Journal articles on the topic 'Radicalism – Italy'

AbstractThis article examines concepts of youth, maturity, and generations in nineteenth-century Ireland and Italy and perceived connections between young people and political and social unrest. I demonstrate that, rather than being consistent, the involvement of younger generations in radicalism was uneven, and varied significantly with historical contexts. I argue that the authorities frequently exaggerated associations between young people and radicalism as a subtle strategy of exclusion, as a means of downgrading the significance of collective action and portraying it as a criminal, emotional, or even recreational matter rather than a political one, a tendency that has often been reinforced in the historiography. Descriptions of youth and maturity should not be understood as merely reflections of age. They were not value-free, and served as indicators of individuals' social standing and political agency or lack thereof. Yet fighting in a rebellion offered an alternative to marriage, owning property, or education for the achievement of “manhood,” or adult status and political agency. The article also investigates how the Great Irish Famine shaped generational consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century through an analysis of the participants in nationalist and agrarian violence. In all, over four thousand participants in collective action in Ireland and Italy are examined.

The second edition of Santi Romano’s book, The Legal Order, now appearing in its first English translation (2017), is a pioneer text of legal pluralism. Its interest lies in its extreme radicalism and in the fact that, although it is written by a lawyer, its argument has many important political implications and addresses core conceptual issues in contemporary sociolegal studies of legal pluralism. The social and political context of Romano’s book in early twentieth-century Italy is far from being solely of historical interest. Issues that surrounded his juristic thinking in its time resonate with important political and social issues of today.

This article aims to explore the interplay between religion and political radicalism in Europe by focusing on the case of Italian ‘White Leagues’ (Catholic trade unions) in the interwar period. Interest in this movement stems partly from the opinion that the understanding of politics in early twentieth-century Europe has often been distorted by the historiographical focus on the political polarisation between communism and fascism, which has led to the neglect of the complex ideological area in between. The article will focus in particular on the main organiser of the peasant ‘White’ unions in Italy, Guido Miglioli. He developed a network of political contacts across Europe with the aim of resuscitating the anti-fascist struggle in Italy and launching a campaign for the liberation of the peasantry. This was to be achieved through a European peasant International that would draw from the Soviet example while maintaining its Christian roots.

European security today faces new challenges that are not directly related to military force. Among them, first of all, is the threat of terrorism, which has both internal and external dimensions. The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of terrorism in the European Union on the example of Italy. The author analyses four types of this threat posed by terrorists according to their political motivation: separatism, left- and right-wing domestic political terrorism, and Islamist terrorism. Italian law distinguishes between the concepts of terrorism, radicalism and subversion. According to the 2015 law, terrorism is defined as conduct that, by its nature or context, may cause serious harm to a country or an international organization. It is aimed at intimidating the population or forcing the State or international organizations to commit or refuse to commit any action. The evolution of the phenomenon of terrorism in Italy is of particular interest because it reflects both general and specific features of the terrorist threat in Europe. From the late 1960s to the 1970s and until the beginning of the 1980s, Italian society had been facing the most brutal manifestations of terrorism. During this period, terrorism evolved from ideological far-right extremism to ultra-left revolutionary extremism, which turns to violence against the State and its servants, calling for a communist transformation of society. By the end of the 1980s, the terrorist threat in Italy had been significantly reduced. The decline in terrorist activity in the 1980s is explained, in addition to the increased effectiveness of the intelligence services and the police, by the decline in political activity in Italy after the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The author draws attention to one of the paradoxes of Islamist terrorism in Italy. Despite the fact that Italy bears the main flow of migration waves that can carry the threat of terrorism to Europe, the country has so far been spared from the large-scale threat of such kind. The example of Italy is also important because today the country’s leadership is the most effective in counterterrorism in comparison with other EU states.

This article aims to be a contribution to the ongoing debate among scholars concerning the question whether recently formed right-wing radical parties represent a new phenomenon and a break with the fascist tradition or whether they remain close to a fascist ideology. The author focuses on a specific national radical right-wing party: CasaPound Italia (cpi), founded at the beginning of this century, which declares itself to be ‘fascist’. While existing research insists on the intervention of external factors such as the economic crisis of 2008 in order to explain a new ‘wave’ of right-wing radicalism in Italy, this article will show the constant evolving of right-wing radical discourse over a longer historical period. The analysis will mainly delve into the ideological and political role played by three leading exponents of the Italian and European radical right: Pino Rauti, Roberto Fiore and Gabriele Adinolfi. Through a narrative style, and using a historical approach and qualitative analysis, this paper argues that their experiences represent the roots and sources for Gianluca Iannone’s project with cpi.

This paper aims to contribute to the historiographical debate about the impact of the Protestant Reformation among the Friar Minors by discussing the case-study represented by the first development of the Capuchin Order. The Capuchins were approved by Clement VII in 1528, just few years after the bull Ite vos (1517) attempted to prevent new divisions within the Franciscans. Their reform movement stood out for its asceticism and mystical spirituality, which attracted the accusation of Lutheranism from the more conservative exponents of the Roman Church. Actually, the «freedom of the Spirit» preached by the Capuchins was not linked to the idea of the «freedom of the Christian» fostered by Luther; it was, instead, influenced by the medieval mystical radicalism of the Spiritual Franciscans whose doctrines were taken up again in 16th century writings. Friars read such works like the heterodox Union of the the soul with God by the observant Bartolomé Cordoni. Nevertheless, a minority of the first Capuchins adhered to Lutheran ideas. Among them was the renowned preacher Bernardino Ochino, who in 1542 left the Catholic faith with some companions from Italy to Calvin’s Geneva and put at risk the very same existence of the Capuchin Order.

This article argues that the shift from the bipolar structure of the Cold War international system to a more polycentric power structure at the system level has increased the significance of regional relations and has consequently enhanced the importance of the study of regionalism. It makes a case for a Mediterranean region and examines various efforts aimed at defining what constitutes a region. In so doing, it investigates whether the Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) can be utilized to define a Mediterranean region and argues that the patters of amity and enmity among Mediterranean states are necessary but not sufficient to identify such a region. It suggests that economic, energy, environmental, and other factors, such as migration and refugee flows should be taken into consideration in order to define the Mediterranean region. It also claims that the Mediterranean security complex includes three sub-complexes. The first is an eastern Mediterranean sub-complex that revolves mainly - albeit not exclusively - around three conflicts: the Greek-Turkish conflict, the Syrian conflict, and the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict. The second is a central Mediterranean sub-complex that includes Italy, Libya, Albania and Malta and which revolves mainly around migration with Italy playing a dominant role due to its historical ties to both Libya and Albania. The third is a western Mediterranean security sub-complex that includes France, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Spain and Portugal. This sub-complex it centered around France, the migration question and its associated threats, such as terrorism, radicalism, and human trafficking. In conclusion, it is concluded that the Mediterranean security complex is very dynamic as there are states (i.e. Turkey) that seem eager and capable of challenging the status quo thereby contributing to the process of the complexs internal transformation.

This article analyzed the rise of far-right political parties and movements in the most developed European countries - Germany, France, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway as well as in the Visegrád Group. The current direction of the political and social development of those major European states shows great resemblance to the 1980s. The political framework is defined by escalating disappointment in social and governmental institutions, growing political fragmentation and increasing complexity of political communications. Under such circumstances radical right parties firmly secured their presence in the national parliaments and enhanced it over the last decade. Alongside their electoral success on the supranational level, it indicates significant alterations in the European political landscape. A new reality is being built while the right radicalism strives to demarginalize itself with its high adaptivity to the essential political institutions. The article analyzed causes and consequences of the ongoing changes. It suggested a new angle to assess the present radical right’s policy effects. Proceeding from the neoinstitutional approach it provided an insight into the key assumptions of radical right, far-right contagion and institutional isomorphism, while outlining the electoral dynamics and distribution of the radical right parties and assembling the concepts of their classification.

Dialogue among the adherents of the major world religions has alwaystaken place, especially, but not only, among the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism,Christianity and Islam. Excellent examples of this may be found in themidst of shared histories where we are more often presented with a recordof conflicts. The high points must be the enormously rich and creative interactionswhich took place in medieval Islamic Spain and southern Italy andat various times in places as far apart as Central Asia, Baghdad, Delhi,Cairo and the Ottoman Empire.As a movement with its institutions and full-time professionals, andnetworks of activists, interreligious dialogue is primarily a phenomenonof the twentieth century. It is the pressures of this century which havedemanded that we mobilize the resources of the great religions for dialogueand peace, purposes which have historically often seemed marginal.In India, the realization that a reasonably unified independence wouldonly be achieved if religions could work together, actually provides asignificant impetus towards the cooperation of religious leaders andinstitutions.The horrors of Nazi genocide in Europe spurred post-war generationstowards a radical review of traditional Christian attitudes towards Judaism.Out of regional tragedies, like the wars in Lebanon and in the formerYugoslavia, have come strengthened efforts across the social spectrum todisarm religious hatreds. The resurgence, in the last couple of decades, ofpolitical radicalism motivated by religion and expressed in religious terms, ...

Abstract The article argues that the locus of the most interesting and important work in the fields of immigration and labor history lies precisely at the intersection of class and ethnicity. In developing this thesis, particularly with respect to Italian immigrant working-class movements in the United States, the author draws on his experiences as a working-class ethnic and historian as well as his readings of the literature. In the course of his research on Italian immigrants in Chicago, the author stumbled upon the submerged, indeed suppressed, history of the Italian American left. Italian-American working-class history has since been the focus of his work. Since mainstream institutions had neglected the records of this history, the recovery of rich documentation on Italian American radicalism has been a source of particular satisfaction. These movements had also been "forgotten" by the Italian Americans themselves. Despite important work by a handful of American scholars, relatively few Italian American historians have given attention to this dimension of the Italian American experience. Curiously the topic has received more attention from scholars in Italy. Mass emigration as much as revolutionary movements was an expression of the social upheavals of turn-of-the-century Italy. As participants in those events, the immigrants brought more or less inchoate ideas of class and ethnicity to America with them. Here they developed class and ethnic identities as Italian-American workers. The construction of those identities has been a process in which the Italian immigrants have been protagonists, filtering cultural messages through the sieve of their own experiences, memories, and values. Historians of labor and immigration need to plumb the sources of class and ethnic identity more imaginatively and sensitively, recognizing that personal identity is a whole of which class and ethnicity are inseparable aspects. The author calls upon historians to salvage and restore the concepts of class and ethnicity as useful categories of analysis.

The article aims at identifying the characteristics shared by the right-wing populist civil movements of Western Europe and the USA and evaluating the possibility to use them for researching right-wing nationalist organizations in Russia. The movements selected for the comparison range from party-like electoral actors to unorganized protesters. They include as follows: The Five-star Movement (Italy), PEGIDA and the like (Germany), the English Defence League (the UK), the Tea Party Movement (the US). The authors identified several interrelated characteristics shared by these movements: (1) dealing with local, usually social, issues, (2) network-like structure of autonomous local groups building the agenda from below, (3) ideological ambivalence leading to replacing ideology with subculture, (4) digitalization of activism. Although in Russia there are no civic movements structurally or functionally identical to Western right-wing populists, the authors demonstrate that local social issues and civic responsibility have become important topics for some Russian nationalists (right-wing radicals) since the mid 2000s. The trends of deideologization and dealing with non-political local issues are researched mainly on the example of the “Frontier of the North” (Komi Republic). The authors conclude that some of the radical Russian nationalists are gradually declining their own independent agenda, following local protests instead. This opens up the possibility for right-wing organizations to become local civil society institutions and to participate successfully in local elections, similar to the “electoral break-through” of right-wing populists in the West. Although it is too early to speak about the deideologization of Russian nationalism, the article suggests that some nationalists are ready to mitigate ideological tensions to secure expanded social support. At the moment, nationalist organizations in Russia remain frozen between right-wing radicalism and emulating Western right-wing populism.

This issue celebrates the fortieth anniversary ofInternational Labor and Working-Class History. A relative youngster, it was a product of the second of two waves that resulted in the foundation of many labor history journals and societies.1The first wave, between roughly 1956 and 1962 included the Dutch-basedInternational Review of Social History;2the Feltrinelli Institute'sAnnaliin Italy; Le mouvement socialin France;Labor Historyin the United States; the BritishBulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History;3the West GermanArchiv fur Sozialgeschichte;and Australia'sLabour History. These journals developed at a time when organized labor and left-wing politics were strong and confident of their future,4although many who were active in these journals were highly critical of the political strategies of the existing Left and, in Eric Hobsbawm's words, viewed them “as an attempt to find a way forward in Left politics through historical reflection.”5The second wave of journal creation in labor history took place in the 1970s and included not onlyILWCH(1972), butRadical History Review(1975),Labour/Le Travail(1976), andHistory Workshop Journal(1976). These journals were especially shaped by the radicalism of the 1960s—the Vietnam War, the Cuban revolution, and the wave of student, feminist, and left-wing unrest in Europe and the world in 1968 and subsequently.6The new journals were more transnational and more comparative; malleable youths, these journals were more susceptible to the influence of the social movements evolving around them. They were more attentive to the relationship between metropole and colonial territories and more focused on the burgeoning fields of black studies and women's history than was true earlier. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, political scientists, and demographers, they were also animated by the tremendous explosion of social history in the 1960s and 1970s and new research underway on social protest movements, race, and social conditions.7

Francoism was the product of the sum of all the heterogeneous forces of anti-liberal right, from the most radical fascists to Christian traditionalists even further to the conservative right than the Monarchists and the Carlists, and as a result their architectural response to the problem of rebuilding Spanish society following the Civil war could not be unitary either. Each school of thought, each situation to be solved, and each architect generated a different solution, and as a result we find a wide variety of architectural works in Francoist Spain. Rather than revisit the topics studied in multiple works since the seventies, this article will focus the research on typologies that have hardly received any attention, namely constructions of marked ideological and propagandistic character, such as the monolithic monuments dedicated to the Fallen, the reconstructions of ‘mythological’ places for the discourse of the first Francoism, and the production of monumental civic buildings, such as the Universities of Labor. The core issue to be resolved is whether some cultural discourses under Francoism constructed the new regime as pioneering a modernizing national revolution, rather than installing a reactionary counterrevolution, and whether the architectural works that resulted in fact present outstanding elements of modernity that had nothing to envy, in their physical scale, radicalism of design, and futural temporality, those of National Socialist Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. Such a kinship suggests that many buildings of right wing regimes, at least in Spain, in the first half of the twentieth century should be considered as belonging organically to the fascist era, even if the regimes that promoted or hosted them were not technically fascist in a strict political and ideological sense, a kinship expressed in their ‘rooted modernism’.

Abstract Many Italians in exile ‚religionis causa‘ had learned to dissimulate well before they left their homeland: nicodemism was part of the necessary life preparation for becoming a radical or an antitrinitarian. Examining the careers of Italian refugees in the mid-sixteenth century, this essay shows that, by the time they crossed the Alps, they were already programmed to keep quiet, evade and deceive. Initially, exile felt like utopia: yet there was also a dawning realisation that restraint, evasion and silence would remain essential in relatively closed Swiss cities. When the exiles’ views turned to dangerous topics like the Trinity, baptism, the immortality of the soul or ‚il cielo aperto‘, they already knew the core nicodemite strategies: evasion, secrecy, ambiguity, pretence, being terse and hiding risky ideas within humanist dialogue form. Three examples are taken from those in and around Basel in the troubled 1550s: Bernardino Ochino, Celio Secondo Curione, and Lelio Sozzini. The burning of Miguel Servetus in nearby Geneva in 1553 appalled all three, crystallised their resistance to the dogma of reformers, and pointed to the dangers of not remaining a nicodemite. Concealment learned in Italy served to keep them alive in Swiss cities. Italian experience had also prepared them to write in forms whereby they might elude the attention of the authorities: spiritual letters (Curione), dialogues (Ochino) and ambiguous comments (Sozzini). All three spread their views by tactics known to nicodemites all over Europe but especially in Italy.

In western countries, prostatic carcinoma is the most frequent neoplasia in the male sex after pulmonary neoplasia. Its early diagnosis is very important. The authors report the results of a screening for prostatic carcinoma effected in some municipalities of the district of Parma (Italy); 28 prostatic carcinomas were diagnosed (1.2% of the examined patients). Twelve patients were submitted to radical nerve-sparing prostatectomy according to Walsh. In all of them, PSA values decreased to values < 1 ngr/ml, confirming the radicality of the operation and few complications occurred. The conclusion of the authors is that nowadays timely radical prostatectomy is the only “definitive” treatment of prostatic carcinoma, allowing a better quality of life, however long it is.

The 4th of August regime in Greece under Ioannis Metaxas has long been treated by theories of ‘generic fascism’ as a minor example of authoritarianism or at most a case of failed fascism. This derives from the ideas that the Metaxas dictatorship did not originate from any original mass ‘fascist’ movement, lacked a genuinely fascist revolutionary ideological core and its figurehead came from a deeply conservative-military background. In addition, the regime balanced the introduction ‘from above’ of certain ‘fascist’ elements (inspired by the regimes in Germany, Italy and Portugal) with a pro-British foreign policy and a strong deference to both the Crown and the church/religion. Nevertheless, in this chapter, I argue that the 4th of August regime should be relocated firmly within the terrain of fascism studies. The establishment and consolidation of the regime in Greece reflected a much wider process of political and ideological convergence and hybridisation between anti-democratic/anti-liberal/anti-socialist conservative forces, on the one hand, and radical rightwing/fascist politics, on the other. It proved highly receptive to specific fascist themes and experiments (such as the single youth organisation, called EON), which it transplanted enthusiastically into its own hybrid of ‘radicalised’ conservatism. Although far less ideologically ‘revolutionary’ compared to Italian Fascism or German National Socialism, the 4th of August regime’s radicalisation between 1936 and 1941 marked a fundamental departure from conventional conservative-authoritarian politics in a direction charted by the broader fascist experience in Europe.

This paper focuses on Italian libertarian and anti-authoritarian environmentalism, embodied at the political level by the Radical Party and by a small organization linked to it, the Amici della Terra, the Italian section of Friends of the Earth. It aims at highlighting their role within the environmentalist galaxy of associations, movements and committees and at studying their political strategy, the peculiarities of their cultural and political contribution to the Green movement, but also their clashes with the other components. The paper analyses the Radical Party and Amici della Terra's support for anti-nuclear mobilizations in the late 1970s, especially against the construction of a nuclear plant in Montalto di Castro; how they provided a political outlet for many animal-rights movements and contributed to bringing conservationist associations closer to politics; and how they tried to build international links with other Green parties and associations. The paper highlights some political and ideological clashes between Radical environmentalism and the so-called ‘Red ecology’ around the referendum against nuclear power plants, the anti-hunting referendum and the mobilization for peace and the Amici della Terra's proposal to create local Green Lists. Thus it aims at adding a political interpretation to the cultural one – suggested by scholars – of the delay in the development of a Green party in Italy compared to other Western European countries.

It is not uncommon to find cases of Muslim women being harassed or bullied in many of the Muslim-minority countries because of their dress. These Islamophobic attacks, unfortunately, are not merely conducted by radicalised individuals; but the subjugation of the rights of Muslim women also comes from institutional bodies and governments. Secular nations, such as France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Switzerland, USA, UK, Canada, China, and Russia have either imposed restrictions on Muslim women regarding their dress code. They see veil as a non-acceptance of progressive or cumulative values which is unsurprisingly not welcomed by the Muslim community. In such environment, it is inevitable for the Muslims to understand what the Qur’ān and Sunnah really say about the dress code for Muslim women in order to explain what their religion really requires from them and to communicate it appropriately to the government officials, journalists, politicians, and other relevant stakeholders. It is also essential from the perspective of segregating cultural aspects from the religious aspects. Many of the commonly used words for the dressing of Muslim women are more rooted in culture than the religion. It is accordingly vital to understand what the Qur’ān and Sunnah really command about the women dressing and how it has been interpreted in various Islamic societies and cultures. This paper accordingly presents an analysis of all the relevant Qur’ānic verses and the prophetic traditions (from the 6 most renowned books of ahadith). The linguistic analysis employed in this paper results in the identification of items of dress that were worn by Muslim women to safeguard their modesty during the times of Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ). The same principles are relevant for today’s age and time and the Muslims can use those guidelines to delineate cultural practices from the religious injunctions.

The 1954, May 4th disaster of the Ribolla mine is one of the worst mine accidents ever happened in Italy. Italian mine activity has never been comparable to that in the most important industrialised countries. The lack of minerals has always been one of the greatest problems hindering industrial development. However, in the first half of the twentieth century and until the ‘70s, mineral extraction was a significant part of the national economy, employing many thousands of workers. More specifically, at first copper mines, later mainly pyrite ones, represented the basis for the development of Montecatini, the big Italian chemical monopoly. The Ribolla lignite mine was owned by the Montecatini company. The mine had a remarkable development during the Second World War and 1200 miners still worked there in 1954. The firedamp explosion caused 43 deaths and was matter of huge controversy and debate among trade unions and left political parties on the one hand and the Montecatini company on the other. Before the disaster, the miners' union had reported serious safety problems with regard to working methods. A deeper insight into the event began to emerge only many years later. In particular, studies based on part of the documents made available from the trial against Montecatini were published in 2005. After the disaster, Montecatini was forced to adopt safety measures and to invest money to improve the working conditions, particularly ventilation in the tunnels. However, the mine’s life had come to an end and some years later it was closed. My study will show how the mining company, trade unions, political parties and local governments acted after the mining disaster. For example, how industrial relations changed in the still open mines. In a social environment dominated by the left, the Montecatini had to abandon the authoritarian behaviour, which was probably derived from the fascist era. The left, on the other hand, had to renounce the most radical elements of their programmes, such as the nationalization of the mines. La actividad minera italiana nunca ha sido comparable a la de los países industrializados más importantes. La falta de minerales siempre ha sido uno de los mayores problemas que han obtaculizado el desarrollo industrial. Sin embargo, en la primera mitad del siglo XX y hasta los años 70, la extracción de minerales fue una parte importante de la economía nacional, empleando a miles de trabajadores. Más específicamente, al principio las minas de cobre, luego principalmente las de pirita, representaron la base para el desarrollo de Montecatini, el gran monopolio químico italiano. La mina de lignito Ribolla, en la parte sur de la Toscana, también era propiedad de la Compañía Montecatini. La mina tuvo un desarrollo notable durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y en mayo de 1954 todavía trabajaban 1.200 mineros. El desastre del 4 de mayo de 1954 en esa mina es uno de los peores accidentes mineros jamás ocurridos en Italia. La explosión de grisú provocó 43 muertos y fue motivo de gran polémica y debate entre sindicatos y partidos políticos de izquierda, por un lado, y la empresa Montecatini, por otro. Antes del desastre, el Sindicato de Mineros había denunciado serios problemas de seguridad por los métodos de trabajo. Una visión más profunda del evento comenzó a surgir solo muchos años después. En particular, en 2005 se publicaron estudios basados en parte de los documentos disponibles del juicio contra Montecatini. Después del desastre, Montecatini se vio obligado a adoptar medidas de seguridad e invertir dinero para mejorar las condiciones de trabajo, en particular la ventilación de los túneles. Sin embargo, la vida de la mina había llegado a su fin y algunos años después se cerró. Mi estudio mostrará cómo la empresa minera, los sindicatos, los partidos políticos y los gobiernos locales actuaron después del desastre minero. Por ejemplo, cómo cambiaron las relaciones laborales en las minas aún abiertas. En un ambiente social dominado por la izquierda, los Montecatini tuvieron que abandonar el comportamiento autoritario, que probablemente se derivaba de la era fascista. La izquierda, en cambio, tuvo que renunciar a los elementos más radicales de sus programas, como la nacionalización de las minas.

Since the 1980s, right-wing extremism, radicalism, and populism have emerged as transformative forces in European politics. This unexpected resurgence has triggered an interdisciplinary scholarly effort to refine our understanding of the far right. Educationalists, however, have largely been absent from this endeavour, leaving us unable to theorise and address the potential effects of the far right’s political and cultural growth on European education. This article aims to provide an empirically based conceptional groundwork for educational research on the far right. Drawing on archival research and content analysis of programmatic material produced by diverse and influential far-right organisations in France, (West) Germany, and Italy, I show that the post-war European far right disposes of the two essential features of a social movement: an action-oriented frame that reduces educational reforms to a common contentious theme, and a dense organisational network. The latter engages in institutional and contentious politics, as well as education. Theoretically, these findings suggest that, in the realm of education, the far right ought to be conceptualised as a social movement that seeks to influence education policy, and represents itself an educational actor. Addressing the far right’s multifaceted educational engagement thus requires a combined effort across European education research.

To coalesce politically is to join together whilst retaining singularity. This is the aim of much contemporary social movement activism, marked most consistently under the sign of the global justice movement – the movement ‘for humanity and against neoliberalism’, as a common slogan goes. This movement regularly writes itself as one composed of diversity and a commitment to horizontal power relations. Within this, the discourse of the movement demonstrates a particular consciousness around privilege and oppression (Starr 95-97). The demands, in this regard, on a coalescence that brings together such groups as middle-class university students, landless peasant farmers, indigenous militants and child labourers are strong (Maeckelbergh). What kinds of solidarities are required for such a precipitation across difference and power? What ethical imperatives are produced for those activists who occupy the normatively first world, white, middle-class activist subject position within this?For activism in the Australian context, this question has had particular implications for practices of alliance and resistance around, for example, the Northern Territory Intervention as well as the treatment of refugees, particularly their mandatory detention and deportation. Many activist individuals and groups involved in these social movements can also be found occupying various positions within global justice movement discourse. There were shouts of “no borders, no nations, no deportations” at the 2002 World Trade Organisation protests in Sydney; there are declarations of Indigenous sovereignty at the gates of the Villawood detention centre in 2010. Under these circumstances, the question for coalition between singularities is negotiated at the difference between being an incarcerated refugee or a citizen of the incarcerating state; or between a person whose livelihood is administered through their race and class and one who has relative control over their own means of existence.Whilst these differentials are neither static nor binarised opposites, they do manifest in this way, among other ways, at the moment of claiming coalition. Again, then: what are the ethics of coalition that might be produced here for the relatively or differently privileged subject? By way of a response, this article is an address to the ethical scene of activist coalition, drawing on anti-colonial feminism, discourses of precarity, and Derrida’s “fiduciary register” (Acts of Religion). I pose three interpenetrating ethics of coalition for the privileged subject in (the) global justice movement: risk, prayer and gift. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you are interpellated as this subject, in view of its instability. By the same token, this meditation is not specifically applied to the cases of alliance sketched above; which is not to say it cannot be.RiskAs global justice movement discourse recognises, the contemporary global polis is heavily marked by practices of securitisation and containment. Under such conditions, anticolonial theorist Leela Gandhi suggests that a collective oppositional consciousness may be defined by risk. For Gandhi it is the risk (of pain, sacrifice, humiliation, or exile) taken by the “philoxenic”, or stranger-oriented, subject in transnational activism that defines their politics as one of friendship, after Jacques Derrida (Politics; Gandhi 29–30). Risk takes the subject beyond recognition; it means facing something you might not recognise, something you cannot know. Easily commodified, risk cannot be pre-planned; “philoxenia”, says Gandhi, “is not reducible to a form of masochistic moral adventurism or absolutism, to a sort of ethics-as-bungie-jumping-at-any-cost school of thought” (30). Risk, rather, is partial, open-ended; always to come. (Risk here is distinguished, thus, from its actuarial register. The regimes of risk underpinning global securitisation are defined by imminence rather than immanence.)Risk, in this ethical imaginary, is a threat to subjectivity; the catalyst for any coalitional process of deactivating the habits of privilege and hierarchy. This is viscerally articulated by Bernice Johnson Reagon in her speech "Turning the Century: Coalition Politics":I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing. (Reagon)Reagon (a musician, scholar and activist speaking at a women’s music festival in 1981) highlighted that, as displacement is necessary to coalition, so do we risk displacement every time we seek coalition. Reagon’s speech remains a landmark challenge for allies to stake their subjectivity on social justice. A response is perhaps prefigured by feminist philosopher and activist Simone de Beauvoir, in her reflection on her pro-abortion activism in early 1970s France:I believed that it was up to women like me to take the risk on behalf of those who could not, because we could afford to do it. We had the money and the position and we were not likely to be punished for our actions. I was already a sacred cow to the authorities and no-one would dare arrest me, so don’t give me too much credit for bravery because I was untouchable. Save your sympathy for the ordinary women who really suffered by their admission. (Bair 547)Contemporarily, queer theorist and activist Judith Butler expresses similar coalescent displacement in Precarious Life, her manifesto for a politics of mourning:For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you”, by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know. (49)Indeed: Butler and de Beauvoir, two different feminists equally concerned with coalition, provide two orientations to the risky solidarity forecast by Reagon. Butler’s is a commitment to displacing privilege, in order to bring about political relationship to another. De Beauvoir’s is to use her privilege to protect and advance the rights of those who are oppressed by that privilege. Both recognise a re-distributive, even liberatory, power that is created by giving up privilege, or by recognising it in order to work against it. Both statements might be located in particular timespace: de Beauvoir’s from a feminism beginning to consider the homogeneity in the white middle class heterosexual feminist construct of “woman”, and Butler’s reflecting a thoroughly raced, classed, queered, feminist subject. An anticolonial feminist reworking of this scene might thus see de Beauvoir and Butler as both deploying forms of Chela Sandoval's “tactical subjectivity”, that “capacity to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved” (58-9). In doing this, both may run the risk of fetishising the others they de/refer to: Butler’s as the source of her humanity, de Beauvoir’s in speaking on their behalf (Ahmed 4-5). So in risking their personal empowerment activists still, simultaneously, risk replicating the very dominations to which they are opposed. The risk still, must not ‘stop’ alliance work, as Sandoval’s theory appreciates (62). These themes - of endurance and disorienting imagination - are rife in activist discourse: from the unionist “dare to struggle, dare to win” to the World Social Forum’s “another world is possible”. The ethical precept of risk is unpredictability, uncertainty; the interception of otherness. PrayerIn a world overdetermined by risk it is no surprise that much global justice movement activism is founded on notions of precarity. “Precarious work” is a term in labour politics that refers to widespread workforce casualisation and the decline of certain industrial standards, particularly in the geopolitical west. An example of its political deployment may be found in the performative Italian meme of San Precario, created by Milanese activists in 2000. For a decade now, San Precario has appeared at rallies, in grottoes and on devotional cards as the patron saint of precarious workers in Italy (Johal); enacting an iconic-ironic twist on prayer. Precarity as activist trope has its roots in wage instability but has been extended (particularly since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York) to refer to the condition of life during neoliberal globalisation.Within this there are those such as Ida Dominijanni who invoke Butler’s “precarious life” for an alliance politics formed from a shared vulnerability and instability. Butler’s notion of precarity here entails an acknowledgement that September 11 generated a “dislocation from First World privilege” (xii) in the Anglosphere.The ethical content of such a risky politics can be gleaned from these examples. On the one hand Butler and Dominijanni demonstrate that to be open to risk is to refuse the obsessive securitisations of neoliberal globalisation. On the other, San Precario highlights the value of security to those who are denied it under those same conditions. In evaluating the many-edged significance of precarity in global justice movement activism, Australian scholar Angela Mitropoulos puts it this way:“Precarious” is as much a description of patterns of worktime as it is the description, experience, hopes and fears of a faltering movement … This raises the risk of movements that become trapped in communitarian dreams of a final end to risk in the supposedly secure embrace of global juridical recognition. Yet, it also makes clear that a different future, by definition, can only be constructed precariously, without firm grounds for doing so, without the measure of a general rule, and with questions that should, often, shake us – particularly what “us” might mean. (Mitropoulos, Precari-Us?)Our precarious lives in partiality require, then, a contemplative sensibility - in order to discern and deploy, to tell the difference between containment and critique, and so on. We need to “take a moment” to balance on precarity’s shaky edge: to mourn the loss of certainty, seek guidance, affirm hope and belief, express the desires of futurity. It is arguably in this way that the Latin precarium became the English word prayer; as its simplest root/route it means “entreaty, petition, request” (Oxford English Dictionary).Prayer implies an address, though not necessarily as supplication to a sovereign. Prayer may instead be a gesture to a time of justice that may arrive despite all odds. Activism is social creativity: it requires the imagination of other worlds. It thus negotiates the transcendant: as other-to-this, other-to-now – simultaneously multiplying conceptions of time. This is a fiduciary mode of being; an openness to otherness that may be distinguished from institutional religion (Derrida, Acts of Religion 51), and that generates a “social divine” (Lacey).Crucially, prayer also tends to belong to the time and space of solitude (the “time out”, the “space outside”). In her thinking on solitude, Angela Mitropoulos suggests of contemporary activists – who are in social movement under hyperconnected capitalism – that “connection is not necessarily relation” (Mitropoulos, What Is to Be Undone?), particularly when said hypernetwork underscores an “injunction to stay connected in order to be a political subject.” Mitropoulos reinforces how “the solitude that can derive from disconnection” need not be “a retreat to the personal … neither individualism or quietism.” Instead, “a politics that disconnects as well as connects remains a form of relation”.To be sure, as Sara Ahmed notes, (more) ethical relations may be formed by a disinvestment that allows one to detect difference and disconnection; “getting closer to others in order to occupy or inhabit the distance between us” (179). In turning away, activists can nuance their responses to the domination they resist: choosing, sometimes, not to reproduce hegemonic sociality. The implication may be that those in social movement who adhere only to the communitarian community critiqued by Mitropoulos will lack the critical expansiveness required of coalition. The ethical precept of prayer may thus question, reaffirm and sustain activism through disconnection from coalition and disinvestment from activism by the privileged subject. Indeed, this may be a particularly just movement when the participation of privileged allies threatens to dominate the resistance of those they ally with.GiftTo think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change. (X 160)These remarks from Andrew X, heavily circulated in some activist milieux, suggest that to Give Up Activism is something of an impossible gift for the activist. Indeed, one response to this text is entitled “The Impossibility and Necessity of Anti-Activism” (Kellstadt). For the geopolitically privileged agent to whom X’s text is addressed, Giving Up Activism would mean giving up privilege – which is itself the necessary and impossible catalyst for ethical coalition in the global justice movement (Spivak). On this logic, those who resist the exclusions of identity, community and geopolity may do well to give up activism when that identification is at risk of reproducing the force of these categories. It is one thing to give up activism as a literal casting off of the label and a refusal of activity addressed to patriarch, polis or nation; an interlinked giving up may be in understanding activism as an impossible gift, along lines traced by Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille and Hélène Cixous. In these specific readings, the gift is reconceptualised as operating outside of the capitalist system of exchange (Cowell). But, under the modern system of ubiquitous global capital, there is something impossible about this gesture. For the privileged subject who “gives up privilege” for the other, she enacts a “giving which is also always a taking”, as Fiona Probyn puts it (42). So, the impossible gift of “giving up activism” – as strategic action or tactical consciousness – is one made with the awareness that the privileged activist in social movement cannot not risk reinscribing domination. Such an understanding in activist discourse would continue to nuánce the question of “What Is to Be Done?” (or indeed, What is to Be Undone, in Mitropoulos’ formulation). The ethical precept of gift is the capacity to give up the privileged investments of activism, and understanding that you cannot.Meta-MovementTo give up activism when it is called for, within an understanding of activism as the impossible gift of the privileged subject, is reflective of the Derridean friendship that shapes Gandhi’s explorations of anticolonial transnational solidarity. This is the friendship that requires turning one’s back, or “‘facing’ back to front” (Wills 9). If horizontal coalitions are to work with and against privilege, and if this means working beyond that limited horizon where activist recognises activist, then “giving up”, “turning one’s back on” activism may be a tactical exercise of power. This “turning one’s back” will also, therefore, be “the turn outwards” implied by prayer: a metaphysical movement that engages the other worlds that are imagined and sought. It is a movement which allows one to risk “giving up activism”, when that is required, in order to give (in)to or over to (the) other(ness). The metaphysical move goes outwards, from “physical” to “meta”: not towards a totalising meta, but as a sense of the other which overwrites present certainties: meta-. I recall Chela Sandoval’s words here: “Without making this metamove any ‘liberation’ or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself” (59, my emphasis). It is in the space of such a movement that the ethics of coalition are disclosed.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality. London: Routledge, 2000.Bair, Dierdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Summit Books, 1990.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.Cowell, Andrew. “The Pleasures and Pains of the Gift." 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