The Global Promise of Social Movements: Explorations at the Edge of Time

A helpful assessment of social movements from a variety of angles is found in a symposium issue of Social Research edited by Cohen Jean L. : “Social Movements,” Social Research, Vol. 52 (1985), pp. 664–890.

There is here an apparently semantic choice that relates in a basic way to substance: do we encompass the new social movements within an expanded conception of “politics” or do we regard this activity (following Gramsci's lead) as a struggle for the cultural terrain that conditions politics (conceived as mainly governance structures of a formal institutional character)? In this article, an intermediate posture is adopted.

For confirmation see Eckstein Harry , “Civic Inclusion and its Discontents,” Daedalus, Vol. 113, No. 4 (Fall, 1989), pp. 107–145.

The phrase and orientation are taken from the Trilateral Commission's notorious publication The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975).

This framework has benefitted from collaborative work with Mary Kaldor under the auspices of the United Nations University. See for example our joint introduction in Kaldor Mary Falk Richard , eds., Dealignment for Western Europe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, forthcoming).

This point is dramatically made by Jungk Robert : “… there is no fundamental difference between atoms for peace and atoms for war,” at p. vi. See generally Jungk, The Nuclear State (London: John Calder, 1979).

For text of proceedings, etc., see Duffield J. , ed. Against the Crimes of Silence (Flanders, New Jersey: O'Hare, 1968).

For text of the report see Israel in Lebanon: The Report of the International Commission (New York: Ithaca Press, 1983).

For accounts see Rainbow Warrior, Insight series of the Sunday Times (London: Arrow Books, 1986); Robie David , Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior (New Zealand: London Publishing, 1986).

Of course, parallel to reassurance is the counter-terrorist campaigns to uphold the security functions of government.

Quoted in O'Brien Conor Cruise , “God and Man in Nicaragua,” Atlantic (August 1986), pp. 50–72, at 63; this section draws on O'Brien's perceptive account.

Both quotations from “Focus on Women,” Breakthrough (Summer 1986), p. 14; material in special issue includes illuminating accounts of the Nairobi Conference.

For broader cultural, political, and economic reflections see Diamond S. , In Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1974).

These metaphors are creatively explored in another kind of inquiry by Russell Banks in his fine novel Continental Drift (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).

Williams Raymond , The Year 2000 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 243–48.