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18 results

  • 2 - Radical Protest on a University Campus

  • Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University, Connecticut, Trevor Stack, University of Aberdeen, Farhad Khosrokhavar, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
  • Book:
    Breaching the Civil Order
    Published online:
    25 November 2019
    Print publication:
    12 December 2019, pp 42-69

  • Summary

    Throughout six decades of internal armed conflict in Colombia, radical protest took multiple forms. Some of them undermined the civil sphere through the exercise of violence and intimidation. Others contributed to expanding the civil sphere and strengthening its vibrancy. Since the 2016 peace accord, Colombian society has faced the challenge of transitioning from uncivil to civil radical protest within multiple institutional scenarios. Here, I will focus on this transition as it occurred within Colombian public universities. During many decades of internal armed conflict, these universities constituted one of the many theaters of the war. There, insurgent and counterinsurgent forces, together with their support networks, confronted each other for the purpose of establishing control over their respective communities. The spread of violence on university campuses and the practices of pressure and intimidation that came along with it critically affected their internal public spheres. It spread various degrees of self-censorship among the members of these communities, and all too often it resulted in the breakdown of open public conversation regarding the experience of campus violence and involvement or participation in the war. Within such contexts the transition from forms of radical protest that undermine civil life to new forms that contribute to its vibrancy serves to undermine the regime of justifications that sustains violent radical protests. Through free discussion, cracks in the wall of silence and fatalistic indifference are developed, cracks that weaken the wall that has served to shield violent radicalism from challenge by a growing segment of their respective communities. In what follows, I will explore three interventions between the early 1990s and 2016 that sought to achieve precisely this sort of transition within the National University of Colombia, the country’s largest public university.

The Civil Sphere in Latin America
  • Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Carlo Tognato
  • Published online:
    28 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018
  • Social thinkers have criticized Latin American development as incomplete, backward, and anti-modern. This volume demonstrates that, while often deeply compromised and fragmented, Latin American civil spheres have remained resilient, institutionally and culturally, generating new oppositional movements, independent journalism, rebellious intellectuals, electoral power, and critical political parties. In widely different arenas, dissidents have employed the coruscating language of the civil sphere to pollute their oppressors in the name of justice. In the 1970s and 1980s, political thinkers heralded the resurrection of Latin American civil society, envisioning a new world of freedom and stability. Corruption, inequality, racism, and exclusion become pressing and urgent 'social problems', not despite the promises of democracy, but because of them. The premise of this volume is that Latin American civil spheres are powerful, even as they are compromised, creating challenges to anti-civil culture and institutions that trigger social reform. It is the first of three volumes that place civil sphere theory in a global context.