Latin Americanism was a topic of intense intellectual scrutiny and political and social activism at the turn of the twentieth century. The rise of the United States as a global power triggered a wide range of debates on the idea present and future of Latin America as an integrated historical and cultural entity. By exploring the work of José Martí and José E. Rodó, who imagined Latin Americanism within the limits of the pedagogical sphere, as well as contributions of Manuel Ugarte and the leaders of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), who attempted to transform it into a militant movement connected to politics on the streets, this chapter shows both the possibilities and limitations of a university-based reformist project in constant search of expanding its social bases and institutional support. Issues of gender bias, language dominance, and ethnic hierarchies are at the center of this discussion about the challenges that Latin Americanism has faced over time.

“Popular Culture and Politics” seek to understand the influential force of popular culture, which can be optimized and utilized to transform the country’s sociopolitical future. As a social institution that arose from the forces of colonization, popular culture has a specific social role to play in that process. Characterized with an elastic capacity to instigate social ideas, popular culture in Nigeria can be used to bring about transformational changes and revolutionary thinking that can shape the Nigerian environment. Although the general belief is that popular culture serves as entertainment with no significant social benefits, that is not entirely the case. This study reveals the existing interconnection between politics and popular culture, highlighting the significance and the different approaches that can actively target a better Nigerian future through popular culture. Nigerian popular culture can use its transformational capacity to inspire desirable changes in the country’s political trajectory. It can be seen beyond its traditional role of entertainment, where it currently receives minimal national recognition. When the people who create cultural materials understand the power that they wield as a social institution, and when they use that power objectively, they can enact a revolution without violence.

“Reformist Option: Grassroots and Political Activism” situates grassroots or community power as the locus of the democratic essence. Through these parts, it engages the narrative of Nigeria focusing on the existing grassroots structures and their formation; it suggests how grassroots efforts can work in a global comparative context while identifying possible ways to move the country forward as it is a mobilizing tool operating from a bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down one, to implement policies, effect change, and drive development. A combination of poor education, repression from the military years, and the unconscious perception that politicians are untouchable prevent the people from revolting against poor governance. These, coupled with factors like corruption, ambiguous division of power, citizen apathy, and political patronage systems have turned the beneficial concept of grassroots governance on its head, and benefits to the citizens are severely limited. However, through participative governance, the citizenry can be empowered and re-energized to make active commitments and contributions toward achieving collective growth and sustainable development. This active political engagement helps to emphatically reject poor governance, which would allow disciplined and visionary leaders, and an active and involved populace, to work together for relevant socioeconomic projects that improve the country's indices in all sectors and improve the welfare of its citizens.

The Conclusion draws together the most important arguments arising from the preceding chapters and offers a commentary on the methodological and historiographical implications of the book for our understanding of popular Conservatism, and popular politics more broadly, in twentieth-century Britain. It highlights three phenomena that shaped the character of inter-war Conservatism. The first is the fact that party activists saw the task of cultivating the new electorate in resolutely local terms, reflecting their abiding commitment to pre-war conceptions of popular Conservatism and how it operated. The second is the role that voters’ material interests played in shaping activists’ understanding of representative politics; the methodological point here being that the agency of local activists, hitherto emphasized in the wake of the ‘linguistic turn’, was circumscribed by existing and inescapable agendas defined by trade, employment, economic prosperity, living standards and amenities. The third phenomenon is the growing significance of modern central government to the enterprise of popular politics between the wars: electoral strategies in the constituencies rested on the assumption that living standards could be successfully managed by government initiative. The chapter concludes by exploring how the Conservatism of the 1930s therefore fostered a programmatic, activist culture of government that did much to foreshadow the statist turn of British politics in the 1940s and 1950s.

Chapter 3 retraces the development of ethics expertise both in domestic contexts and in global governance arenas. It goes back to the first debates on the need to include a social and ethical assessment of science of technology in the late 1970s in the UnitedStates, in the context of new social challenges presented by technological innovations (such as organ transplantation), the publicising of several instances of bad practices on the part of medical professionals, and risks which arose when molecular biologists discovered they could create DNA sequences in the laboratory that did not naturally exist. In this context, isolated scientists and politicians, theologians and groups of engaged citizens felt the need to regulate medical and scientific activities.But while concerns over the ethics of medicine and science were initially voiced as a strong critique, bioethics eventually took the form of a new expert discourse, which became entangled with politics. This genealogy of the emergence of the notion of bioethical expertise is key to understanding the function payed by such experts in policymaking today.

The local organizational life of political parties displays notable variation that merits systematic examination. The purpose of this chapter is to document the divergent trajectories of subnational organizational units, providing the basis for the subsequent analysis of developmental variation. The first section analyzes the basic characteristics of all local party organizations the Golden Dawn (GD) set up, laying the groundwork for the subsequent analysis of variation in their organizational evolution. The second section provides insights into local organizational life by analyzing the range of activities they have undertaken over a period of twenty-three years. The third section uses these data to show the distinct trajectories of the various local units of the GD and analyze variation in organizational outcomes. It first presents evidence regarding the degree of continuity these local structures display bringing to the surface cases of organizational persistence and fatality. It then delves deeper into the organizational life of local party branches and presents data regarding their activism.

This chapter borrows insights from the extant literature on the far right and the broader literatures on political parties, social movements and militant democracy to develop a theory of local party development. It explicates a theoretical framework examining how endogenous and environmental factors shape the development of extremist right-wing party organizations, at the national and, more importantly, at the subnational level. It first looks at how internal party characteristics shape the capacity of extremist right-wing parties to grow roots in local societies. It then focuses on environmental factors: it examines how electoral, institutional and societal factors affect local party trajectories.