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Scholars have posited both a positive and a negative relationship between political openness and transnational activism, arguing that while closed opportunity structures positively affect activism by creating strong incentives for activists to "go transnational," they also negatively affect activism by inhibiting local groups from participating. The author argues that these contrary arguments are largely the result of an insufficiently developed comparative approach to the study of transnational activism. By examining countries at different levels of openness and multiple types of activism, she shows that different types of activism are affected in distinct ways by the level of political openness.

This paper traces our scholar-activist work with resident groups that arose in response to the redevelopment of a public housing estate in Sydney, Australia. Over the two-year period of our involvement, the groups' capacities to contest the redevelopment were gradually destabilised and neutralised by pressure from state actors and through intra-group tensions. In other words, the activism imploded and we were imbricated in that process. In this paper, we apply an autoethnographic method of 'writing-as-inquiry', which draws upon our correspondence with one another as data, to chart the challenges and possibilities for academics working within urban activism. Firstly, we are critical of ourselves for treading (too) carefully, which meant that we failed to challenge gendered, racialized and classed group hierarchies, and failed to support more radical and resistant positions to state authorities. Secondly, we highlight the power that individual actors can have to derail an activist group. Place-based activism necessarily means that people of varied political leanings and ideological dispositions will come together. It also means that people of diverse, and sometimes antagonistic personalities, will encounter one another. Thirdly, we point to the hostile and destructive context provided by the neoliberal city and, increasingly, the neoliberal university. We propose that when engaging in activism, academics should determinedly de-centre the self and centralise activist aims as they work to balance the objectives on both sides of the scholar-activist hyphen. We deliberate the role academics can play in mediating the conflicts that arise in activism, and the repercussions of such a direction, which inevitably means accepting the messiness of activism, and as Haraway has put it, 'staying with the trouble'.

The issue of what development is & how it is commonly conceived, is also dealt with in the fifth article of this volume, 'Activism, Expertise, Commons' by Larry Lohmann. For many policymakers & activists, social & political reality is imagined to be divided into two parts: what Lohmann terms 'disembodied, potent, transcendental, 'global' entities' such as 'globalization' & their alleged counterpart in the 'local' & 'particular'. Through such dualisms emerges, among other things, a view of development as being a process of planning, taming, organising & rationalising undeveloped, natural, irrational or unmapped domains. However, these dualisms, through which much politics -- tacitly or overtly -- tends to operate, are, he says, subject to incessant collapse. Using three different examples -- dams/development, commodification/'the economy' & science -- Lohmann describes the processes by which the dichotomies are built up & disintegrated. Every development 'master plan' & its implementation, he points out, evolves through an endless chain of revisions, additions, restructurings & other redistributions of power in offices, corners of farmers' fields & elsewhere. Similarly, the politically-contested frontier between 'the market' & what is imagined to be 'outside the market' constantly shifts as the institutions of 'economics' work at the unfinishable job of creating an 'economy'. A more determined awareness of the processes through which dualisms between intention & world, theory & practice & 'inside' & 'outside' are set up, Lohmann suggests, could help middle-class activism better achieve its goals. Rather than buying into a dichotomous metaphysics by attempting to improve theories that are seen as different in kind from practice, he argues, middle-class activists might become more effective by becoming more self-conscious about the primacy of forming closer working alliances with what he calls 'commoners', whom he sees as being often less prone to imagine political action in terms of such dichotomies. Adapted from the source document.

What is volunteering? -- Types of volunteering -- What is activism? -- Types of activism -- Common causes for volunteering and activism -- Why do people volunteer? -- Achievements of volunteering and activism -- Building communities -- Anonymity and celebrity -- Activism and the internet -- Being educated -- Getting involved