Books on the topic 'Democratic Socialist Movement (Nigeria)'

This book examines how the Netherlands managed to create and maintain one of the world’s most generous and inclusive welfare systems despite having been dominated by Christian-democratic or ŸconservativeŒ, rather than socialist dominated governments, for most of the post-war period. It emphasizes that such systems have strong consequences for the distribution of income and risk among different segments of society and argues that they could consequently only emerge in countries where middle class groups were unable to utilize their key electoral and strong labor market position to mobilize against the adverse consequences of redistribution for them. By illustrating their key role in the coming about of solidaristic welfare reform in the Netherlands, the book also offers a novel view of the roles of Christian-democracy and the labor union movement in the development of modern welfare states. By highlighting how welfare reform contributed to the employment miracle of the 1990s, the book sheds new light on how countries are able to combine high levels of welfare generosity and solidarity with successful macro-economic performance.

Nigeria's Stumbling Democracy and its Implications for Africa's Democratic Movement is the first book to recount and analyze Nigeria's controversial general elections of April 2007. Because Nigeria's immense and diverse population of 140 million people and its wealth of natural resources make it a microcosm of Africa, Nigerian politics are an ideal case study and bellwether by which to view and understand African politics and the ongoing democratic experiments on the continent. Ten leading scholars of Nigerian and African politics, variously based in Nigeria, the US, and Europe, contribute original chapters commissioned by Professor Okafor to provide an account at once deep and comprehensive of what went wrong with these disputed presidential, federal, and state elections; together with their implications for the future of the democratic movement, both in Nigeria and in Africa as a whole. Although the 2007 general elections resulted in the first-ever handover of political power from one civilian government to another in the history of Nigeria, by which the two-term Christian president Olusegun Obasanjon was succeeded by a Muslim, Alhaji Musa Yar'Adua, they were condemned by internal and international watchdogs for pervasive vote-rigging, violence, intimidation, and fraud which were, as this book documents, perpetrated by and with the connivance of the nation's security forces. The disappointment of continental hopes that these elections might finally break with Nigeria's history of tainted elections has grave repercussions for the democracy movement not only in Nigeria but throughout Africa-as seen in the knock-on effect upon the disastrous general elections in Kenya later the same year.

This chapter examines the role played by the Socialist Party in shaping the political debate over Woodrow Wilson's neutrality and preparedness policies following the outbreak of World War I. It considers how the Socialist Party sought to create a viable working-class antiwar movement, declaring “war on war” as it strongly contested the Wilson administration's definitions of U.S. national security, preparedness, and citizenship duties. It also also looks at the different personalities involved in early national Socialist Party policy formulations as well as U.S. foreign policy debates, including Allan Benson who sought to make foreign policy more subject to democratic checks and balances by leading a campaign for a national referendum on war.

This chapter examines the relationship between peace movement activism and demilitarization in both East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the history of peace activism in the two parts of the divided Germany: the liberal-democratic West German Federal Republic (FRG) and the socialist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Such an approach reveals not only the common themes they addressed and the transfers of ideas across the Iron Curtain, but also the ways in which governments addressed them as mirror images in the Cold War for ideas. While the peace movements in the West could appear in the contemporary political-cultural mainstream as the results of communist infiltration, the GDR government regarded the independent peace movement in the East as the result of the infiltration of the GDR by dangerous bourgeois-capitalist pacifists.

Taking a public policy perspective, this book explores how local governments and societal organisations in Germany and China work together in order to solve the social problems they face. Against the backdrop of the migration movement to Europe in 2015/16 and the longer history of rural-to-urban migration since the 1980s in China, this comparative study explores the challenges which migration poses to local governments. Despite the fundamental differences in the political systems of the democratic, federal state of Germany and the authoritarian, socialist People's Republic of China, the authors found that governments and societal actors turn to similar solutions to problems related to the integration of migrants and that collaborative governance plays an important role in it.

This chapter examines how the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia contributed to the rise of the Red Scare. On November 7, 1917, revolutionaries from the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party seized power in Petrograd and proclaimed the world's first socialist government. The Bolsheviks endorsed violent, class-based insurrection and policies of land and resource nationalization. News of the Bolshevik uprising intensified the wartime atmosphere in the United States, in which fear of treachery was rampant. This chapter first considers American intervention in Russia during the period 1917–1920 before discussing the emergence of the Red Scare in 1919–1920 and of anticommunism in the labor movement. It also looks at the strikes, bombings, and deportations in 1919 that offset whatever prestige the American Federation of Labor (AFL) accrued during the First World War. Finally, it describes the end of the Red Scare following US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer's fall and the release of the National Popular Government League report.

Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development intervenes in southern labor, civil rights, and social movement histories to counter the misconception that cooperatives are merely proto-political entities serving as training grounds for or as ancillary to institutionalized social justice movements critiquing capitalism and its fraught connections to gender, race, and class. To historically and theoretically anchor the book, the book examines seven neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice activists animated successive generations of locally-informed, regional cooperative networks stimulating urban growth in New Orleans. Debating alternative forms of social organization within the city’s plethora of integrated spaces, women, people of color, and laborers blended neighborhood-based African, Caribbean, and European communal traditions with transnational cooperative principles to democratize exploitative systems of consumption, production, and exchange. From utopian socialist workers unions and Rochdale grocery stores to black liberationist theater collectives and community gardens, their cooperative businesses integrated marginalized residents into democratic governance while equally distributing profits among members.

Culture from the Slums explores the history of punk rock in East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a critical constituent of this movement. For young Germans at the time, punk appealed to those gravitating toward individual and cultural experimentation rooted in notions of authenticity—endeavors considered to be more “real” and “genuine.” Adopting musical subculture from abroad and rearticulating the genre locally, punk gave individuals uncomfortable with their societies the opportunity to create alternative worlds. Examining how youths mobilized music to build alternative communities and identities during the Cold War, Culture from the Slums details how punk became the site of historical change during this era: in the West, concerning national identity, commercialism, and politicization; while in the East, over repression, resistance, and collaboration. But on either side of the Iron Curtain, punks’ struggles for individuality and independence forced their societies to come to terms with their political, social, and aesthetic challenges, confrontations which pluralized both states, a surprising similarity connecting democratic, capitalist West Germany with socialist, authoritarian East Germany. In this manner, Culture from the Slums suggests that the ideas, practices, and communities which youths called into being transformed both German societies along more diverse and ultimately democratic lines. Using a wealth of previously untapped archival documentation, Culture from the Slums reorients German and European history during this period by integrating alternative culture and music subculture into broader narratives of postwar inquiry and explains how punk rock shaped divided Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.

esistance features a selection of overtly non-conformist positions in the contemporary visual art scene of Albania vis-à-vis the most recent social, political, and economic turmoils in the Western Balkans – a region marked by the dark side of political governances that have remained “democratic” in their outward appearance (especially toward the European Union), while dramatically leaning toward autocratic regimes in the eyes of their own citizens. Regardless of their citizens’ primary interests, and despite some positive signals surfacing in the international media, almost every attempt to establish lasting conditions for democratic governance in the Western Balkans has been shrouded in the veil of profit-driven political scandals, personal greed for more and more power over the people’s rights, and the extinction of public property in pursuit of social elite’s corporate and private interests. Additionally, and more specifically related to Tirana, artists and citizens have, over the years, been involved in various types of revolt, expressing their disagreements with the ongoing destruction of public property in the name of “modernization and development”: a movement led by local political powers through financially and strategically motivated processes of architectural cannibalism – not only at the expense of erasing Albanian cultural heritage or long-term residents’ habitats, but also at the expense of taking human lives under the pretext of “urbanization.” The most obvious instance of this economy of destruction was the complex of buildings linked to the National Theater of Albania in downtown Tirana that has served as a symbolic and material place of citizens’ resistance: for more than two years, together with local artists, they have been opposing the government’s plans to demolish the old complex in order to build a new one – until this finally happened in Spring 2020, in the midst of the ongoing COVID19 pandemic. Rooted in the atmosphere of the National Theater Protests in Tirana, RESISTANCE was conceived in Summer 2019 by ZETA Center for Contemporary Art as the International Artists-in-Residence Program, in cooperation with three partner organizations from Kosovo, Serbia and North Macedonia (Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art in Prishtina; Ilija & Mangelos Foundation in Novi Sad; and Faculty of Things That Can’t Be Learned in Bitola) and supported by Swiss Cultural Fund in Albania, a project of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Gradually, the project expanded into an exhibition (Heterotopias of Resistance, curated by Blerta Hoçia and featuring works by Lori Lako, Fatlum Doçi, Edona Kryeziu, Nina Galiç, Darko Vukiç, Nikola Slavevski, and Natasha Nedelkova) and a series of interviews and panel discussions (with contributions by Lindita Komani, Edmond Budina, Ervin Goci, Ergin Zaloshnja, Pleurad Xhafa, Gentian Shkurti, Stefano Romano, Luçjan Bedeni, HAVEIT, Leonard Qylafi, Jonida Gashi, and Fatmira Nikolli). The results of both have been collected and presented in the format of a publication that, besides serving as an indispensable reading material concerning visual arts and politics in contemporary Albania, especially to those abroad, functions by itself as a form of resistance against contagious cultural policies in weak post-socialist “democracies” in Southeastern Europe.