This chapter introduces a self-development theory of the nonprofit sector, informed by alternative development and basic-needs theory. The theory presented in this chapter suggests that nonprofit law plays a role in creating a legal framework that allows people to participate in the improvement of their own lives and communities through self-development. With a nonprofit-friendly legal environment in place, individuals have greater economic incentive to work within their own communities to create organizations that help individuals, families, and communities to meet their own needs. This paradigm stands in contrast to views of nonprofit organizations as facilitators of rescuing behavior, in which one group of people seeks to uplift another. Based on cases in Nigeria and South Africa, this paper describes the role and importance of nonprofits in facilitating the development of individuals, institutions, and communities from within.

This chapter examines the petition system in the early People’s Republic of China. While the state’s policies related to “handling letters and visits from the people” were in some ways a continuation of long-standing traditions, this chapter argues that Maoist political culture reshaped letters-and-visits work in revolutionary ways. Interacting with the people by answering their letters and talking with them in government reception offices were two of the concrete tasks associated with the implementation of the Communist Party’s most fundamental governance strategy, the mass line. Work with letters and visits was one of the instruments Party leaders themselves used to observe and gauge the nature and success of their mass-line work. Documents from this endeavor certainly show that the people’s views were not consistently represented in political discourse and that mass-line rhetoric did sometimes aid Party Central in its more authoritarian endeavors. However, the history of letters and visits also reveals that the early PRC state was never able to fully realize the potential of petitions as a surveillance tool. At the same time, the central importance of mass-line discourse gave both rhetorical and practical power to ordinary people, in ways that had marked effects on state and society.

This chapter mainly discusses the process of Shanghai evacuating a large number of urban population from the city in the early days of the founding of the people’s Republic of China by sending “refugees” and “victims” home, mobilizing farmers to return home for production, and calling on urban residents to migrate and reclaim wasteland, and changing their identity into farmers through land reform, joining co-operatives or establishing collective farms.The Communist Party of China reduces the urban population and consumption through these methods, aiming to realize the strategy of industrialization as soon as possible and build a strong socialist country.

This chapter focuses on struggles to dwell in the city that characterised a strand of both racist practice and responses to it.From attempts to purchase collectively housing to the rarely told stories of organised squatting and the emergence of the black housing movement, the forces of racist exclusion produced a Newtonian response; collective endeavours to claim the right to find somewhere to live in the cities of post-war Britain. These social movements racialised both the claim to dwell in the city and the challenges to patterns of discrimination. But the struggles which emerged from the grassroots and grew over the 1970s and 1980s also in some ways ran their course over time for reasons that are also considered in this chapter.

This chapter taks Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s re-approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in 2019 as a starting point to understand the productive tensions between hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, and grassroots political formations. On the same day Trudeau re-approved the pipeline, a stunning display of counter-hegemonic solidarity occurred, as representatives from the Tsliel-Waututh, Squamish, and Musqueam nations, alongside elected officials from the City of Vancouver and the Grand Chief of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, redoubled their commitment to protecting their shared coastal ecosystem. Days later there was yet another display of resistance to Trudeau’s policies: this time in the form of a 20 km march, at the head of which was a Tiny House. Destined for Secwepemcul’ecw, in the interior of British Columbia, this Tiny House was pulled by a coalition of grassroots Indigenous leaders and settlers. Placing these tactics into relief alongside one another reveals the remarkable diversity of anti-imperialist struggles at work today and shows the possibilities of collective liberation that emerge through committed internationalism grounded in local struggle.

Chapter 4 begins with an in-depth process tracing of the decisions around political party formation in Egypt after Mubarak’s ouster. We revisit the puzzling variation in party formation across the Egyptian political opposition landscape, particularly examining the decision on the part of Egyptian organized labor and pro-reform activist groups not to form political parties, tracing the link between the structure of the opposition under the Mubarak regime to the strategic incentives and organizational constraints faced by groups at this juncture. We then conduct an in-depth within-case comparison of the mobilization prior to Egypt’s 2011 elections, utilizing granular data on political parties’ specific campaign strategies and methods to trace the link between the adaptations that various groups made during the Mubarak era to the relative organizational and persuasive resources political groups had, and the mobilization tactics and strategies they were then able to use. We also specifically examine compelling evidence for common alternatives or contributing explanations for the Muslim Brotherhood’s success, and show that while these explanations certainly fill in part of the picture, they are incomplete without an understanding of mechanisms linking authoritarian legacies to the 2011 elections.

Chapter 5 expands the tracing of the theorized causal mechanisms beyond Egypt to see how far these mechanisms travel and if they operate in the same way across other cases of founding elections. Each case comparison begins with an analysis of the processes of party formation, linking the political opportunity structure of the authoritarian era to the contours of the ideological landscape and the strategic incentives facing different groups at this juncture. Each case then examines the evidence for the mechanisms linking the authoritarian era political opportunity structure to the organizational and persuasive resources available to each political group and their ability to use different mobilization tactics. As in Egypt, opposition groups that were excluded from electoral participation possess similar organizational and symbolic resources and thus are able to use more effective voter mobilization tactics than other political groups, resulting in their electoral success. The accounts find evidence for this causal chain in Tunisia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Zambia, but the mechanism operates differently in the case of Brazil, offering useful insight into the scope conditions under which the mechanisms theorized in the Egypt case operate elsewhere.

Varieties of English used as second or additional languages have received an enormous amount of attention in the past decades, particularly following Kachru’s pioneering work on Indian English. The sociolinguistics and the linguistic features of these Englishes have been described extensively, and corpora such as the International Corpus of English or the Global Corpus of Web-based English allow their linguistic comparison. Most descriptions and corpora are based on what have been called “educated” speakers – individuals who have successfully completed secondary education, often the elites of their various countries. However, many users of English today do not belong to societal elites but often to disadvantaged communities; frequently, they have acquired English with limited or no access to formal instruction. This chapter describes the uses and processes that can be observed with these individuals. Drawing on examples from, for instance, working-class citizens in Sweden, refugees in Europe, taxi drivers and informal traders in South Africa and Uganda, and domestic help in Hong Kong, it describes the histories and sociolinguistics of the spread of English at the grassroots of societies.