New and Alternative Social Movements in Spain: The Left, Identity and Globalizing Processes

This collection offers a diachronic analytical study of new and alternative social movements in Spain from the democratic transition to the first decade of the 21st century, paying attention to anti-war mobilizations and the use of new technologies as a mobilizing resource. New and alternative social movements are studied through the prism of identified linkages among the left, movement identities and global processes in the Spanish context. Weight is given to certain important historical aspects, like Spain’s relatively recent authoritarian past, and certain value-added factors, such as the weak associationalism and materialism exhibited by the Spanish public. These are complemented by exploring insights offered by key theoretical approaches on social movements (political opportunities structures, resource mobilization). The volume covers established social movement cases (gender, peace, environmental movements) as well as those with a more explicit connection to the current context of global contestation (squatters’ and anti-globalization movements).

Overlapping Notions of Self and Other: the Case of the Anabaptist Body

This paper examines the complex interrelations between notions of ͚“elf͛ and ͚Otheƌ͛ with regards to human bodies, taking as a case study the bodily experiences of Anabaptist Christians, both historically and in the present day. It first examines body practices and discourses through the lens of Anabaptist approaches to baptism and conscience and it relates these to the Foucauldian notion of care of the Self. It then looks at biopolitical relations between individuals and the state through an examination of oath-taking and anti-war protests. Finally, it discusses the roles of bodies and bodiliness in contemporary Anabaptist commemorative practices. 

A European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Antic-Catholicism and Anti-Bolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922 to 1933

The term “culture war” has become a generic expression for secular-catholic conflicts across nineteenth-century Europe. Yet, if measured by acts of violence, anticlericalism peaked in the years between 1927 and 1939, when thousands of Catholic priests and believers were imprisoned or executed and hundreds of churches razed in Mexico, Spain and Russia. This essay argues that not only in these three countries, but indeed across Europe a culture war raged in the interwar period. It takes, as a case study, the interaction of communist and Catholic actors located in the Vatican, the Soviet Union, and Germany in the period between the beginning of the Pontificate of Pius XI in 1922 and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany in 1933. Using correspondence and reports from the Vatican archives, this essay shows how Papal officials and communist leaders each sought to mobilize the German populace to achieve their own diplomatic ends. German Catholics and communists gladly responded to the call to arms that sounded from Rome and Moscow in 1930, but they did so also to further their own domestic goals. The case study shows how national contexts inflected the transnational dynamics of radical anti-Catholicism in interwar Europe. In the end, agitation against “godlessness” did not lead to the return of a “Christian State” desired by many conservative Christians. Instead, the culture war further destabilized the republic and added a religious dimension to a landscape well suited to National Socialist efforts to reach a Christian population otherwise mistrustful of its völkisch and anticlerical elements.

Right to War in the Islamic Tradition:Jihad and its Compatibility with Modern International Law (will be submitted to the publisher in April 2014)

In the last century, Islam drew the world’s attention though such phenomena as the Islamic revolution in Iran, the fierce Muslim resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat by a radical Islamic group. But it was when Osama Bin Laden and his organization Al Qaeda were established to have been behind the 11 September attacks in the US, the age-old images of Islam, the fanatical and belligerent religion threatening what the Western world stands for, were revitalized. The impact of 9/11 attacks was so great that even balanced portrayals of Islam were eclipsed by stereotypical images of a fundamental, anti-Western and warmongering religion that bore the hallmarks of medieval prejudices and rhetoric. The popular image tailored for the Western audience reflected Islam as monolithic, intrinsically aggressive, and determined to engage in religious wars against the interests and values of the Western civilisation.
This book intends to help reduce, at least to a reasonable degree, the impact of sweeping, and at times tendentious, generalisations about Islamic laws of warfare. The main purpose of this book is to place the legal, cultural and historical practices of Islamic wars in their broader socio-political contexts, thereby establishing that there has been no undisputed understanding of what defensive or aggressive warfare entails in Islam, whether in doctrine or in practice.

Rheumatologists' judgements about the efficacy of anti-TNF therapy in two neighbouring regions

Objectives: The requirement in Northern Ireland to prescribe biologic agents according to NICE/BSR guidelines and within a fixed budget has created a waiting list for treatment that has no parallel in the Republic of Ireland. The study investigated the bearing this situation may have on had on the consultants’ judgements in the respective areas.

Methods: 78 case vignettes created from the data on real patients with RA treated with biologics in the north and south of Ireland were appraised by 9 southern and 8 northern consultants who judged the clinical benefit and significance of the patients’ condition after a trial of therapy. Quantitative (Clinical Judgement Analysis) and Qualitative (Focus groups) techniques were used.

Results: Northern consultants perceived a slightly greater degree of clinical benefit after a trial of therapy than southern consultants. Judgment models of northern and southern consultants were broadly comparable. The latter tended to be more uniform in their judgments than the southern group. Focus group discussions with consultants largely validated the findings of the quantitative analysis but revealed how clinical judgment analysis might be misled by gaming strategies.

Conclusions: Despite the absence of overt rationing in the south of Ireland, as far as the judgment of therapeutic benefit from biologics was concerned, the clinical judgment policies of practitioners were very similar to those in the north. The adoption of NICE/BSR guidelines in the north may have improved the uniformity of clinical practice in Northern Ireland.

State power matters: power, the state and political struggle in the post-war American novel

This article is concerned with resituating the state at the centre of the analytical stage and, concomitantly, with drawing attention to the dangers of losing sight of the state as a locus of power. It seeks to uncover the relationship between two related lines of critical inquiry: Marxist and Foucauldian theories of the state; and the attempts by three postwar American novelist (Ken Kesey, William Burroughs and E.L. Doctorow) to determine the nature and extent of this power and to consider under what conditions political struggle might be possible. It argues that such a move is needed because recent critical analysis has been too preoccupied by corporeal micropolitics and global macropolitics, and that the postwar American novel can help us in this move because it is centrally concerned with the repressive potentiality of the US state. It maintains that the resuscitation of Marxist state theories in early 1970s and a debate between Poulantzas and Foucault is intriguingly foreshadowed and even critiqued by these novels. Consequently, it concludes that these novels constitute an unrecognized pre-history of what would become one of the key intellectual debates of the late twentieth century: an engagement between Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of the power and resistance.