Burma has freed up to 100 political prisoners, including an ethnic minority guerrilla leader and a prominent dissident, in a gesture the country's elected government hope will be seen by the international community as a move toward liberalisation.
Although he made rough gestures towards the dissident Nottinghamshire miners' leaders, who had opposed the strike, his position was rational, and aimed at persuading Scargill to moderation.
U.S. Presidents, historically, have been prone to raising the plight of dissidents, and making other unwelcome gestures toward liberal democracy.
Beyond the lurid "Lady Macbeth," critics have come to see even Shostakovich's most triumphal musical gestures as mere surface, hiding the cunning silences of a dissident.
So far, Rove, an unlikely dissident, is the only prominent Republican leader to so much as gesture at stepping forward, as Buckley and his allies did.
Even veteran dissidents concede that the atmosphere has improved, and that the emir's gestures have created optimism.But the opposition, both Shia and Sunni, wants more than gestures.
The term quickly became applied to a wide variety of live art events from the painterly gestures of Japan's Gutai group to the street actions of Czech dissident Milan Knizak and his Aktual group.
In communist countries during the 1980s, dissidents did their best to annoy, outwit and undermine the apparatchiks with ironic gestures.
With the rise of the Roman Catholic civil rights movement and sectarian violence in the 1960s and conciliatory gestures toward Northern Ireland Catholics and the government of Ireland by UUP Prime Minister for Northern Ireland Terence O'Neill, dissident elements left the party to form other organizations, notably the hard-line Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), cofounded in 1971 by Ian Paisley.
In another conciliatory gesture the police gave passports to the mother and older brother of Chen Guangcheng, a blind dissident who escaped to the American embassy in Beijing early last year and (in an unusual victory for human-rights diplomacy) was allowed to leave for America.
DISSIDENT GARDENS, by Jonathan Lethem.
