Suchergebnisse

This article uses interviews with committed anti-war and peace activists to offer an overview of both the benefits and challenges that social movements derive from new communication technologies. It shows contemporary political activism to be intensely informational; dependent on the sensitive adoption of a wide range of communication technologies. A hyperlink analysis is then employed to map the UK anti-war movement as it appears online. Through comparing these two sets of data it becomes possible to contrast the online practices of the UK anti-war movement with its offline 'reality'. When encountered away from the web, recent anti-war contention is grounded in national-level political realities and internally divided by its political diversity; but to the extent that experience of the movement is mediated online, it routinely transcends national and political boundaries.

Social movements contain structures of beliefs and values that guide critical action and aid activists' understandings. These are worthy of interrogation, not least because they contain points of articulation with ideational formations found in both mainstream politics and academia. They offer an alternative view of society, economy and polity that is grounded in protagonists' experience and struggle. However, the ideational content of social movements is often obscured by a focus on particular, immediate goals; by their orientation to certain forms of action; and by the mediated, simplified nature of their communication. Additionally, recent social movements display a tendency to coalition action, bringing a diverse set of political understandings in concert on highly specific campaigns. This conceptual article seeks an approach to identifying the messages within social movements that remains sensitive to their complexity, dynamism and heterogeneity. Through a critique of the concept of ???interpretative frames??? as developed in social movement studies, I describe the novel concept ???orientational frame???. In contrast to social movement scholars' tendency to focus on instrumental claim-making by movement organizations, I emphasize deeply held, relatively stable sets of ideas that allow activists to justify contentious political action. Through an engagement with Michael Freeden's morphological approach to understanding ideologies I attempt to draw frame analysis away from the positivistic attempt to delineate general processes into a hermeneutic endeavour more suitable to understanding the richly detailed, context dependent ideas of particular social movements.

This article explores a number of key questions that serve to introduce this special issue on the ethics of research on activism. We first set out the limitations of the bureaucratic response to ethical complexities in our field. We then examine two approaches often used to justify research that demands time consuming and potentially risky participation in research by activists. We label these approaches the ethic of immediate reciprocity and the ethic of general reciprocity and question their impacts. We note, in particular, the tendency of ethics of reciprocity to preclude research on 'ugly movements' whose politics offends the left and liberal leanings predominant among movement researchers. The two ethics also imply different positionalities for the researcher vis-à -vis their subject movement which we explore, alongside dilemmas thrown up by multiple approaches to knowledge production and by complex issues of researcher and activist identities. The overall move to increasing complexity offered by this paper will, we hope, provide food for thought for others who confront real-world ethical dilemmas in fields marked by contention. We also hope that it will encourage readers to turn next to the wide range of contributions offered in this issue.

The upsurge in activism opposing wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq appears to represent a significant process of transnational collective action. Using data collected through participant observation, interviews and web site analysis, this article explores the role of the Internet in facilitating transnational activism between Australia, Britain and the United States. This research confirms Tarrow's (2005a) assertion of 'rooted cosmopolitanism'- a primary commitment to locally contextualised action combined with a desire for transnational support. The Internet is used primarily for gathering news and for sharing symbolic expressions of solidarity. In Australia, in particular, with fewer domestic anti-war resources on-line, international networking proves particularly useful. To an extent, on-line networks reach across both political diversity and geographical boundaries. However, on-line resources do not appear to enable the more personal connections required to build stable, working coalitions across borders.