Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh

Economic Changes and Surges in Micro-Nationalist Voting in Scotland and the Basque Region of Spain

I During the 1970s, residents in Scotland and the Basque region of Spain began to vote in large numbers for nationalist candidates. Almost overnight the Scottish National Party and a collection of three Basque parties became important electoral forces, expanding their shares in general elections by more than 15 percent of all ballots cast (see Tables 1 and 2).

On Movement Frames and Negotiated Identities: The Case of Poland's First Solidarity Congress

How do participants in a social movement come to agree on goals and strategies? Recent scholarship has moved in two theoretical directions. Some writers focus on movement leaders and their efforts to excite and attract potential supporters by formulating a vision that conveys optimism and moral outrage, yet is congruent with long-standing popular beliefs. Other writers focus far less on leaders and their frames and insist, instead, that movements are organizationally decentralized and typically lack consensus on goals and strategies. From this second perspective, programs are best seen as the byproducts of ongoing clashes and messy negotiations between a myriad of local activists with different beliefs, diverse values, and frequently divergent interests. Using the First Solidarity Congress as a historical case study, this article argues for the utility of combining both approaches – one that focuses on leaders’ ongoing efforts to build consensus around a seemingly effective frame, and the other that stresses the extent of intra-movement discord and the decentralized nature of movement organizations.

Rise of the Right: Exploring Conservative Movements in the United States

New types of conservative politics appeared in the USA toward the conclusion of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Spokespersons for these novel projects donned the mantel of democracy and insisted that they spoke for everyday people. They also asserted that the non-radical left in the United States (that is, ‘Liberals’) was a collection of out-of-touch intellectual elitists who disdained the values, needs, and circumstances of lowand middle-income and wage-earning Americans. Finally, the new American conservatives (sometimes dubbed ‘neo-conservatives’ by opponents across the ideological spectrum) argued that they would capture political power in a genuinely democratic way: through grass-roots ‘movements.’ The two books under review explore the rise of self-styled conservative ‘movements’ during the twilight of the twentieth century. Taking seriously the self-presentation of the neo-conservatives, the books show how modern academic theories about social movements can be applied to understand the politics of not only self-declared ‘progressives,’ but self-defined ‘conservatives’ as well. Because the books use different types of academic theories, they examine slightly different topics and explore different sorts of questions. How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism looks at stages in the ideological and organizational development of the new conservatism, and at how those

Preparing to Fight the Good Fight: Advice from Two Associate Deans to Faculty Friends.

In our professional work, many of us are involved in university service and politics and some of us enter administrative positions. As political scientists who became associate deans of colleges of liberal arts and sciences, our observations from our administrative perches and our disciplinary knowledge have provided insights on how faculty can protect and promote academic values.

Crossing Frontiers: Theoretical Innovations in the Study of Social Movements

For better or worse, scholars who write about the origins, activities, and consequences of social movements often talk past each other. Babel occurs partly because social movement scholars are trained in different disciplines with dissimilar analytic concepts, presumptions about relevance, and methodological techniques. In addition, one finds in every discipline competing (if not clashing) intellectual currents and political orientations, which contribute to the multiplicity of voices and perspectives on any topic. For instance, one can find social-movement analysts in departments of political science who are Marxists, mass-society theorists, world-systems theorists, subaltern-studies folks, post-cultural-studies scholars,

For What Do We Cheer? Nietzsche, Moral Stands, and Social Movement Research

This article explores moral stances in social movement research. The article first identifies three moral orientations (and their corresponding world views) that have become common since the end of the Cold War. The second section uses Friedrich Nietzsches praise and criticism of three types of “useful history” to clarify the benefits and costs of each moral orientation. The article closes with thoughts about the relevance of Nietzsches notion of “free spirits” to morally inspired scholarship about movements.

The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilization. By Conversi Daniele. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1997. 312p.

it is based is complex and multifaceted. The author has skillfully woven together Western social science concepts of political reform with a wide range of Chinese sources and his own interviews. The restructuring, he finds, has taken place in two stages: 1978 through 1986 and 1986 to the present. The first stage was characterized by pragmatic considerations. Deng Xiaoping exploited mass dissatisfaction with his predecessor, Mao Zedongs atrocities, and promised drastic changes. An Chen opines that, with the PRC on the brink of social upheaval, Dengs priority had to be the restoration of order and stability. Yet, he could not simply restore the party-state institutions of the 1950s, with their quintessentially Maoist combination of political indoctrination, organized terror, and legitimacy conferred by winning the civil war in 1949. In the interim, citizens had become more intractable and disobedient, and the revolution had lost its elan vitale.

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In this scholarly work, Zirakzadeh argues that there is a calculated reasoning behind ETAs political violence that is often overlooked by researchers. His book is a comprehensive account of the Basque regions grassroots politics.

A Rebellious People: Basques, Protests, and Politics.

This article explores the social circumstances that nurture social movements in advanced capitalist societies by examining the Spanish and French high‐school student movements of 1986–87. Attention...