Dissent Archives

The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil

Rather than looking back into Brazil’s authoritarian past, the Bolsonaro administration (2019–2022) provides an innovative case study through which to explore Brazil’s manifold and recurring expressions of authoritarianism. This book investigates the ways that authoritarianism most recently emerged and how it was confronted, and, in doing so, the varied ways (and spaces) in which struggles over the meaning and practice of democracy that took place during the period.

The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil examines repression and dissent: efforts to dismantle democratic foundations alongside forms of contestation and resistance to authoritarianism. The chapters offer valuable theoretical and ethnographic insights, from interdisciplinary perspectives, into the complex realities that Brazilians experienced in the four years of Bolsonaro’s presidency. The book is organised around four sections, each addressing a core area where democracy, as meaning and practice, was contested, attacked and defended. This is shown not only between Bolsonaro’s government and those who resisted it from within and outside the state, but also between state and non-state actors and between public and private sectors, allowing for a broad view of the country’s polarised political landscape and the impact such struggles have had on civil society.

The Intimate Life of Dissent

The Intimate Life of Dissent examines the meanings and implications of public acts of dissent, drawing on examples from ethnography and history. Acts of dissent are never simply just about abstract principles, but also come at great personal risk to both the dissidents and to those close to them. Dissent is, therefore, embedded in deep, complex and sometimes contradictory intimate relations. This book puts acts of high principle back into the personal relations out of which they emerge and take effect, raising new questions about the relationship between intimacy and political commitment. It does so through an introduction and eight individual chapters, drawing on examples including Sri Lankan leftists, Soviet dissidents, Tibetan exiles, Kurdish prisoners, British pacifists, Indonesian student activists and Jewish peace activists.

The Intimate Life of Dissent will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers of anthropology, history, political theory and sociology. Written in a clear and accessible style, it is also suitable for teaching introductory undergraduate courses on political anthropology.

Church Courts and the People in Seventeenth-Century England

Religion meant far more in early modern England than church on Sundays, a baptism, a funeral or a wedding ceremony. The Church was fully enmeshed in the everyday lives of the people; in particular, their morals and religious observance. The Church imposed comprehensive regulations on its flock, and it employed an army of informers and bureaucrats, headed by a diocesan chancellor, to enable its courts to enforce the rules. Church courts lay, thus, at the very intersection of Church and people.

The courts of the seventeenth century – when ‘a cyclonic shattering’ produced a ‘great overturning of everything in England’ – have, surprisingly, had to wait until now for scrutiny. Church Courts and the People in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed survey of three dioceses across the whole of the century, examining key aspects such as attendance at court, completion of business and, crucially, the scale of guilt to test the performance of the courts.

While the study will capture the interest of lawyers to clergymen, or from local historians to sociologists, its primary appeal will be to researchers in the field of Church history. For students and researchers of the seventeenth century, it provides a full account of court operations, measuring the extent of control, challenging orthodoxies about excommunication, penance and juries, contextualising ecclesiastical justice within major societal issues of the times and, ultimately, presents powerful evidence for a ‘church in danger’ by the end of the century.