Anonymous Comrade submits:

Contemporary Anti-War Mobilizations

Agonistic Engagement Within Social Movement Networks

A two-day workshop to be held in Corfu, Greece, November 6-7, 2003

The network perspective is often discussed in relation to social movements
and collective action. Key elements of the latter, such as actors,
agencies, organizations, institutions etc. witnessing, participating,
confronting or allying with social movements, can be studied in their
networked entanglements -- consensual or conflictual, deliberative or
agonistic -- at any level of collective action -- local, national or global.This international workshop seeks to explore a particular form of
contemporary social movements: anti-war mobilizations and peace movements,
increasingly connected with networked forms of collective action in the
era of globalization. In particular, we seek papers addressing one or more
of the following questions:

* How are national, subnational and transnational mobilizations
articulated to each other specially when they put forward distant issues
an in the case of the contemporary anti-war movements?

* What sort of networked patterns or organizational forms emerge from such
movements and how these expanded network structures are configuring or are
configured within broader political processes and global information
flows?

* Do the recent episodes of anti-war collective action cluster in emerging
cycles and waves of protest? Is their diffusion affected by the geographic
scale or on any other underlying heterogeneities?

* What kind of data or/and ethnomethodological work could properly map the
anti-war movement?

* What sort of causal models or agent-based simulations of evolving
dynamic and self-organizing networks could describe the dynamics of these
mobilizations?

* How do policies and politics over anti-war mobilizations relate to each
other? What is the response of the authorities or the state to this type
of contentious action? What is the interaction between anti-war protest
and repression?

* How is globalization connected with the upsurge of global terrorism
together with many other types of violence (state, racial, ethnic,
cultural or gender-based)?

* How do the modern states of emergency and risk society react against the
threads or accidents of network vulnerabilities, failures or collapses?

* Could modern movements as global anti-war protests be viewed as a
particular instance of reflexive remodernization?

* How public deliberation and pluralist democracy can foster inside the
radical agonistics against globalization?

* Can the democratization of science or the idea that 'another science is
possible' be advanced and sustained within these mobilizations?

The Workshop will be organized by Dr Iosif Botetzagias
(iosif_botetzagias@yahoo.co.uk) and Prof Moses Boudourides
(mboudour@upatras.gr), University of Patras, Greece. There are no
registration fees and delegates interested in participating will soon
receive information about hotels in Corfu and traveling within Greece.

Abstracts up to 250 words should be sent by email to one of the organizers
by July 15, 2003.