John Foran

Political Cultures of Opposition Exploring Idioms, Ideologies, and Revolutionary Agency in the Case of Nicaragua

Using interview data from Nicaragua, we propose the concept of “political cultures of opposition” for bringing culture and agency into the study of revolutions, and linking the subjective elements of experience and emotion with the social structural ones of organizations and networks. We use evidence from the Nicaraguan uprising of the 1970s to show how a repressive political structure was experienced by ordinary citizens, who turned to two political cultures — liberation theology and Sandinismo. These cultural constructions enabled participants from diverse backgrounds to channel their experiences and emotions into revolutionary actions, most often with and alongside the Sandinistas.

Let us change the world without taking power violently

Written in the form of a letter to a comrade, this text presents a political balance sheet on the work of John Holloway on radical social change. The strength of his work lies in its acute insight into the psychology of subjects resisting capitalism, the expansion of the concept of political agency to embrace myriad forms of everyday ‘breaks’ from capitalism’s systemic grip, and the poetic prose that graces Holloway’s major works, Change the World without Taking Power and Crack Capitalism. Points of critique include the difficulty and thus limited utility of the arguments that provide the foundation for these insights, the constraints posed by staying within the theoretical universe of Marxism, and the determined refusal of all forms of engagement with the state. The author argues that the forms taken by radical social change in the twenty-first century are more varied than Holloway’s major works suggest, and that, in particular, nonviolent social movements such as Latin America’s Pink Tide and the Arab Spring help us imagine multiple paths to radical social change today.

Theorizing the Cuban Revolution

An assessment of the outcomes of the Cuban Revolution in terms of theories of both the causes and outcomes of revolutions in general reveals that that the revolution has been spectacularly successful in terms of ensuring the well-being of the vast majority of Cubans, while at the same time failing to deliver fully democratic institutions and freedoms. The success of the revolution in maintaining itself against U.S. hostility and the deepening of neoliberal global capitalism is attributed to the strength of the political culture that the revolution has forged and carried forward across the generations. The future of the revolution looks bright, especially if the Cuban people find a way to secure deeper democratic gains to match their social and economic ones.

Breaking Barriers to Climate Justice

Sociologists John Foran and Richard Widick explore the nature of the current global impasse on climate change negotiations, and argue that an emerging alliance among progressive nations and climate justice movements, and especially youth, offers grounds for cautious optimism.

System Change, Not Climate Change: Radical Social Transformation in the Twenty-First Century

The world as we know it is crashing around us. The signs are evident, and they are everywhere: intense, extreme storms, floods, drought, heat, rain, fire, and winds—nothing is as it was. Politicians don’t know what to do, and the actions of so many of them seem downright cruel, vacuous, or incompetent. The devastation of war, military operations, policing, lethal drones, and physical attacks roll over populations entirely innocent of any crime. The slow grind of debt, privation, and daily exploitation wears on more than half of Earth’s human inhabitants. Non-human creatures are dying out in record numbers as Earth’s systems are polluted, contaminated, and wracked by the endless extraction of fossil fuels, minerals, and the loss of healthy soil and water.

Sexual Politics in Modern Iran

Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved

Autocracy, Modernization, and Revolution in Russia and Iran.

What did the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 share besides their drama? How can we compare a revolution led by Lenin with one inspired by Khomeini? How is a revolution based primarily on the urban working class similar to one founded to a significant degree on traditional groups like the bazaaris, small craftsmen, and religious students and preachers? Identifying a distinctive route to modernity--autocratic modernization--Tim McDaniel explores the dilemmas inherent in the efforts of autocratic monarchies in Russia and Iran to transform their countries into modern industrial societies.What did the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 share besides their drama? How can we compare a revolution led by Lenin with one inspired by Khomeini? How is a revolution based primarily on the urban working class similar to one founded to a significant degree on traditional groups like the bazaaris, small craftsmen, and religious students and preachers? Identifying a distinctive route to modernity--autocratic modernization--Tim McDaniel explores the dilemmas inherent in the efforts of autocratic monarchies in Russia and Iran to transform their countries into modern industrial societies.