Neighborhood associations are geographically bound, grassroots organizations that rely on volunteer membership and direct participation to identify and address issues within their neighborhood. Often these groups serve as intermediaries between residents and local decision-makers, such as government officials, developers and business owners, and providers of public goods and services. As a case example, we describe the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP), launched in 1990. The NRP is a notable long-standing attempt to bolster the role of neighborhood associations in municipal governance. It demonstrates many of the potential benefits as well as the challenges of neighborhood associations as vehicles for locally scaled democracy. After this, we examine dynamics of community power and empowerment processes in neighborhood associations and make recommendations for practice and future research.

This chapter looks at the impact of the American Revolution and its war on both Britain and Ireland. Its central concern is to explore whether Britain and Ireland can be incorporated in the Atlantic Revolution thesis, first advanced by Robert Palmer, which suggests the migration of revolutionary impulses eastwards. The argument developed here lays less emphasis on the inspiration provided by the democratic ideas associated with the American Revolution than on the importance of British military setbacks and ultimate defeat in the War of American Independence. It also highlights domestic and wider imperial influences on reform within Britain and Ireland, which also seem to have played a more significant role than the democratic tendencies of the American Revolution. By no means all the different reform programs and proposals in Britain and Ireland envisaged movement in a democratic direction. Indeed, the chapter makes the case for our considering most of the calls for reform in this period as attempts to turn the clock back, and recover lost or declining safeguards against misrule, or remedy long-standing grievances, rather than as forward-looking attempts to embrace democracy.

Ordinary civilians are assumed to panic or freeze in crises, but research has shown that this is a myth. In many crises, civilians provide life-saving help to those in need. They may even form emergent groups, which are temporary organizations that are involved in crisis response activities. Their actions can be of major importance to the crisis response efforts, but professionals are often reluctant to include volunteers in formal crisis structures out of distrust and because it requires considerable adaptation. By excluding volunteers, responders are sure that trained professionals provide high-quality support to affected communities. The attitude of frontline responders to volunteers poses a dilemma. It is important to anticipate the presence of well-intentioned volunteers and build relations with them, so that their skills and intentions can be rapidly identified and potential coordination can be established early on. Civilians can be given a variety of tasks, depending on the crisis, but it should not foreclose the recognition of their possible victimhood. Open engagement enables the adaptive incorporation of civilians in frontline crisis response efforts.

Voluntarism, and its associated virtue, has long been a legitimation device in the construction of public authority. It has been theorized, at least in Western political philosophy, as a counterweight to the excesses of big government or big business. In some studies in Africa, voluntarism has been married to instrumentalist accounts of doing politics. This chapter highlights the nuanced complexities in invoking voluntarism, its ideational and material components, and the multifaceted opportunities and obligations it affords. It demonstrates continuity between government and non-government around the production of this form of authority. However, legitimation is a practice negotiated by its ‘publics’. In this case, this comprises volunteers who must negotiate the vertical, often extractive pressures from external actors of their physical and emotional labours as well as lateral contestation by peers of their own authority to act in the interests of Others. This chapter explores the material and ideational legitimation that volunteer networks afford non-governmental organizations as well as the negotiation and contestation of voluntarism’s work on the part of volunteers themselves.

With personal information an overt ‘site of struggle’ in contemporary politics, how do non-state actors gather data but also craft their authority to do so? This chapter shifts the site of Informational Relations spatially, away from the lofty ‘international’, as well as temporally, to earlier in this chain of events. The authority of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to gather data is often treated as antecedent, but collecting Others’ information and acting as repositories are themselves invocations of authority. While a key driver of this book has been the importance of ideas in crafting everyday authority, legitimation’s material consequences are highly conspicuous in this process of gathering information: it is a core NGO ‘currency’. This chapter focuses on the collection of data, whereby the authority of NGOs is instantiated through acts of monitoring and verification, both laterally with respect to peers and vertically to communities. It pits NGO against NGO; NGO against local government; village volunteers against their leaders and peers. NGOs thus find themselves enmeshed within a complex informational ecosystem that is truly global. Given the clear fungibility of information, the gathering of data proved one of the most contentious legitimation practices.

Two ostensibly contradictory forces operate in Japanese society, as is the case in other industrialized societies. On the one hand, it is subject to many centrifugal forces that tend to diversify its structural arrangements, lifestyles, and value orientations. On the other hand, a range of centripetal forces drives Japanese society towards homogeneity and uniformity. This chapter endeavors to recapitulate these two forces in the context of Japan’s civil society. The first section examines the fragmentation of social relations. The second section scrutinizes the rise of social movements in the 2010s. The third section delves into the quiet spread of volunteer activities and non-profit organizations and non-governmental organizations as the backdrop of the dissenting protests and the changing configuration of interest groups at large. The fourth section examines the viability of the emic notion analogous to citizenship in the analysis of the Japanese context. The last section attempts to locate a variety of forms of control in an analytical framework and to summarize their features as ‘friendly authoritarianism’ across the wide spectrum of Japanese society.

In 1914 the home front in all countries greeted the war with an outpouring of patriotic support, but only Germany saw significant support for war before it was declared. Everywhere the advocates of peace were quickly overwhelmed, in particular the Marxist Socialist movement, which struggled to balance the coordination of international pacifism with hopes for political revolution, as reflected in a conference at Zimmerwald in neutral Switzerland in 1915. By then, the early rush to volunteer in Britain and the Dominions, where no military service requirements existed, had begun to dissipate. The home fronts were forced to respond when the anticipated short war dragged on into a second year. When heavy casualties created an ongoing need for fresh manpower, and the exhaustion of the initial stockpiles of munitions placed unprecedented demands on industry, women assumed an increasingly important role either as workers or as noncombatant volunteers, including under the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations. The war revolutionized labor relations as well as gender relations. As the war entered a third year, censorship and propaganda assumed a growing role in sustaining the home fronts, especially for the Central Powers once the Allied naval blockade began to affect food supplies.

This chapter examines when a trust becomes fully constituted. It considers the maxim of equity 'equity will not assist a volunteer'. A trust is fully constituted when the settlor either conveys the property to a trustee or declares that he holds the property on trust for named beneficiaries. The trust will only be enforceable when a settlor has done everything in his power to transfer the property according to the nature of the property. In some limited circumstances a trust will be enforceable even where the settlor has not done everything in his power if it would be unconscionable not to enforce it. An incompletely constituted trust may be enforceable by the benficiaries either under teh rules of contract or unusually as a trust of a promise. There are three main exceptions to the rule that equity will not assist a volunteer: the rule in Strong v Bird; a donatio mortis cause and proprietary estoppel.