This section includes book notes of 150-300 words as well as some book reviews of 600-900 words on books of particular interest to the members of our group. If you have either suggestions for books you would like to review or see reviewed (including recent books of your own), please contact Nigel Copsey of the University of Teesside (UK).
Book Notes
David Croteau, William Hoynes, Charlotte Ryan (eds.), Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, 320 pp., USD 24.95, ISBN: 0-81664621X (pbk). Reviewed by Randle Hart (University of Toronto) The theme of the 15 essays in this edited volume – dedicated to William Gamson’s academic-activist career – is that social movement scholars need to make their research and theories more useful (and more accessible) to activists. In the process of making the case, however, the writers – some academics, some professional activists, some both – often prioritize academic knowledge over the experiences, abilities, and intellect of activists themselves. Many of the contributors seem to forget that activists know what they are doing and probably don’t need academics’ aid in order to be successful. Many of the contributors rely on resource mobilization theory to show how academics can help activists identify and utilize resources. This theory, however, is derived from empirical research on collective action and, as such, really does not offer activists anything new; it simply tells them what they probably already know. The same can be said of the book’s concern with framing theory: do activists really need academics (or professional framing teachers!) to instruct them on how to create and disseminate collective action frames? Does not framing theory assume that activists do this as part of collective action (with varying levels of competence)? Finally, in a book about collaboration between activists and academics I was surprised that none of the contributors provided an extended discussion of Gramsci. Perhaps it is too risky in the United States under the Bush regime to write favorably about Marxist intellectualism. There are some very fine essays, however. Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp write about their fusion of participatory action research and the extended case method, and theirs is a good example of activist-academic feminist collaboration done right. Two essays by sociologists and former SDS members (Richard Flacks and Robert J.S. Ross) also skillfully unite their experiential knowledge of activism with social movement theory. David Meyer’s essay on how activists could use social movement scholarship is also
worth reading, as is David Snow and Catherine Corrigall-Brown’s essay on “nonresonant” frames. I doubt that those who research extreme movements and extreme politics will find this book useful as a whole. With few exceptions, the essays assume that social movements are all progressive and inherently good in themselves. As a leftist who studies the far right, I really don’t want the movements that I examine to benefit from my research because I think these organizations are inherently wrong. Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, Carol Mueller (eds.), Repression and Mobilization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, 258 pp., GBP 17.50, ISBN: 0-8166-4426-8 (pbk). Reviewed by Sabine C. Carey (University of Nottingham) Repression and social movements have both been the subject of a large and growing field of academic research. In the past, scholars with a political science background have generally focused on repression, sociologists have concentrated more on social movements, while the work produced in the other field as often been overlooked. This book brings together eminent authors from both backgrounds to produce an interesting collection of studies that use a variety of approaches and methods to investigate different aspects of the repression-mobilization link, some of which have so far received little attention. The introductory chapter by Davenport offers an excellent overview over this field, its main theoretical models, its achievements, as well as the main shortcomings of this literature. In the second part of the introduction, he draws “a fundamentally different model of state-dissident interaction” (p. xxvi), based on the findings of the contributions. But what students of the repression-dissent nexus find is not a substantially new model of the relationship, but rather a more detailed and disaggregated (and hence less parsimonious) diagram of a large array of linkages between repression and mobilization, where none of the elements are particularly surprising or new. Similarly, several contributions further refine and disaggregate previous work, instead of developing entirely new approaches. For example, Boudreau’s very interesting and thought-provoking chapter on conceptualizing the use of repression builds upon Most and Starr’s (1989) decision-making model, although he does not refer to this earlier work. Nonetheless this book will be of great interest to scholars of the mobilization-repression nexus. It offers an excellent collection of the latest work in this field and highlights both the multitude of questions that still beg further inquiry as well as the varied conceptual and methodological approaches that help us to better understand the causal linkages and mechanisms that lead to conflict and human suffering.
Roger Hewitt, White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 182 pp., USD 29.99 (pbk) / 75.00 (hbk), ISBN: 0-52152089-4 (pbk); 0-52181768-4 (hbk). Reviewed by Gary Freeman (University of Texas at Austin) This short book covers a lot of territory and perhaps tries to accomplish too much. Its core, which makes very interesting reading, is a detailed study in the tradition of reflexive ethnography of the attitudes and community processes of the white residents of the working class districts of Greenwich in south London. The scene of “three unambiguously racial murders” (p. 44) between 1991 and 1993, the community was the focus of intense media coverage, protest marches, government studies, and academic analysis. Roger Hewitt was himself commissioned by Greenwich Council to study racism among adolescents in the area and bases this book in part on the materials he collected. He presents responses of white youths and adults to the characterization in the press of the murders of three young black men as racially inspired. Whites, he shows, produced “counter narratives” to shift public discussion from white animus to white victimization. They believed that the elite discourse of white racism was “unfair to whites” because, among other reasons, black violence or aggression toward whites was not treated as racism. The book contains extensive discussion of the historical and comparative context of contemporary race relations, but the most compelling material is gathered at grass roots level. Long quotations of white youths and adults are often riveting. The data is interpreted via a theoretical framework drawn from discourse analysis or narrative theory. Hewitt treats the complaints of his interlocutors with grudging respect, trying to identify “the borderline between the reasonable concerns of white non-powerful persons and the racialisation of these concerns” (p. 17). Adopting the realist stance of practitioners of his art, he nonetheless denies that “all stories of ‘unfairness to whites’ are ‘untrue’ or ‘racist distortions’” (p. 77). While some are clearly fabrications, “others, adopted into the same genre as these, can, on the basis of forms of evidence beyond the narrative, make reasonable claims to correspond to reality and to arise from contact with reality” (p. 77). Marjorie Mayo, Global Citizens. Social Movements & The Challenge of Globalization, London and New York: Zed Books, 2005, 224 pp., GBP 17.95, ISBN: 1-84277-139-6 (pbk). Reviewed by Verity Burgmann (University of Melbourne) Proponents of globalization encourage the notion that globalization is an inevitable and inexorable process that cannot be denied. Marjorie Mayo’s wide-ranging and insightful book cuts through such fatalism to focus on strategies to build effective, socially inclusive and democratically accountable alliances for social transformation globally. Movements against capitalist globalization, she maintains, can and should be supported by the development of critical theory as well as by building solidarity in practice, within
national borders and across them, internationally. Global Citizens is an important contribution to the transformative project, because of its clarification of the crucial theoretical issues, its recapitulation of some of the more memorable moments in anticapitalist struggle worldwide and its analysis of the lessons learnt. On the one hand, she describes the critical theoretical debates on globalization, the distinction between left-wing and right-wing opposition to globalization, discussions about civil society, ‘the end of history’, arguments between new social movement theorists and class analysts, the differences between American and European approaches to the study of social movements, the insights from community development and community education approaches to global citizen action, the debates on women and development, and more. On the other hand, she examines how these debates and issues play out in the real world, with case-studies, for example, of trade union revitalization, social-movement unionism and community unionism, the phenomenon of ‘protest businesses’, international people to people exchanges for urban transformation, the Global Campaign for Education, the Jubilee 2000 Coalition, the Stop the War Coalition. With the battle of ideas currently being waged so vigorously by the protagonists of neoliberalism, Mayo’s book is useful for those wishing either to respond to these challenges or to analyze the contest.
Book Reviews Elisabeth Carter, The Extreme Right in Western Europe. Success or failure?, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, 271 pp., GBP 55.00, ISBN 0-7190 7048-1 (hbk) Reviewed by Sarah de Lange (University of Antwerp) Although much has been written on the electoral success of extreme right parties in Western Europe, relatively little attention has been devoted to the part extreme right parties themselves have had in their success. With her book The Extreme Right in Western Europe Elisabeth Carter makes a substantial contribution to the study of the extreme right. The book assesses the explanatory power of both internal and external supply side theories of extreme right party success. And although Carter’s findings are not very surprising - extreme right parties are more successful when they adopt a moderate ideological profile and when they are well-organized and well-led - the book is an example of good scholarship. The book consists of four thematic chapters; the first and second chapters investigate the extent to which party-centric explanations can account for the uneven success of extreme right parties, whereas the third and fourth chapters estimate the impact of
environmental factors on the success of extreme right parties. The first chapter deals with party ideology as a possible explanation for the success of extreme right parties. To analyze the effect of this variable, Carter develops a typology of extreme right parties. On the basis of the importance extreme right parties attach to the immigration issue, the nature of the racism they adhere to (if any) and the position they take vis-àvis democracy, parliamentarianism, and pluralism she distinguishes between neo-Nazi (xenophobic and racist, anti-democratic, neo-fascist (not xenophobic or racist, antidemocratic), authoritarian xenophobic (xenophobic and culturalist, reformist: less democracy, less pluralism, more state), neo-liberal xenophobic (xenophobic and culturalist, reformist: more democracy, less state) and neo-liberal populist parties (not xenophobic or racist, reformist: more democracy, less state). An analysis of the electoral success of these five types of parties shows that authoritarian xenophobic, neo-liberal xenophobic, and neo-liberal populist parties perform much better at the polls than neo-Nazi and neo-fascist parties, which supports the hypothesis that moderate extreme right parties are more successful than radical extreme right parties. Although Carter’s analysis on this point is convincing, it should be kept in mind that her notion of what is extreme right and what is not is rather broad. One can seriously dispute the status of neo-liberal xenophobic and neo-liberal populist parties as part of the extreme right family. In the second chapter Carter analyzes to what extent party organization and party leadership have an impact on the success of extreme right parties. She finds that highly organized and well-led parties outperform weakly organized and poorly led ones. Surprisingly, high levels of factionalism do not diminish the electoral potential of extreme right parties. The fourth chapter establishes that the structure of competition in the party system also has an effect on the success of the extreme right. Extreme right parties are found to be successful when they themselves and the mainstream right are moderate. The success of the extreme right is also dependent on the level of convergence between the mainstream left and right, a confirmation of the well-known hypothesis of Herbert Kitschelt. The fourth and last thematic chapter shows that electoral laws have relatively little impact on the electoral success of the extreme right. On this point Carter’s book is in contradiction with a number of earlier studies that have found a significant effect of electoral systems and related laws on the success of the extreme right. Carter’s study has been conducted with care and precision. An important quality of the study is the inclusion of both positive (i.e. successful extreme right parties) and negative cases (i.e. unsuccessful extreme right parties) in the analysis. Many small parties that remained excluded in earlier studies are included in this one, which obviously strengthens its conclusions. Thus, Carter’s study deals with no less than 41 extreme right parties. The book also demonstrates that the author has thorough knowledge of the parties and countries under study. Moreover, all theoretical, methodological and empirical choices that have been made in the study are well documented and defended. Ongoing debates on the nature and success of the extreme right are described extensively and the author is not afraid to take position. The book deserves to be read by all who work on extreme right parties and will also be a valuable asset for courses at graduate level.
Nigel Copsey and David Renton (eds.), British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 256pp., GBP 45.00, ISBN 1403-93916-0 (hbk). Reviewed by Steven Woodbridge (Kingston University, UK). This edited volume of nine chapters plus a short introduction has its origins in an academic conference held in 2003 on the relationship between the Labour movement and right-wing extremism in Britain. In 2002-03 the ‘modernised’ and newly-confident British National Party (BNP) had made some worrying electoral headway at local municipal level, especially in northern towns in England where the Labour Party had traditionally been strong. In particular, the BNP appeared to be deriving benefit from working-class disillusionment with the record of New Labour in economically depressed areas. A number of the contributors to the book were thus motivated primarily by a concern to better understand and counter the apparent new threat from the BNP, and to locate it within the broader historical evolution of British fascism. These objectives are reflected well in the collection, which in addition offers some new material on how the British authorities ‘managed’ the political challenge from the extreme right in the 20th century. As the editors point out, the book does not represent any consensus of historians in favour of present-day activism. The collection is rather a set of diverse essays, with various views and approaches. But herein lies its strength, as there is a nice balance of academic scholarship between liberal and radical authors. After a clear first chapter on how a Conservative government partly made use of fascists for strike-breaking purposes in the 1920s (by Maguire), the next (by Thurlow) explores how the British state sought to play a more impartial role as an ‘umpire’ between Communism and fascism in the 1930s. The reader is then taken into the post1945 period with a chapter on the strategy of the police when dealing with renewed conflict between Mosleyism and anti-fascists in the late 1940s (Macklin). There are also contributions on the important part feminists played in anti-fascism (Gottlieb) and on how British anti-fascism developed an international campaigning dimension (Mates). Other chapters explore the degree to which the extreme right has often tried to appropriate ‘left-wing’ discourse to widen its appeal, such as the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s (Coupland) and the BNP more recently (Linehan). Further chapters set out succinctly the complex policy dilemmas faced by the Labour and trade union movement when responding to the National Front in the 1970s (Renton) and the BNP in the early years of the 21st century (Copsey). One key point that emerges from the British case is that the temptation on the part of mainstream political parties to pander to media panics over asylum and migration can help to feed the momentum of the extreme right over issues such as local housing allocation and spending on amenities, a pattern that has also been identified by researchers in other parts of Europe. There are also some salient points concerning the
new professionalism of extreme right activists and their increased use of ‘doorstep’ canvassing and targeted campaigning on local issues, particularly given the decline in grass-roots membership of mainstream parties such as New Labour. Although it required a distinct ‘summing up’ chapter to round things off, all in all, this is a valuable addition to the historiography on extremism in Britain. It contains some of the latest scholarship on how the lessons of past encounters with fascism can throw light on the present-day variants, especially in relation to the BNP. Academic researchers, politicians and activists on the ground would do well to ponder its core arguments.