North America

The communication practices of three US anti-poverty groups in the San Francisco Bay Area – Coalition on Homelessness, Poor News Network, and Media Alliance – are discussed whose communication strategies work for the recognition and rights of low-income and homeless people, and for policies to better redistribute economic and communications resources.

The effects of counter-terrorism legislation on civil society organisations (CSOs) based in the South have received little attention in the wider literature. This article reports on the findings of a series of international workshops to examine the effects of such legislation held in Lebanon, the Kyrgyz Republic, India, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. The evidence presented at these workshops suggests that counter-terror legislation is undermining the work of civil society in complex and interrelated ways.

In 1987-1988, a national debate erupted in Canada on the desirability of entering into a free trade agreement with the USA and its potential effect on Canadian culture, society, and national sovereignty - as well as its economy. A national coalition of labour unions and civil society groups emerged to oppose such an agreement with the USA, and later its expansion to Mexico as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Trying to build alliances that span the divide between trade unions and NGOs as well as the divide between the North and the South might seem a utopian task. But this is exactly what an imaginative new generation of organisers from the western hemisphere's labour movements and NGOs are trying to do. This paper analyses two very different efforts working to bridge this `double divide'.