Abstract:This article uses interviews with committed anti-war and peace activists to offer an overview of both the benefits and challenges that social movements derive from new communication technologies. It shows contemporary political activism to be intensely informational; dependent on the sensitive adoption of a wide range of communication technologies. A hyperlink analysis is then employed to map the UK anti-war movement as it appears online. Through comparing these two sets of data it becomes possible to contrast the online practices of the UK anti-war movement with its offline ‘reality’. When encountered away from the Web recent anti-war contention is grounded in national-level political realities and internally divided by its political diversity but to the extent that experience of the movement is mediated online, it routinely transcends national and political boundaries.

An electronic preprint of this article is available here: Anti-War Movement Online, Preprint. The authoritative final version will be available online at: Taylor and Francis, ICS.

Abstract: The upsurge in activism opposing wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq appears to represent a significant process of transnational collective action. Using data collected through participant observation, interviews and website analysis this paper explores the role of the Internet in facilitating transnational activism between Australia, Britain and the United States. This research confirms Tarrow’s (2005a) assertion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ – a primary commitment to locally contextualised action combined with a desire for transnational support. The Internet is used primarily for gathering news and for sharing symbolic expressions of solidarity. In Australia in particular, with fewer domestic anti-war resources online, international networking proves particularly useful. To an extent, online networks reach across both political diversity and geographical boundaries. However, online resources do not appear to enable the more personal connections required to build stable, working coalitions across borders.

An electronic preprint of the article is available for download here: Transnational Anti-war Activism Preprint. The published version is available from the Australian Journal of Political Science 43(1).

Abstract: Significant activist groups see information and communication technologies (ICTs) as offering substantial potential in empowering social movements in organisation, mobilisation, and communication of their critiques and demands. Academic studies have begun to demonstrate some of the creative and technologically sophisticated uses to which activists have put new media. However, emphasis on the novel tends to overshadow the degree to which activists’ everyday lives are structured by interaction with new communications media. This paper analyses informational practices among UK anti-war and peace activists, demonstrating a far more complex picture of the value of new media to campaigning organisations. On the one hand, we see informational practices that utilise the manifest functionalities of new technologies as absolutely pervasive in contemporary activism. On the other hand, we see some activist groups discovering the latent functionalities of ICTs through stringing together multiple modes of communication or combining technologies with the social and political networks in which they interact. Through such practices activists produce relatively novel communication structures that potentially offer new ways of exerting the power of collective action.

This paper may be downloaded in pdf format from this link: Anti-War Activism and New Media.

With these aims the site design is aims at ease of navigation and simple presentation. Unlike much of my other web design work, this site doesn’t depend on any content management, which, in the main, keeps the technological ingredients down to HTML and CSS. The only complex feature is the photo galleries, written in PHP to enable easy resizing of images.

My involvement has included:

• Giving the site a new design;
• Creating a simple navigation system;
• Editing and authoring content;
• Re-working and installing my own photo gallery software.

Visit the Anti War Research website at: www.antiwarresearch.info

At the heart of social movements lie structures of beliefs and values that guide critical action and aid activists’ understandings. These are worthy of interrogation, not least because they contain points of articulation with ideational formations found in both mainstream politics and academia. They offer an alternative view of society, economy and polity that is grounded in protagonists’ experience and struggle. However, the ideational content of social movements is often obscured by a focus on particular, immediate goals; by their orientation to certain forms of action; and by the mediated, simplified nature of their communication. Additionally, recent social movements display a tendency to coalitional action, bringing a diverse set of political understandings in concert on highly specific campaigns.

This conceptual paper seeks an approach to identifying the messages within social movements that remains sensitive to their complexity, dynamism and heterogeneity. Through a critique of the concept of ‘interpretative frames’ as developed in social movement studies, I describe the novel concept ‘orientational frame’. In contrast to social movement scholars’ tendency to focus on instrumental claim-making by movement organisations, I emphasise deeply held, relatively stable sets of ideas that allow activists to justify contentious political action. Through an engagement with Michael Freeden’s morphological approach to understanding ideologies I attempt to draw frame analysis away from the positivistic attempt to delineate general processes into a hermeneutic endeavour more suitable to understanding the context dependent, specifically realised ideas of particular social movements.

The full paper may be downloaded here: A Hermeneutic Methodology for Frame Analysis

European Court of Human Rights, original photo by keepthebyte on flickr

The lecture explains sections 44-47 of the Terrorism Act and gives an overview of the judicial review process. I then look at three issues brought up by the case. First, the relationship between the judiciary and the state in the context of national security is examined. I argue that we see a complex and shifting relationship that belies any simple view of the ’separation of powers’. Second, I look at the degree to which the judiciary takes a role in governing use of discretionary powers by the police. I argue that the judicial review process contains a blind spot where the complaint is systematic, but informal misuse of exceptional police powers whether that be against peaceful protesters or against people on the basis of race or religion. Third I run through some aspects of human rights legislation, to the degree that they are relevant to our case.

The full lecture may be downloaded here: The Terrorism Act and the Judicial Review Process.
The accompanying powerpoint slides may be downloaded here: Judicial Review Process Slideshow.

My involvement in this web site included:

• Instituting another person’s graphic design using HTML and CSS.
• Writing customised javascript for interactive menus.
• Writing a PHP contact form.

Visit the K2A website at: www.k2a.cc

Since the late 1990s millions of people have been involved in political protest actions contesting globalisation and war. The two issues are interconnected by the continuing involvement of many of the same individuals, organisations and networks making political claims in opposition to relevant institutional actors. Social movements involved in these protests include a marked diversity of political worldviews.

This thesis analyses the worldviews informing particular instantiations of those movements. Social movements must be understood as continuous, dynamic processes which, at times, occur as large-scale public events. Participants’ political beliefs are formed, tested and reconstituted in continuous debate and action with their peers and opponents. Meaning results from the interrelations between concepts in larger ideational structures. Interpreting the worldviews presented by social movements therefore involves piecing together various ideational elements into reasonably coherent, interlocking structures that make sense of the statements and behaviour of social movement participants. It is through extended participation within social movement groups that discursive processes can be observed. An ethnographic methodology therefore forms the empirical basis on which this thesis develops an hermeneutic project that elucidates the meanings of social movements.

The activities of Sheffield-based participants in movements contesting globalisation and war offer the opportunity for an ideational study grounded in everyday activities and discourse. Three significant justificatory worldviews are identified: revolutionary socialism, direct action and radical liberalism. Understanding these belief structures as overlapping, in conflict and in competition will be valuable in interpreting particular phases of contemporary movement activity. The latter is demonstrated in detailed case studies of the anti-war and social forum movements. These cases illuminate complex connections between the local and global spheres of social movement action, offering understanding of how beliefs identified at the local level reflect claims made by broader social movements.

Download the Preliminaries.

The main focus here, though, is to look at a body of research that examines the ‘interpretative frames’ that protesters and activists use to understand the world around them. We are all constantly engaged in processes of learning that reinforce or recreate our own set of beliefs and values. The concept of ‘interpretative frames’ is supposed to capture the way that these beliefs and values are structured. We become emotionally attached to certain ways of looking at the world so that new information is often framed within those beliefs we previously held. So, if you already believe that all government is the self-interested exercise of power in order to further enrich the powerful, you’re more likely to interpret, say, the Iraq war in this way.

The main contribution this thesis tries to make to the theoretical debate is to clarify the nature of these interpretative frames. Scholars have tended to see them as quite superficial, as if you could express different political opinions depending on which way the political wind blows. While may be true of the expression of beliefs, I doubt it is true of the holding of those beliefs. More importantly people’s beliefs and values - and especially activists’ beliefs and values - inform their decisions to act in certain ways. As most activists realise, people with particular politics will have a particular take on how to change the world. Academics have tended to separate ideas and action in their analyses, so that is one thing this thesis tries to put right.

Add in a bunch of fairly esoteric conceptual work and this chapter gets to the point of describing the ‘orientational frame’ as that set of beliefs that offers someone a view of the world, of their place in it, and of the ways in which social change might be achieved. So, it becomes possible to describe and analyse relatively stable structures of ideas that exist (in a particular sense) beyond any individual’s expression of them.

The key point to remember throughout is that it is not possible simply to write down a programmatic set of beliefs and pidgeon-hole people according to whether they fit or not. In the rest of the thesis I do identify three sets of ideas that tend to cling together (and also have relationships with socialism, anarchism and liberalism). However, these ideas are stuck together with the weak glue of shared culture, particular understandings of history, and trends in the sorts of experiences activists are likely to encounter. On exposure to these orientational frames (or structures of ideas) activists will interpret them in ways that depend on the individual journey they have taken through their political (and indeed non-political) lives. As such many people will rightly refuse to be pigeon-holed or categorised. Nevertheless, the ‘orientational frames’ can be discussed independently of individual interpretations. This chapter closes by explaining exactly how that can be achieved.

Download C1: Understanding Social Movements