include Who Speaks for Roma? and Romaphobia: The Last Acceptable Form of Racism. His research has been published in leading international journals, including Social Movement Studies; International Political Science Review; Ethnic and Migration Studies; and the International Journal of Communication. In 2018-2019, he was a EURIAS/Marie Curie Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, and in 2022-2023, he was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award at the University of Southern California.
McGarry applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Political Voice: Protest, Democracy, and Marginalised Groups, and reported the following:
Page 99 is in Chapter 3 which outlines the key concept of my book, political voice, and its three core elements: autonomy, representation, and constitution. Page 99 focuses on constitution. It does pass the Page 99 Test as it advances the book’s main argument which is the relationship between protest, democracy, and marginalised groups.Visit Aidan McGarry's website.
Here is an excerpt of page 99 (references removed):The articulation of political voice constitutes groups and affirms a consciousness, an awareness of one’s position, an apex of production which ruptures its surroundings and transforms the consciousness of the group. Most research on policy, politics, social movements and studies on revolutions look for impact and the proof of resonance on regimes, authorities, or institutions. This is not a central interest for this book. I attempt to shift the analytic focus and show how political voice actually creates groups through the act of articulation. This is a significant outcome in and of itself.Page 99 highlights three central arguments of the book:
Articulation is therefore an action whereby a subject constitutes an object – a ‘meaningful unity’ or ‘unity of sense’- in a shared space. And so, the articulation of political voice crystalizes collective consciousness. We witness a dialectic process of subject constitution and object formation through political voice…Political voice is built on collective agency but does not collapse the individual agent into the group.
Status in politics comes from the constitution of the political subject, being seen and, in turn, securing recognition as a legitimate political actor. It is important to avoid the assumption that every voice will be heard because existing structures, the very ones which suppress and exclude minority voices, will ultimately decide which voices are heard and which are not. This highlights a tension with constitution, and one which suggests constitution is relational, depending on intersubjective interaction, specifically the recognition of existence. Do we really exist if others deny our existence? The same quandary arises when nations declare their sovereignty and create a constitution with newer states requiring other states to recognize their existence, Kosovo and South Sudan being two recent examples. Constitution through the articulation of political voice thus carries a plaintiff hope to be recognized as a legitimate political agent.
First, it suggests that the importance of the articulation of voice is in the act itself, speaking up and speaking out. When we think of protests throughout history, we often evaluate those that have ‘succeeded’ and those which have ‘failed’, but this misses the point. Protest should not always be measured by impact or perceived success because, for marginalised people, the simple act of making oneself heard is an important political outcome. This is especially true for marginalised people like queers, refugees, or ethnic minorities who are often actively silenced or excluded from mainstream political institutions.
Second, it explains how people constitute themselves through articulating their voice. In essence, we speak ourselves into being. This page reflects on how, in protest movements, the individual is sometimes collapsed into the collective, such as a demonstration. The group is often assumed to be a unified coherent and bounded block, when the truth is that all protests are extremely heterogenous and do not tend to act in a unified manner. The individual and her agency is sometimes lost when we examine collective action.
Third, it develops an understanding of constitution, when new political subjects are brought into being through the articulation of voice. A key part of this dynamic is recognition of others. This develops earlier arguments in my book on how voice is relational and ultimately requires external actors (such as the media, the government, political parties, international organisations, oppositional movements, and the general public). This recognition is fraught with problems because powerful actors will invariably seek to silence and deny the voice of marginalised groups to affirm their own power. Throughout the book, and on page 99, I argue that the articulation of political voice is the only way to change the status quo.
--Marshal Zeringue
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