Dissatisfied with the compartmentalization of studies concerning strikes, wars, revolutions, social movements, and other forms of political struggle, McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly identify causal mechanisms and processes that recur across a wide range of contentious politics. Critical of the static, single-actor models (including their own) that have prevailed in the field, they shift the focus of analysis to dynamic interaction. Doubtful that large, complex series of events such as revolutions and social movements conform to general laws, they break events into smaller episodes, then identify...

Most books on social movements treat them as special episodes, apart from normal politics. This book is about how social protest movements become involved with political parties and elections. It reveals how movements really are a "normal" part of modern politics, shaping parties and elections.Everyone wanting to know how political parties and social movements actually operate should read this book.

Deborah Yashar analyzes the contemporary and uneven emergence of Latin American indigenous movements--addressing both why indigenous identities have become politically salient in the contemporary period and why they have translated into significant political organizations in some places and not others. She argues that ethnic politics can best be explained through a comparative historical approach that analyzes three factors: changing citizenship regimes, social networks, and political associational space--providing insight into the fragility and unevenness of Latin America's third wave...

This analysis of the relationship between democratization and contentious politics builds upon the model set forth in Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, 2001). Comparing the Low Countries, Iberia, France, the British Isles, the Balkans, Russia, and other European regions over three and a half turbulent centuries, the book demonstrates how similar recurrent causal mechanisms in different combinations, sequences, and initial conditions produced contrasting trajectories toward and away from democracy in different parts of the continent. Also available: Dynamics of Contention 0-521-80588-0...

Although the fields of organization theory and social movement theory have long been viewed as belonging to different worlds, recent events have intervened, reminding us that organizations are becoming more movement-like and volatile and politicized while movements are more likely to borrow strategies from organizations. Topics covered in this volume range from globalization and transnational social movement organizations to community recycling programs.

This analysis of the confrontation between popular movements and repressive regimes in Central America, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala, examines urban and rural groups as well as nonviolent social movements and revolutionary movements over three decades from 1960 on. It studies the impact of state violence on contentious political movements and defends the political process model for studying such movements.

From labor organizers to immigrant activists, from environmentalists to human rights campaigners, from global justice protesters to Islamic militants, this book shows how ordinary people gain new perspectives, experiment with new forms of action, and sometimes emerge with new identities through their contacts across borders. It asks to what extent transnational activism changes domestic actors, their forms of claim making, and their prevailing strategies. Does it simply project the conflicts and alignments familiar from domestic politics onto a broader stage, or does it create a new political...

How can the poor and weak 'work' a political system to their advantage� Drawing mainly on interviews and surveys in rural China, Kevin O'Brien and Lianjiang Li show that popular action often hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within the state. Otherwise powerless people use the rhetoric and commitments of the central government to try to fight misconduct by local officials, open up clogged channels of participation, and push back the frontiers of the permissible. This 'rightful resistance' has far-reaching implications for our understanding of contentious politics. As O'Brien...

In this book, Silvia Pedraza links Cuba's revolution and its mass exodus not only as cause and consequence but also as profoundly social and human processes that were not only political and economic but also cognitive and emotive. But, ironically for a community that defined itself as being in exile, virtually no studies of its political attitudes exist, and certainly none that encompass the changing political attitudes over 47 years of the exodus. The book uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to gain insight into the political disaffection of Cuban refugees.

Close to three hundred stores and supermarkets were looted during week-long food riots in Argentina in December 2001. Thirty-four people were reported dead and hundreds were injured. Among the looting crowds, activists from the Peronist party (the main political party in the country) were quite prominent. During the lootings, police officers were conspicuously absent - particularly when small stores were sacked. Through a combination of archival research, statistical analysis, multi-sited fieldwork, and taking heed of the perspective of contentious politics, this book provides an analytic...