Plan Fund Proposal (2010-11)
Department of Political Science
Govt.College Madappally.
(1).2202-03-105-99, Faculy Development.
1.National Seminar on “Social Movements and Protest Politics in India”.
Introduction
Protest reflects the key aspect of the relationship between the state and society. State is responsible for formulating and carrying out policies for society. State may lack the resources to meet the demands and expectations of various competing social groups. That may lead to anger among some groups in the society, which can take the shape of protest movement. Protest arises from disagreement over limited issues, such as opposition to particular policies of a government, or antagonisms between groups competing for political influence.So how movement arises and how various groups participate in it is an important area of intellectual pursuit.Students of political science and teachers should have great mastery over the area so as to get a clear understanding of the society.It is so important to understand how to approach a social movement and what are basic theoretical approach to social movements.
Relevance
In democracies, we do not see a uniform pattern of popular protest movements.Some democracies experience more protest than other democracies. France hosts more protest annually than Germany does. Bangladeshis invade the streets much more than the people in Sri Lanka do. Answers to this difference may be found in their political cultures or by carefully auditing the performance of their democratic institutions. However, it is more puzzling when within the same democracy, people in some areas protest more successfully than other areas. It seems that some ordinary people, who are busy in their struggle for day-to-day survival, attain the degree of coordination and mutual awareness that they need to wage strategically effective protests, while some others fail. Some need to ask, why some groups sharing a grievance mobilize successfully while others do not in democracies? In recent years, democratisation has spread to the South and with it increasing number of social movements. The origin and outcome of these movements are being explained with the help of theoretical frameworks developed to study social actions in the North. Here, the aim is to examine the relevance of these theories to evaluate the success and failure of social movements in the developing countries.
In India at the outset, we must note that the term “non-party domain” or the “non-party political domain” is not a conceptual category that refers to any specific set of processes, movements, institutions or practices.But it is so vibrant and proliferating day by day. It is a category that has been descriptively deployed in the Indian context by a group of scholars, to refer to a series of movements and social struggles that burst forth on the scene in the 1980s, broadly speaking. In the specific sense in which this category was used by these scholars, it was meant to refer to a series of responses to problems in the formal political process that prevented the interests of a whole range of social groups and many significant issues from getting translated into the electoral calculus of party politics. Of late, the term that has gained some currency in political discourse and is being used widely to refer to a range of movement-type as well as institutional initiatives, is the notion of “civil society”. This category is increasingly used as a self description even by those groups who would have in an earlier period used the category of “non party political domain”. Even though the current use of this concept of “civil society” too is quite vague, it has at least the advantage of being used as a normative category to demarcate a sphere of non-state activities that keeps the state’s excesses in check and attempts to influence policy in the direction of greater transparency and accountability.
Seminar Themes
Social movements and protest politics,New social movements,Civil society movements,Various social movements in India
Duration of Seminar
Two days.
Estimated expenditure statements
Remuneration to resource persons-30000/-
Remuneration to participants-30000/-
Stationery and other expenses-10000/-
Food and accomodation-20000/-
Total Estimated Expenditure-90000/-
Good Attempt.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to see the title..
Protest Politics and Social Movement are independent conceptual categories that converges in many a ways. But rather than the inclusive spaces, the exclusive boundaries consumes more spaces. It is also interesting to look at the attempt to link it onto the NGOisation & Civil society space that keeps the state’s excesses in check and promotes the protest as political agency.
While presuming the article's assumption regarding the genesis of protest (disagreement over limited issues) as untenable.. is it delimiting protest as short term mobilisation?
Then questioning on theories of North.. where do you locate the theories of south.. the populist / subaltern/ identity constructions?
May be the glass we are using have different colour to look at.. But to hope to see it through the same lense..