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Abstract
Worldwide, civilians experiencing violence make agential choices about how they interact with conflict landscapes. This special issue assembles contributions that specifically deepen our understanding of nonviolent civilian agency amid violence. Our Introduction embeds these contributions in a wider overview of the study of civilian agency in war. First, we unpack the state/military versus civilian binary upon which dominant scholarship’s idea of agency in violent conflict is often still based and show how this has contributed to an analytical gap in our understanding of nonviolent civilian action. We then provide an overview of the growing literature that has started to fill this gap and discuss how its recentering of nonviolence and civilian agency enables a more nuanced understanding of conflict management and transformation across diverse contexts. Finally, we provide an overview of the contributions to this special issue and how they take the state of the art of scholarly work forward.
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Abstract
The “Czechoslovakian Sixties” can be described as the culmination of an incredible intellectual activity. Jóhann P. Árnason spent this time as a student at Charles University in Prague, deeply immersed in the Czech and Slovak intellectual life. This article claims that his personal experience with “Czechoslovakian (Hi)Story,” as well as with its intellectual reflections, significantly influenced the development of his socio-theoretical point of view. However, this ambitious claim will be confined to only three foci. First, Jóhann Árnason will be placed into the Czechoslovakian context. By this, the intellectual and artistic achievements of the 1960s will be put into contrast with the creative “impotence” of the 1990s, which, inter alia, is a consequence of the dominance of the transitological approach in political and social sciences at that time (i.). This approach is strongly criticized across the paper, especially in the second part, introducing Boris Buden’s critique of it (ii.) Finally, that “intellectual impotence” will be explained by using Árnason’s reading of Jan Patočka’s text Supercivilization and its Inner Conflict (iii.).
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Germany is considered a lauded land of music: outstanding composers, celebrated performers and famous orchestras exert great international appeal. Since the 19th century, the foundation of this reputation has been the broad mass of musicians who sat in orchestra pits, played in ensembles for dances or provided the musical background in silent movie theatres. Martin Rempe traces their lives and working worlds, including their struggle for economic improvement and societal recognition. His detailed portrait of the profession ‘from below’ sheds new light on German musical life in the modern era.
Author:
Germany is considered a lauded land of music: outstanding composers, celebrated performers and famous orchestras exert great international appeal. Since the 19th century, the foundation of this reputation has been the broad mass of musicians who sat in orchestra pits, played in ensembles for dances or provided the musical background in silent movie theatres. Martin Rempe traces their lives and working worlds, including their struggle for economic improvement and societal recognition. His detailed portrait of the profession ‘from below’ sheds new light on German musical life in the modern era.
Author:
Abstract
This paper examines the impact that the Basque civic movement had in the civil resistance against the armed separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (eta). The ‘civic’ or ‘constitutionalist’ movement, whose best-known representative was the social movement organization ¡Basta Ya!, emerged to demand the protection of Basque citizens’ human and political rights, which were routinely abused by eta and their sympathisers. The movement impacted on the cycle of contention against terrorism through the diffusion of democratic norms and anti-eta political narratives, by sustaining civil resistance against terrorism while enduring persecution by their militants and sympathisers and by protecting the social fabric through the channelling of non-nationalist grievances into collective action that was pro-democratic and nonviolent. The case highlights the crucial parallels that exist between civil resistance to authoritarian regimes and non-state groups and the crucial role that civil society actors can play in the social delegitimisation of terrorist organisations.
Unlocking the Golden Past of the Rudari Woodworkers
This is the first monograph on the history of the Rudari people of Romania and the first mapping of their settlements. The Rudari are a population which has traditionally inhabited the Balkan area and much of Central Europe. Many of them do not know the Romani language but speak Romanian dialects and today make a living out of carving wooden household items, although their Slavic name alludes to mining. Indeed, the Rudari were for centuries gold-prospectors and gold-washers working for the Crown of Wallachia and were administrated as slaves by a monastery situated on the auriferous Olt river. The authors have reconstructed the fascinating history of this ethnic group for a period of 500 years until the 19th century when gold-panning went in decline due to the exhaustion of the reserves of alluvial gold.
Unlocking the Golden Past of the Rudari Woodworkers
This is the first monograph on the history of the Rudari people of Romania and the first mapping of their settlements. The Rudari are a population which has traditionally inhabited the Balkan area and much of Central Europe. Many of them do not know the Romani language but speak Romanian dialects and today make a living out of carving wooden household items, although their Slavic name alludes to mining. Indeed, the Rudari were for centuries gold-prospectors and gold-washers working for the Crown of Wallachia and were administrated as slaves by a monastery situated on the auriferous Olt river. The authors have reconstructed the fascinating history of this ethnic group for a period of 500 years until the 19th century when gold-panning went in decline due to the exhaustion of the reserves of alluvial gold.