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The emerging synthesis between nonviolent action and contentious politics studies has yielded important insights. Yet it also reproduces the dichotomy between politics and culture that continues to haunt both fields. Extending recent work by Jean-Pierre Reed and John Foran, our contribution introduces the political cultures of nonviolent opposition concept to forge a new synthesis, one that recognizes the politics of nonviolent culture and the culture of nonviolent politics. We apply our theoretical framework to two empirical cases, the Indian independence movement and the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (known as Movimento Sem Terra or MST), and conclude with ideas for further research on political cultures of nonviolent opposition.

Implicating myself in Métis scholar Natalie Clark's question “who are you and why do you care?” (2016, p. 48), this chapter traces the theorization of love in the Human Services, with a focus on the field of Child and Youth Care. I explore love as an ethical, political, and necessary force in times of ongoing colonial and state violence against Indigenous and racialized peoples (Ferguson & Toye, 2017). I go on to highlight my graduate research as a Child and Youth Care Masters student and educator, grappling with my own settler identity as a diasporic, queer, ciswoman of color, and questioning my complicity as a settler body on stolen Indigenous lands. The chapter includes vital knowledge from my research with Sisters Rising, an Indigenous-led, community-based, participatory study that uses arts-and-land-based ways of knowing to honor and uphold stories, art, and knowledge from Indigenous and racialized young peoples and communities. By tracing the reflections on decolonial love shared through Sisters Rising, I consider ways that racialized settler practitioners might engage a decolonial love ethic in praxis. Calling upon critical feminist, Indigenous, and postcolonial scholarship and brilliance, this chapter invites other settler practitioners, specifically those who identify as racialized or people of color to reckon with the intricacies of our collective complicity in notions of settler purity and apolitical practice (Shotwell, 2016). Throughout the chapter, I highlight conceptual approaches for loving politicized praxis rooted in movements toward social justice, Indigenous sovereignty-building, and decolonization.

The title of this series, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, reflects the triple foci of its volumes. These three issues that are so central to the identity of this series – social movements, conflicts, and change – are also prominent features with regard to the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. Thus we open this 27th volume of the series with three papers analyzing various aspects of Northern Ireland's civil rights movement, a social movement working for political and social change in a society marked by protracted conflict. The first paper, by Gregory Maney, innovatively analyzes the interrelationships between the Irish Republican Army's campaigns of armed violence and the nonviolent civil rights movement.

Lorenzo Bosi is currently ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Social & Political Movements of the University of Kent. His research examines social movements, political violence, as well as consolidated political identities and relations, in socio-politically polarized contexts such as Northern Ireland. He is also participating as an affiliated researcher in an international research project: The European Protest Movements since the Cold War.

The scholarship on social movements has focused attention recently on the strategic dimensions of decision-making by movement actors. Much of this work has been rooted in detailed case studies that offer useful analytical windows through which we can view the strategic choices made by individual movement organizations. As valuable as this work is in its own right, equally if not more important questions remain with regard to how the position a movement organization occupies in the broader social movement field impacts strategic decision-making of that organization and those other organizations with which it interacts. In fact, the coalition politics of a social movement is often a key variable in the degree to which a movement succeeds in its goals. Coalition conflicts and politics matter. Today's so-called anti-globalization movement, the peace movement opposing the Iraq War, and the contemporary global environmental movement with its focus on global warming each demonstrate that coalitions are important for social movements.