All people wish to avoid nuclear war, but this fact provides little guidance for policy. One reason is a lack of understanding of how a nuclear war might come about or how one could be prevented; much of what is offered as expert knowledge cannot be defended as more than educated opinion. Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War assesses current knowledge to create a basis for new intellectual approaches to the subject of international security that are conceptually rigorous, theoretically eclectic, and methodologically self-conscious. Leading scholars review specific behavioral and social...

In the last year the world has witnessed changes in East-West relations that would have been unthinkable only a short time ago. The Berlin Wall has crumbled, Eastern Europe has thrown out its authoritarian leaders, and the Soviet Union itself has undergone dramatic changes in political structure and foreign policy. The U.S. public no longer regards the Eastern Bloc as the principal threat to national security. Yet even with the undeniable thaw in the Cold War many of the old scenarios for "World War III" remain as plausible as they were in the past, and new sources of instability could arise...

The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. This volume, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in the volume has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modelling or explanations based on abstract,...

Charles Tilly, in this eloquent manifesto, presents a powerful new approach to the study of persistent social inequality. How, he asks, do long-lasting, systematic inequalities in life chances arise, and how do they come to distinguish members of different socially defined categories of persons? Exploring representative paired and unequal categories, such as male/female, black/white, and citizen/noncitizen, Tilly argues that the basic causes of these and similar inequalities greatly resemble one another. In contrast to contemporary analyses that explain inequality case by case, this account...

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...

The contributors to this volume are concerned with the patterns of continuity and change in industrial labor conflicts in major industrialized countries before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The articles have been conceived as part of a series of efforts to assist the further development of comparative labor history, and in particular the application of quantitative techniques to the analysis of industrial labor conflicts in comparative perspective.

Citizenship and identity provide the focus for this collection of original essays from a group of theoretically innovative historians and social scientists. The volume explores the competing and sometimes conflicting roles of citizenship and identity, be it racial, class, ethnic or other, in popular politics. The concept of citizenship is also examined. All essays are historically and comparatively grounded. Covering a wide variety of countries, topics covered include: citizenship rights and party-union relations in Western Europe; politics, industrialization, and citizenship; contested...

Rightly fearing that unscrupulous rulers would break them up, seize their resources, or submit them to damaging forms of intervention, strong networks of trust such as kinship groups, clandestine religious sects, and trade diasporas have historically insulated themselves from political control by a variety of strategies. Drawing on a vast range of comparisons over time and space, Charles Tilly asks and answers how, and with what consequences, members of trust networks have evaded, compromised with, or even sought connections with political regimes.

Are there any commonalities between such phenomena as soccer hooliganism, sabotage by peasants of landlords' property, road rage, and even the events of September 11? With striking historical scope and command of the literature of many disciplines, this book seeks the common causes of these events in collective violence. In collective violence, social interaction immediately inflicts physical damage, involves at least two perpetrators of damage, and results in part from coordination among the persons who perform the damaging acts. Charles Tilly argues that collective violence is complicated,...