IAS Grant Updates

Brian Tokar's anthology, Engineering Life: A People's Guide to Biotechnology, is finished and will be published by Zed Books in Fall 2000. Brian Tokar and Zoe Erwin were awarded $1000 in June 1997.

Lucien Van der Walt's project, Anarchism and Revolutionary Syndicalism in South Africa 1904-1921, has essentially been completed. He will be expanding upon the original research and will focus on the impact of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism on broader social movements, with particular reference to nationalist and labor movements. The material is to become part of his Ph.D. thesis, which he is pursuing at the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa. He was awarded $500 in June 1998.

Fernando López's research into his project The FACA and the Anarchist Movement in Argentina, has produced interesting material on a congress held by anarchists at prison in Villa Devoto, Argentina, in 1931, and about the level of violence and sectarianism between the militants of the Argentinian anarchism movement from 1925 to 1930. Incidents include violent encounters between groups such as the anarchist "foristas"  and a rival anarchosyndicalism organization, the Unión Sindical Argentina. The violence and sectarianism caused individual members of groups to be attacked. Incidents include the murder of López Arango, editor of the magazine La Protesta and Jacobo Prince, a writer whose article appeared in the publication Pampa Libre and angered someone enough to shoot him in the back. López continues his research at various Latin American archives. He was awarded $2200 in June 1999. 

Patricia Green's piece, Federica Montseny: The Woman and the Ideal/La Mujer y El Ideal, continues to take shape. Parts of the material appeared in an article on "Turn of the Century Spanish Utopian Short Fiction", published in Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, 133, 1999. She will also be submitting a study on Federica Montseny's novel HEROINAS to the Brazilian journal Cadernos do Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth.  Greene expects to complete most of her project sometime this spring.  She was awarded $900 in June 1998.

C.W. Brown has completed a draft of his piece, Vanguards of the Crusaders; The American Radical Right, Liberal Ideology, and the New World Order. Brown shows how an American moralism is the basis for both  liberalism and right wing conservatism and subsequently leads to disturbingly similar conclusions. He also shows how American policy reflects and encourages a New World Order grounded in an antidemocratic Christian ethos by using the example of the Persian Gulf War. At the same time he looks at how anarchism may or may not escape from this American moralism. Finally, Brown intends to explore the anarchist approach to democracy and how this can offer a substantive alternative. He was awarded $800 in June 1997.  

Joe Lowndes is still working on his piece "Anarchism and the Rise of Rightwing Anti-Statism." In particular, he is focusing on the potential of left-democratic localism as a response to right wing devolution in the US. He was awarded $1000 in June 1998.