Urban Revolt: State Power and the Rise of People's Movements in the Global South

How do individuals and organizations move beyond the boundaries of constitutional or legal constructs to challenge neoliberalism and capitalism? As major urban areas have become the principal sites of poor and working-class social upheaval in the early twenty-first century, the chapters in this book explore key cities in the Global South. Through detailed cases studies, Urban Revolt unravels the potential and limitations of urban social movements on an international level.

Trevor Ngwane: Trevor Ngwane is a scholar activist who has over the years devoted as much time to academic work as to community and political activism. He studied at the University of Fort Hare during the apartheid days for four years and did not graduate due to various “student disturbances”. He obtained his BA (Sociology and Psychology) degree through the
University of South Africa and his BA Honours (Sociology) at the University of the Witwatersrand and PhD at the University of Johannesburg (2016) For two decades he has been active in the trade unions, social movements and political organisations as an organiser and militant, a period that spanned the transition from apartheid to a democratic society. He was also involved in the international movement for social and economic justice and was active for several years in the African Social Forum, a component of the World Social Forum. In 2011 he obtained his MA at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Development Studies and is currently reading for a PhD at the University of Johannesburg where he is attached to the Research Chair for Social Change in which he is a researcher in the Rebellion of the Poor protest monitoring and database compilation project. Ngwane is currently active in the Socialist Group, Democratic Left Front and United Front, organisations that seek a pro-working class pro-poor future for South Africa and the world.

Immanuel Ness: Immanuel Ness, PhD, is professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. His research focuses on working class mobilization, Global South workers, migration, resistance and social movements. Ness is author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto, 2015); Guest Workers and Resistance to US Corporate Despotism (University of Illinois 2011) and Immigrants, Unions, and the U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press 2005). He is General Editor with Peter Bellwood of Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, 5 volumes (2013). He is finishing a book on migration and inequality in the Global South. Ness is editor of New Forms of Worker Organization (Oakland: PM Press) and co-editor with Dario Azzellini of Ours to Master and to Own: Worker Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011). He is editor of the peer-review quarterly journal, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society.

Luke Sinwell: Luke Sinwell, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa, PhD, is currently a Senior Researcher with the South African Research Chair in Social Change, University of Johannesburg. His research interests include the politics and conceptualisation of participatory development and governance, social movements and housing struggles, direct action as a method to transform power relations, ethnographic research methods and action research. Luke is the author of several chapters in books and has published in a range of academic journals. He is a co-author of Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer (Jacana 2012, Bookmarks and Ohio University Press 2013) and the co-editor of Contesting Transformation: Popular Resistance in Twenty-First Century South Africa (Pluto Press 2012).