort to try and attract this broad authorship for the Special Issue - and we are delighted with the excellent range of papers based on geographical location and gender.