Susan C. Pearce

Intersections, Immigration, and Partner Violence: A View From a New Gateway—Baltimore, Maryland

This article reports on the results of exploratory surveys with immigrant women regarding their observations of intimate partner violence and criminal justice practices in their communities in the emerging immigrant gateway of Baltimore, Maryland. Using an intersectional/interlocking theoretical framework, it asks how nativity interacts with other social locations in the experiences of partner violence through surveys of women representing 5 language groups. The study found high levels of awareness of the problem of partner violence in immigrant communities and strong awareness of many U.S. criminal justice approaches to the problem. Although the women preferred informal sources of support in a situation of abuse, they strongly supported government intervention. We found low levels of awareness of the Violence Against Women Act as well as little support for the higher levels of prosecution for batterers, even though arrest was sometimes approved. The article calls for sensitive policies and practices that take into account the particular vulnerabilities of the foreign-born, especially in localities where national diversity is relatively novel.

Who Owns a Movement’s Memory? The Case of Poland’s Solidarity

It is August of 1980. The Lenin shipyards in Gdansk, Poland are about to erupt into worker protest, as food prices escalate. In a system built on a philosophy of worker ownership, free trade unions are — ironically — illegal. Veteran crane operator Anna Walentynowicz raises her voice about management abuses — and loses her job. Workers rally and declare a strike. Electrician Lech Wale¸sa scales a 12-foot wall to join the workers -and assumes the leadership mantle. From 17,000 protesters in Gdansk, to local university student occupations, to nationwide sympathy strikes across the country, to the Solidarity (‘Solidarnośc’) trade union that draws ten million members plus countless fellow travellers globally, this remains among the largest social movements on record. Intellectual activists Bronislaw Geremek, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and Adam Michnik labelled Solidarity a ‘self-limiting revolution’ — (using nonviolence and eschewing a full-scale popular revolt to wrest state power) (Staniszkis, 1986). This movement would help usher in the people-power sentiment across the Eastern Bloc that would culminate with the domino-style collapse of seven state-communist systems across Central and Eastern Europe symbolized by the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall (Kenny, 2002) — a historically unprecedented achievement for a nonviolent revolution.

LGBT Movements in Southeast Europe: Violence, Justice, and International Intersections

The Southeast Europe region of the Western Balkans and Turkey has witnessed a burgeoning growth of LGBT organizing within and across countries. It also continues to experience patterns of homophobic violence, including attacks on public Pride events. This region has been coming under increasing scrutiny by the European Union and international bodies for rights protections for gender and sexual minorities. Scrutiny has been particularly intense as each of these countries moves toward European Union accession. This chapter comparatively chronicles the continued patterns of violence, the legal and social changes to address the violence, and the activists’ use of external rights instruments as boomerangs or ricochets to advance their social inclusion and reverse the impunity for violence at the individual and systemic levels.

Poland and EU enlargement: foreign policy in transformation

and its cynical and manipulative president of the Machiavellian type. According to Zygar, Putin once recommended Russia’s Defense Minister to watch it for insights into Western politics (271). The account of Putin’s relations with foreign leaders is also very interesting. As Zygar suggests, Putin deals successfully only with the “European cynics” – Gerhard Schroeder and Silvio Berlusconi. On the other hand, he never gets well with high-toned politicians of scrupulous integrity. Angela Merkel is an example of such politicians who always irritated Putin. One of the episodes describes how Putin deliberately brought his Labrador Konni to meetings with Merkel, who was afraid of dogs: “They made an interesting threesome, even delivering a press conference together – the Russian, the German, and the dog” (121). The book is sometimes criticised for relying on the author’s assumptions rather than facts. Zygar himself notes that stories of the Kremlin’s men are subjective narratives that are based on individual personalities and their intentions. On the other hand, the book offers the unique testimony on the Kremlin’s history written from the insider’s perspective and it will be of great interest to academic and media experts who specialise in Russian politics.