Strategies for Systemic Change:Youth Community Organizing to Disruptthe School-to-Prison Nexus

The school disciplinary landscape across the United States changed significantly through the enactment of policies that criminalize students’ behaviors during the 1990s and 2000s. Schools began to involve the police and criminal legal system in school disciplinary issues that used to be handled by school administrators. This shift led youth of Color1 to increasingly come into contact with the juvenile legal system through school suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to alternative schools—what we characterize as the school-toprison nexus. Conceptualizing the school-to-prison pipeline as a nexus, or interlocking system of power over youth, allows us to understand how the criminalization of youth is a systemic problem that demands structural change and interventions across multiple levels of analysis and settings, including local schools, school districts, police departments, and state policies. Although important research has documented the ways that Black and Latino youth are referred to the juvenile legal system through punitive school policies, there has been less attention to the actions youth are taking to critique and dismantle these policies. Youth community organizing (YCO) against the school-to-prison nexus represents an arena of youth activism that deserves further attention and analysis. In this chapter, we define YCO as groups that create spaces for young people to think critically about their everyday social conditions, identify root causes of social problems, and build political power and voice to create policy solutions and change in their communities (Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006; Kirshner, 2015; Watts, Griffith, & Abdul- Adil, 1999)

Guest Editors' Introduction II: reflections on scholarship and activism in Canada and Ireland

No abstract

Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics 179:Activism, separation of powers and development

We consider a model of constitutional (mechanism) design with separation of powers where different institutions are assigned different tasks. In this context, we define activism as an institution extending its mechanism of decision-making into the domain of other institution’s tasks. When members of the institutions are likely to be benevolent as well as non-benevolent, such activism in a limited form reduces the cost of achieving collusion-proofness and raises welfare. Hence the value of such activism can be potentially very high in the context of developing economies. But as the fraction of non-benevolent member increases, such activism turns excessive and reduces welfare. It is argued that developing economies are likely to get caught in the excessive activism trap because of the high levels of corruption and bribery

Transnational NGOs between Popular Uprising and Authoritarian Regime: Developments in Egypt

Scholars differentiate the concepts of internationalism and transnationalism. While the first refers to the connectivity between macro institutions such as states, multinational corporations and other institutionalized actors within and beyond national boundaries, the second term emphasizes public movements, organizations and communities engaged in de-territorialized socio‐cultural, political and economic activities. This paper focuses on the role of transnational NGOs (TNGOs) in recent developments in Egypt. The current scholarly debate on the so‐called “Arab spring” considers the mobilization of disempowered youth, intense media-tech application and sustained international pressure as crucial to ousting authoritarian regimes in North Africa. Delineating the role of TNGOs complements such findings. TNGO activities and responses to the Egyptian uprising in 2011 and to the ensuing coup in 2013 reveal the capability of such organizations to balance civic transformational oriented mobilizations with state centred institutional considerations. Furthermore though TNGOs cannot directly change the current political stalemate in Egypt, the power elite might misinterpret the changing and sometimes contradictory positions of these organizations and might eventually encourage the return to authoritarianism. After introductory remarks on the background of the uprising, the paper proceeds to theoretical discussion of transnational engagement followed by recent historical and current empirical developments