Part of a ‘New Politics'

In first part of this book, I charted the development of community organizing in the United States and the United Kingdom. I now turn from ‘Experience’ to ‘Analysis’ as I bring community organizing into a critical dialogue with examples of the extra-institutional political activism that has become increasingly significant in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Over the last decade the Internet has increasingly provided a globally accessible forum for the ‘new politics’. During the late 1990s the Mexican resistance movement the Zapatistas began to illustrate the potential of the Internet as a tool for social movement politics. ¹ The use of texting and social media such as Twitter in the 2009 protests about the Iranian presidential elections, in demonstrations against rises in student tuition fees in the United Kingdom in 2011, as a tool in the initial months of the Arab Spring across North Africa and parts of the Middle East from 2010 to 2012 and the Occupy movement since 2011and the sharing of a YouTube video protesting against Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda (viewed almost ninety million times in 2012) have further demonstrated the dispersed political power of the Internet. Is this a ‘new politics’ for a ‘Facebook generation’? ² Although in the United Kingdom and the United States active engagement in formalised political processes has declined in recent decades, the claim that politics has withered on the vine needs to be considered afresh. ³