Mary Joyce (ed.): Digital Activism Decoded. The New Mechanics of Change (2010)

The media have recently been abuzz with cases of citizens around the world using digital technologies to push for social and political change—from the use of Twitter to amplify protests in Iran and Moldova to the thousands of American nonprofits creating Facebook accounts in the hopes of luring supporters.

These stories have been published, discussed, extolled, and derided, but the underlying mechanics of the practice of digital activism are little understood. This new field, its dynamics, practices, misconceptions, and possible futures are presented together for the first time in Digital Activism Decoded.

Topics include:
* how to think about digital activism
* the digital activism environment: infrastructure, social, political, and economic factors
* digital activism practices: two research perspectives and the danger of destructive activism
* digital activism’s value: balancing optimism and pessimism
* building the future of digital activism

Publisher: International Debate Education Association, New York, June 2010
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License BY-NC 3.0 US.
ISBN 978-1-932716-60-3
228 pages

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Manuel Castells: The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 2nd ed. (2009)

In this second volume of The Information Age trilogy, with an extensive new preface following the recent global economic crisis, Manuel Castells deals with the social, political, and cultural dynamics associated with the technological transformation of our societies and with the globalization of the economy.

* Extensive new preface examines how dramatic recent events have transformed the socio-political landscape of our world
* Applies Castells’ hypotheses to contemporary issues such as Al Qaeda and global terrorist networks, American unilateralism and the crisis of political legitimacy throughout the world
* A brilliant account of social, cultural, and political conflict and struggle all over the world
* Analyzes the importance of cultural, religious, and national identity as sources of meaning for people, and its implications for social movement
* Throws new light on the dynamics of global and local change

Publisher John Wiley and Sons, 2009
Information Age Series, Manuel Castells
ISBN 1405196874, 9781405196871
Length 584 pages

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CrimethInc: Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook (2004)

Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook is an anarchist book released by the CrimethInc. collective in December 2004. It provides information on and strategies for direct action useful to activists and dissenters. There are sections on forming affinity groups, organizing demonstrations, stenciling, black blocs, sabotage, squatting, and more personal topics like mental health and “Supporting Survivors of Domestic Violence”. It was written over a span of three years by dozens of radical collectives from all over the world working together.

The title alludes to The Anarchist Cookbook, a controversial book from 1971. CrimethInc. denounces the earlier book, saying it was “not composed or released by anarchists, not derived from anarchist practice, not intended to promote freedom and autonomy or challenge repressive power–and was barely a cookbook, as the recipes in it are notoriously unreliable. At best, it was a fraud, a spoof; at worst, an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of anarchist practice, and cause readers to injure themselves. The recent movie by the same name is equally embarrassing, not so much to anarchists as to the industry that produced it.”

Publisher CrimethInc. (December 2004)
ISBN 0-9709101-4-2
624 pages

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Wilma de Jong, Martin Shaw, Neil Stammers (eds.): Global Activism, Global Media (2005)

Radical political activist movements are growing all the time. To reach a wider audience each organisation has formed networks and websites, exploiting new communications technologies as well as conventional media to get its message across. This is often very successful: activist politics have come to influence ‘mainstream’ politics over fundamental issues such as trade, gender relations, the environment and war. This book brings together activists and academics in one volume, to explore the theory and practice of global activism’s relation to all forms of media, mainstream and otherwise. The contributors examine how global activism is represented in the mainstream press and explain the strategies that activists adopt to spread their own ideas. Investigating Indymedia and internet activism, they show how transformations in communications technology offer new possibilities, and explain how activists have successfully used and developed their own media. Case studies and topics include the world social forums, an example of a campaign from the NGO Action Aid, a campaign strategy from an internet activist, Greenpeace and the Brent Spar conflict, the World Development Movement and representations in the mainstream press, the Independent Media Centre, transgender activism on the net, Amnesty International, Oxfam and the internet.

Publisher Pluto Press, 2005
ISBN 0745321968, 9780745321967
Length 235 pages

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Joanne Richardson (ed.): Anarchitexts: Voices from the Global Digital Resistance (2005)

Anarchitexts brings together a global mix of voices from the new “underground”: engaged artists intervening in local struggles on the streets, media producers promoting technologies based on sharing and cooperation rather than privatization and competition, activists participating in global networks built through electronic democracies and decentralized forms of cooperation, and extraordinary people creating an alternative society through their everyday practices.

As a matter of principle Anarchitexts reflects the first-hand perspective of those involved at the point of production, not distanced reflections by critics, specialists, or armchair theorists.

Publisher Autonomedia, 2005
ISBN 1570271429, 9781570271427
Length 368 pages

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Mario Diani, Doug McAdam (eds.): Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action (2003)

For the first time in a single volume, leading social movement researchers map the full range of applications of network concepts and tools to their field of inquiry. They illustrate how networks affect individual contributions to collective action in both democratic and non-democratic organizations; how patterns of inter-organizational linkages affect the circulation of resources both within movement milieus and between movement organizations and the political system; how network concepts and techniques may improve our grasp of the relationship between movements and elites, of the configuration of alliance and conflict structures, of the clustering of episodes of contention in protest cycles.Social Movements and Networks casts new light on our understanding of social movements and cognate social and political processes.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2003
ISBN 0199251770, 9780199251773
Length 348 pages

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Lorenzo Chiesa, Alberto Toscano (eds.): The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (2009)

This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present—against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls ‘the Italian desert’.

Contents
Antonio Negri, ‘The Italian Difference’
Pier Aldo Rovatti, ‘Foucault Docet’
Gianni Vattimo, ‘Nihilism as Emancipation’
Roberto Esposito, ‘Community and Nihilism’
Matteo Mandarini, ‘Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s’
Luisa Muraro, ‘The Symbolic Independence from Power’
Mario Tronti, ‘Towards a Critique of Political Democracy’
Alberto Toscano, ‘Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Subject of Antagonism’
Paolo Virno, ‘Natural-Historical Diagrams: The ‘New Global’ Movement and the Biological Invariant’
Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Franciscan Ontology’

Publisher: re.press, Melbourne
ISBN-13: 978-0-9805440-7-7
ISBN-ebook: 978-0-9806665-4-0
Publication date: July 2009
Pages: 180
Format: 216×140 mm (5.5×8.5 in) Paperback
Series: Transmission

This work is ‘Open Access’, published under a Creative Commons license.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/

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John Holloway: Change the World without Taking Power. The Meaning of Revolution Today (2002)

The series of demonstrations since Seattle have crystallised a new trend in left-wing politics. Popular support across the world for the Zapatista uprising and the enthusiasm which it has inspired has led to new types of protest movement that ground their actions on both Marxism and Anarchism. These movements are fighting for radical social change in terms that have nothing to do with the taking of state power. This is in clear opposition to the traditional Marxist theory of revolution which centres on taking state power. In this book, John Holloway asks how we can reformulate our understanding of revolution as the struggle against power, not for power.

After a century of failed attempts by revolutionary and reformist movements to bring about radical social change, the concept of revolution itself is in crisis. John Holloway opens up the theoretical debate, reposing some of the basic concepts of Marxism in a critical development of the subversive Marxist tradition represented by Adorno, Bloch and Lukacs, amongst others, and grounded in a rethinking of Marx’s concept of ‘fetishisation’– how doing is transformed into being.
The struggle for radical change, Holloway argues, far from being marginalised, is becoming more and more embedded in our everyday lives. Revolution today must be understood as a question, not as an answer.

Publisher Pluto Press, 2002
ISBN 0745318649, 9780745318646
Length 237 pages

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Paul B. Hartzog: Panarchy: Governance in the Network Age

Paul Hartzog introduces the concept of panarchy, a sociopolitical field that emerges when connective technologies, which lower the threshold for collective action, enable cooperative peer-to-peer production – of knowledge, of tools, of power.

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Ruth Reitan: Global Activism (2007)

This comprehensive study traces the transnationalization of activist networks, analyzing their changing compositions and characters and examining the roles played by the World Social Forum in this process.

Comparing four of the largest global networks targeting the ‘neoliberal triumvirate’ of the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization:
* the Jubilee anti-debt campaigners
* Via Campesina peasant farmers
* Our World Is Not For Sale
* and the anarchistic Peoples’ Global Action.

Written by a scholar-activist, the book highlights that despite their diversity, these collective actors follow a similar globalizing path and that networks in which solidarity is based on a shared identity perceived as threatened by neoliberal change are gaining strength. Social forums are depicted as a fertile ground to strengthen networks and a common ground for cooperative action among them, but also a battleground over the future of the forum process, the global anti-neoliberal struggle, and ‘other possible worlds’ in the making.

Global Activism will appeal to students and scholars interested in globalization, international relations, IPE and social movements.

Publisher Routledge, 2007
ISBN 0415455510, 9780415455510
Length 338 pages

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Manuel Castells (ed.): The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective (2005)

Manuel Castells – one of the world’s pre-eminent social scientists – has drawn together a stellar group of contributors to explore the patterns and dynamics of the network society in its cultural and institutional diversity. The book analyzes the technological, cultural and institutional transformation of societies around the world in terms of the critical role of electronic communication networks in business, everyday life, public services, social interaction and politics. The contributors demonstrate that the network society is the new form of social organization in the Information age, replacing the Industrial society. The book analyzes processes of technological transformation in interaction with social culture in different cultural and institutional contexts: the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Finland, Russia, China, India, Canada, and Catalonia. The topics examined include business productivity, global financial markets, cultural identity, the uses of the Internet in education and health, the anti-globalization movement, political processes, media and identity, and public policies to guide technological development. Taken together these studies show that the network society adopts very different forms, depending on the cultural and institutional environments in which it evolves.

Published by Edward Elgar, 2005
ISBN 1843765055, 9781843765059
464 pages

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