Editor’s Note: CPR’s Andrea S. Viejo had the opportunity to converse with Valeria Hamel, one of the spokespeople of the #YoSoy132 student movement in Mexico advocating for freedom of the press. She gave us insight into the upbringing of this movement and what it was like to organize the first independent student run presidential debate in the history of Mexico ahead of the July 1 election. Valeria is a 22-year-old law student at the Instit...
llustration by Maddy Kloss Some of the snapshots from Chile’s ongoing student movement depict a lighthearted mobilization. Led by the charismatic Camila Vallejo, the students have used Twitter and Facebook to stage kiss-a-thons and superhero-themed costume protests. But other images have been more violent. Protesters have taken to the streets and set fire to government buildings and private businesses. In return, they have been bombarded with w...
From Wikimedia Commons Given my recent fascination with student protest movements, Montréal was an obvious destination for my spring break. For the past several years now, the province of Québec has been caught in the midst of the largest student uprisings in North American history. In response to tuition hikes announced several years ago, students launched a general strike that reached its climax last spring with hundreds of thousands of peopl...
Brown Spectator: Why did you decide to pursue a violent disobedience despite the remarkable success of the non-violent protests that had taken place in the 60s, such as the Civil Rights movement? Mark Rudd: My friends and I were entranced by the heroism of Che Guevara and the Vietnamese and the Black Panthers and various people around the world who had taken up the gun to fight for freedom. We wanted to be like them. It was a losing strategy, i...
Illustration by Stephanie Mannheim Recently, the Washington Post ran an editorial by Ed Rogers called “OWS is over.” Writing that the movement “never constituted any class, or even a sub-class, to begin with,” Rogers argues, “It is possible the OWS movement will infest public space again. But they won’t be forming the core of Obama reelection rallies – or at least he hopes not. Only the most marginal Democratic officials would appear in close...
...al candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi triggered mass urban protests which startled the entire Iranian body politic, from the frustrated middle classes to the highest echelons of clerical power. The protestors—soon deemed the Green Movement—demanded free and fair elections and the expansion of basic civil liberties, rapidly becoming a unique political phenomenon unseen in 30 years. Out of the sea of these nameless thousands, Mousavi emerged under the b...
...rom Chile to Québec to Chicago. Jones believes that recent shifts in the political landscape, along with enhanced potential for collaboration between organizations, signal that activists are on the verge of a transformational movement for public education. Jones and his fellow activists are engaged in resisting what he and many others refer to as “corporate education reform,” a set of proposals for America’s schools that many mainstream politicia...
Justin Walker As democracy becomes a lifeless dream for Iranians and the Green Movement becomes a fleeting memory of a brave but futile attempt for change, there seems to be reason, backed up by the recent behavior of the international community, to look at Iran as a monolithic nuclear threat. It is one thing, though, for the Iranian nuclear threat to dominate the world’s headlines; it is quite another for this threat to eradicate or render obs...
Bill McKibben, one of the most prominent environmental activists and journalists today, has been at the forefront of the climate change movement since its inception. He wrote the first book on climate change, The End of Nature, in 1989. In 2007, he founded 350.org, an international organization committed to reducing global CO2 atmospheric concentration levels to 350 parts per million—the level scientists agree is environmentally safe. In 2009, u...
...ave stopped being capital and have become like a Styrofoam cup. You buy them cheaply, you use them up, and when you’re done, you throw them away.” The Modern Fight Against Slavery In the 1990s, the seeds of a new abolitionist movement were sown. The end of the Cold War and the drastic economic liberalization of Eastern Europe brought more visibility to the issue of human trafficking across the borders of new post-Soviet states. Pioneering academi...
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