How do individuals and organizations move beyond the boundaries of constitutional or legal constructs to challenge neoliberalism and capitalism? As major urban areas have become the principal sites of poor and working-class social upheaval in the early twenty-first century, the chapters in this book explore key cities in the Global South. Through detailed cases studies, Urban Revolt unravels the potential and limitations of urban social movements on an international level.
Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a founding member of the Lower East Side Community Labor Organization, an autonomous activist organization in New York City. His research and writing focuses on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy, and migrant worker resistance to oppression. Ness has just completed Guest Workers, Corporate Despotism and Resistance,(forthcoming University of Illinois Press) a book that examines the rise of guest workers from the global South in the US and labor opposition to employer abuses. He is author of numerous books including an anthology of contemporary labor: Real World Labor, with Amy Offner and Chris Sturr (Dollars & Sense). He edits the peer-review quarterly journal, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, and has also edited several reference works, including the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), and, with Aaron Brenner and Bejamin Day, the Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History (Sharpe 2009).
Trevor Ngwane is a scholar activist, based in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa, who has over the years devoted as much time to academic work as to community and political activism. For two decades he has been active in the trade unions, social movements and political organisations as an organiser and militant, a period that spanned the transition from apartheid to a democratic society. He was also involved in the international movement for social and economic justice and was active for several years in the African Social Forum, a component of the World Social Forum. Luke Sinwell, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa, PhD, is currently a Senior Researcher with the South African Research Chair in Social Change, University of Johannesburg. His research interests include the politics and conceptualisation of participatory development and governance, social movements and housing struggles, direct action as a method to transform power relations, ethnographic research methods and action research.Publication date: June 6, 2017
Edited by Dario Azzellini and Immanuel Ness