BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Challenging the Hope Deficit
Making A Movement
By Barney Cullum
Published by Acropolis, 2023, rrp £14.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Those paying attention to world affairs today know there is something of a ‘hope’ deficit. It is with this in mind that I have chosen to review Barney’s book looking at successful movements ‘driving social change around the world’ or as he calls them, ‘the disruptors’. Each of the groups covered have limited goals and limited success, but taken together give cause for at least some hope!
In his introduction, Barney touches on the double-edged sword of hope for change versus reality, so he is not a naive optimist, which makes his book all the more beneficial. His introduction talks about Just Stop Oil, and their relatively successful early ‘nonviolent direct action’ and much more successful ‘marketing’, but also the limits imposed by changing legislation aimed at smothering people-powered lobby groups. In this case, that was Suella Braverman’s amendments to the Public Order Act of 1986. And, since the book was written, we have seen ‘Labour’ extending the reach of legislation to stop any protests they don’t like, and even ensuring police action continues despite the courts overruling the government. This is, of course, an unacceptable attack on our civil liberties, and taken alongside other extensions of policing of protest from the Thatcher era, the Criminal Justice Act of the early 90s, and Blair’s reforms after the 2000 petrol strike, gives the framework for future governments to enforce a police state clampdown on us all.
Nevertheless, amongst the weeds and cobbles there is still hope for new shoots to sprout. The trick is ‘how to achieve social change’ despite the obstacles. Barney has, as he puts it, ‘met and quizzed activists, lawyers, political scientists, campaigners, graffiti artists, anthropologists, peace-builders, hacktivists, charity directors, authors, Olympians, refugees, researchers and every other kind of change agent you can think of. For this book.’
TEN PARTS BY THEME
He takes a global approach, from Greta Thunberg, through Black Lives Matter, to Greek refugee NGOs and reconciliation activists in the Sahal. The book is divided by theme into ten parts. The first addresses environmentalist groups, such as Extinction Rebellion and Freetown Christiania; the second, race-related activism and education. In part three, Barney looks at issues around abortion law in Turkey and in Ireland, and the social movements fighting for justice during Brazil’s ‘Zika crisis’. The fourth part is ‘Health and Healing – Creative Confrontation’, and touches on mental health politics, drug legalisation, and the ‘wall museum’ in Palestine – the latter is especially poignant given the genocidal war that has no doubt destroyed such initiatives since.
In the fifth section Barney looks at legal roots to change in Spain; Mary Hwyere’s ‘International Alert’ group, building peace by confronting trauma in the Sahal; and the Columbian peace accords. Parts six and seven cover the fightback against censorship and repression in Albania, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Turkey. Part eight takes on hacktivism in Iran and resistance to internet control in Ethiopia. This latter has global importance today. At the time of writing, Barney records that ‘whilst there have been policies restricting access to the internet across the world, they had arguably never been attempted on the scale seen in Ethiopia’ in 2016. Attempts to control access to Facebook, YouTube and ‘X’ have since become ubiquitous from China to here in the UK; banning VPNs to those without digital proof of identity; the ‘great firewall of China’ that former Hastings MP Amber Rudd advocated for copying in Britain, and that Starmer gives every sign of also wishing to perpetrate, all seek to censor and control dissent. As with the clampdown on protest in the streets, this adds to an arsenal of dubious control that is just begging for a paranoid extremist future government to misuse even more blatantly than today. Analysing successful methods of resisting this is imperative.
Part nine looks at refugees and asylum seekers, in the face of state attempts to effectively criminalise NGOs seeking to help them. Speaking of Greek attempts to shut down humanitarian support, Ellim Xenou of charity ‘Doctors of the World’ states that ‘the new asylum law and the defaming and blaming of NGOs… they are all different pieces of the same puzzle that is to make refugees and migrants lives unbearable so as not to create a pull factor for more to come to Europe. [Yet] ethnocentric policies may add a challenge – a barrier – but you don’t put an end to the people’s hope for a future, for a better life, for peace this way.’ The last chapter in part nine addresses women’s rights in sports in Qatar.
The last part looks at the role of Human Rights Watch and Legal Agenda in Lebanon, and the relative success at the time Barney was writing of anti-corruption protests in Israel, which, like Just Stop Oil here, used non-violent direct action in the form of roadblocks. Sadly, the military events that have taken place since 2023 will have negated any successes. Then Barney looks at anti-Beijing activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with the activist collective Scholarism, and the ‘Umbrella Movement’.
Barney is not unrealistic about the limits of these activist and legalist movements, but sees them as demonstrating ‘the imagination, independent thought and optimism fundamental to all social change movements’, the importance of international links, and of solidarity and ‘shared leadership’. Activism for positive change is a ‘permanent revolution’, with a step forward here and a step back there, but the green shoots persist. To quote Galaxy Quest, “Never give up, never surrender!”
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