ABSTRACT
Introduction This book sets out to answer a difficult question about life in the late twentieth century. While people’s lives continue to be mainly circumscribed by the localities in which they live and work, can they exert an influence on the fate of those places given that so much their destiny is increasingly controlled by global political and economic forces? The most important version of this question in the 1980s has concerned prospects of survival in the face of a second Cold War between the USA and USSR. This threatened to heat up into the most dangerous conflict possible on more than one occasion in the past decade as the two superpowers struggled to gain advantage in the balance of military and political power. Such was the popular alarm at these posturings that new kinds of social movement, such as the Women’s Peace Protest in Britain, the Nuclear Freeze campaign in the USA, and European Nuclear Disarmament (END), came into existence to join rejuvenated movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).These movements are not, in the sense of this book, local in their scope, though they would not exist in practical terms without often very strong local or regional organizational bases. Indeed, one of the issues which is addressed in subsequent chapters is why social protest campaigns such as the Peace Movement or the Women’s Movement are stronger in some localities than others and whether such spatial variation is explicable in general terms. Are there, in other words, locally rooted social processes capable of projecting the interests of locality members well beyond the local political arena, and what might those processes be? Moreover, why should some localities be good at mobilizing local interests and others more acquiescent towards the outside world? Why is the evenly spread presence of democratic rights unevenly acted upon? Why do some issues anger people in certain localities more than people in others, and why do
Figure 1.1 The seven study localities.
