Transnational Roots of the Civil Rights Movement - by Sean Chabot (Paperback)

About the Book

This book explores collective learning in the Gandhian repertoire's transnational diffusion from the Indian independence movement to the American civil rights movement. Instead of focusing primarily on interpersonal linkages or causal mechanisms, it highlights how decades of ...

Book Synopsis

This book explores collective learning in the Gandhian repertoire's transnational diffusion from the Indian independence movement to the American civil rights movement. Instead of focusing primarily on interpersonal linkages or causal mechanisms, it highlights how decades of translation and experimentation by various actors enabled full implementation. It also shows that transnational diffusion was not a linear and predictable process, but underwent numerous twists and turns. It is relevant for contemporary scholars as well as activists.

Review Quotes

More theoretically sophisticated than existing historical accounts of the adoption of Gandhian non-violence by black civil rights leaders and far richer historically than most sociological accounts of the diffusion of movement tactics, Chabot has written the best book to date on the "transnational roots of the Civil Rights Movement." A welcome addition to both social movement studies and the historiography of the "long" civil rights movement.

Sean Chabot's book describes and analyzes the decades of collective struggle that produced the Gandhian approach to nonviolent resistance in the American civil rights movements, and the decades of collective learning that enabled African Americans to apply this approach. For an understanding of how innovative protest methods travel between social movements as different and distant as the Indian independence movement and American civil rights movement, scholars and activists could not do better than to read this book.

About the Author

Sean Chabot is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Eastern Washington University.