Search Term: riots

Ahmed Ben Bella

Ahmed Ben Bella was born in Marnia, near the Algerian-Moroccan border, although some doubt remains about whether the year of his birth was 1916 or 1918. One of five brothers of a farmer, in sociological terms Ben Bella’s family was part of the countryside elite that had been impoverished by French colonialism. From these rural roots Ben Bella rose to become the first post-Independence President of Algeria in 1963 and, until his overthrow in June 1965, one of the most famous leaders of the third world revolutionary movement that took off across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi Flees the Country

This Day in World History
In the mid-1970s, few rulers seemed more secure than Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. He had oil wealth, a powerful military, and the friendship of the United States and other western nations. Yet on January 16, 1979, he and his family were forced to flee. What toppled this powerful ruler?

Algeria’s televised coup d’état

By Martin Evans
On 11 January 1992 the Algerian President, the white-haired sixty-one year old Chadli Bendjedid, announced live on television that he was standing down as head of state with immediate effect. Nervous and ill at ease, the president read out a brief prepared statement. In it he explained his decision as a necessary one. Why? Because the democratic process which he had put in place two years earlier could no longer guarantee law and order on the streets.

Hagia Sophia consecrated

This Day in World History
Impatient, the Emperor Justinian did not wait for the arrival of Menas, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church. Rather than entering the new cathedral jointly with the religious leader, he went in alone. Dazzled by the beauty of his structure, particularly its massive dome with a 105-foot diameter—meant to echo the vault of heaven—circled by forty windows at the base, the emperor is said to have proclaimed that he had outdone Solomon, builder of the famous temple of Jerusalem more than a thousand years before.

Women, sex, and the anonymous changers of history

Women were not liberated in legislatures, claims Leif Jerram, but liberated themselves in factories, homes, nightclubs, and shops. Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini made themselves powerful by making cities ungovernable with riots rampaging through streets, bars occupied one-by-one. New forms of privacy and isolation were not simply a by-product of prosperity, but because people planned new ways of living, new forms of housing in suburbs and estates across the continent. Our proudest cultural achievements lie not in our galleries or state theatres, but in our suburban TV sets, the dance halls, pop music played in garages, and hip hop sung on our estates.

Ian Fleming and American intelligence (Part 1)

By Nicholas Rankin
On 15 May 1941, two Englishmen flew from London to Lisbon, at the start of a ten-day wartime journey to New York City. Though they wore civilian clothes they were, in fact, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming RNVR, the future author of the James Bond novels. What followed was to change American intelligence forever.

198 methods of nonviolent action

In light of the growing momentum of Occupy Wall Street and the international riots this summer, we’ve decided to share the following excerpt from Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts. These 198 methods of nonviolent action have all been used in historical instances of nonviolent struggle. Without doubt, a large number of additional methods have already been used but have not been classified

Everything you ever wanted to know about Prohibition

Prohibition, or “the Noble Experiment,” refers to the period between 1919 and 1933 when the sale, manufacture, and distribution of alcohol were illegal in the United States. Although it may have lasted only 14 years, Prohibition was the culmination of decades of protest and lobbying and has ramifications that are still felt today. It remains the focal point of the ongoing debate surrounding the potential dangers and benefits of alcohol and people’s right to drink as they please.

Why labor warms to the Wall Street protests

By Joseph McCartin
As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement gathers momentum in New York and around the country, one of its most interesting features has been the growing number of union members at the protests. For understandable reasons, unions have traditionally avoided close involvement with demonstrations as spontaneous as OWS.

What Occupy Wall Street stands for

By Elvin Lim
To understand the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is helpful to understand that it is the antithesis of the Tea Party movement, though for now, much smaller in scale. Occupy Wall Street protesters are, like the Tea Party protesters, disenchanted at the state of the economy, and impatient for solutions. But unlike their compatriots on the Right, their animus is directed at corporate America (Wall Street), not at government (Washington, DC).

Monumental decisions

By Margot Minardi
The new Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial in Washington, DC, attracted criticism from an unlikely corner recently when poet Maya Angelou complained that one of the inscriptions made the civil rights leader seem like an “arrogant twit.” In a sermon on “The Drum Major Instinct,” delivered two months before

Memo from Manhattan: Eye of the storm

By Sharon Zukin
Everyone knows by now that Tropical Storm Irene, which blew through the East Coast last weekend, flooded the beaches, suburbs and some inland towns but did little lasting damage in New York City. I have seldom felt so lucky to live on a high floor with no river view and on a street with very few trees.

Making an example of rioters

By Susan Easton
In the wake of the recent riots, much attention has been given to the causes of the riots but an issue now at the forefront of press and public concern is the level of punishment being meted out to those convicted of riot-related offences. Reports of first offenders being convicted and imprisoned for thefts of items of small value have raised questions about the purposes of sentencing, the problems of giving exemplary sentences and of inconsistency, as well as the issue of political pressure on sentencers.

Phantom states and rebels with a cause

By Daniel Byman and Charles King Three years ago this month, Russia and Georgia fought a brief and brutal war over an obscure slice of mountainous land called South Ossetia that had declared its independence from Georgia. Flouting international law, Russia stepped in to defend South Ossetia and later formally recognized the secessionists as a […]

The deep wound

By Nigel Young

Rioting in English cities can be written off as the same mindless looting and burning that spread in US cities such as Los Angeles in the past. (I’m reminded of the 1965 Watts riots.) But then as now, context is everything. In a simplistic analysis, a feral elite has bred a “feral” urban mob in a classic, centuries-old repetition of patterns of social discontent, bubbling to the surface in a sudden expression of blind undirected rage. The young, the jobless and the marginal, in particular, sense at least their displacement and invisibility.

Feral capitalism hits the streets

By David Harvey

“Nihilistic and feral teenagers” the Daily Mail called them: the crazy youths from all walks of life who raced around the streets mindlessly and desperately hurling bricks, stones and bottles at the cops while looting here and setting bonfires there, leading the authorities on a merry chase of catch-as-catch-can as they tweeted their way from one strategic target to another.