A well-researched and insightful guide to building long-lasting coalitions.
Dwidar, an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, presents a detailed examination of intersectional advocacy in society and the workplace.
In her nonfiction debut, the author studies the structures and workings of advocacy groups dedicated to intersectional social justice, concentrating on both the importance coalition-building and its challenges. Her studies indicate that building bonds between allied social justice organizations significantly increases their influence. However, she warns that research shows that coalition-building, while effective, isn’t the only key to long-term success, as the coalitions themselves, and not just their constituent groups, must have clearly demarcated structures; they must be crystal-clear on questions such as: “Who decides what? Who contributes what? and Who gets what?” This kind of clarity lends itself to what Dwidar views as one of the main priorities of social justice organizations: securing funding. In a densely packed and extensively researched series of chapters, complete with charts and graphs, she effectively offers three basic rules for such coalitions: Develop a clear architecture of decision-making (“you should have difficult conversations about who is in the coalition and who is in charge of it”); include diverse groups in any coalition, despite the risks of altering the balance of power sharing; and commit to longer-term, “less restrictive” funding. The main strength of Dwidar’s book is its extensive grounding in data and research, rather than anecdotes, but a great secondary strength is the author’s willingness to acknowledge how advocacy groups can be distracted by counterproductive infighting. As such, members of such coalitions are sure to find her conclusions to be enlightening.
A well-researched and insightful guide to building long-lasting coalitions.Pub Date: June 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780226840383
Page Count: 225
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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