Books in the Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics series

This book, first published in 2003, is about how social protest movements become involved with political parties and elections. Most books on social movements treat them as special episodes, apart from normal politics, but this book shows how movements really are a 'normal' part of modern politics, shaping parties and elections.

This book offers an innovative perspective on the ever-widening gap between the poor and the state in Latin American politics. It presents a comprehensive analysis of the main social movement that mobilized the poor and unemployed people of Argentina to end neoliberalism and to attain incorporation into a more inclusive and equal society. The piquetero (picketer) movement is the largest movement of unemployed people in the world. This movement has transformed Argentine politics to the extent of becoming part of the governing coalition for more than a decade. Rossi argues that the movement has been part of a long-term struggle by the poor for socio-political participation in the polity after having been excluded by authoritarian regimes and neoliberal reforms. He conceptualizes this process as a wave of incorporation, exploring the characteristics of this major redefinition of politics in Latin America.

How did NAFTA catalyze solidarity among US, Canadian, and Mexican unions? By showing how transnational laws and governance institutions constrain and expand transnational social movements, this book argues that, collectively, unions can help shape how the rules governing the global economy are made.

This book examines information reported within the media regarding the interaction between the Black Panther Party and government agents in the Bay Area of California (1967-1973). Christian Davenport argues that the geographic locale and political orientation of the newspaper influences how specific details are reported, including who starts and ends the conflict, who the Black Panthers target (government or non-government actors), and which part of the government responds (the police or court). Specifically, proximate and government-oriented sources provide one assessment of events, whereas proximate and dissident-oriented sources have another; both converge on specific aspects of the conflict. The methodological implications of the study are clear; Davenport's findings prove that in order to understand contentious events, it is crucial to understand who collects or distributes the information in order to comprehend who reportedly does what to whom as well as why.

This book examines the success and failure of social movements to bring about change in American society. Joseph Luders focuses on the targets of protests and affected bystanders, their interests, and their responses to explain the diverse outcomes of social movements.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of diverse social movements protesting the free market and advocating socialization ushered in governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Silva offers the first comparative account, analyzing the motive for the protests and the power of the movements behind them.

How can we get inside popular collective struggles and explain how they work? Contentious Performances presents a distinctive approach to analyzing such struggles, drawing especially on incomparably rich evidence from Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The book accomplishes three main things. First, it presents a logic and method for describing contentious events, occasions on which people publicly make consequential claims on each other. Second, it shows how that logic yields superior explanations of the dynamics in such events, both individually and in the aggregate. Third, it illustrates its methods and arguments by means of detailed analyses of contentious events in Great Britain from 1758 to 1834.

As the nuclear arms race exploded in the 1980s, a group of U.S. religious pacifists known as the Plowshares movement used radical nonviolence to intervene. Nepstad documents the emergence and diffusion of this international movement and explains why some of these Plowshares groups have persisted while others have collapsed.

This book scrutinizes the series of food riots in Argentina in December 2001. It pays particular attention to the secret relationships among looters, political activists, and police forces. These clandestine relationships constitute the gray zone of politics.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the confrontation between popular movements and repressive regimes in Central America for the three decades beginning in 1960, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala. It examines both urban and rural groups as well as both nonviolent social movements and revolutionary movements.

Organization theory and social movement theory are two of the most vibrant areas within the social sciences. This collection of original essays and studies both calls for a closer connection between these fields and demonstrates the value of this interchange.

Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000, first published in 2004, is an analysis of the relationship between democratization and contentious politics that builds upon the model set forth in the pathbreaking book, Dynamics of Contention. Using a sustained comparison of French and British histories since 1650 or so as a springboard for more general comparison within Europe Contention and Democracy goes on to demonstrate that democratization occurred as result of struggles during which (as in 19th century Britain and France) few, if any, of the participants were self-consciously trying to create democratic institutions. Consequently, circumstances for democratization vary from era to era, region to region as functions of previous history, international environments, available models of political organization, and predominant patterns of social relations.

In the twentieth century, indigenous people in Latin America started to speak out, mobilize, and organize in unprecedented ways. This book asks: why are indigenous people mobilizing now and why only in specific places? This book answers these questions with insight into their advancement and reform of democracy.

In recent decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other non-routine politics has flourished. And yet research on the topic remains highly fragmented, reflecting the influence of at least three traditional divisions. The first of these reflects the view that various forms of contention are distinct and should be studied independent of others. Separate literatures have developed around the study of social movements, revolutions and industrial conflict. A second approach to the study of political contention denies the possibility of general theory in deference to a grounding in the temporal and spatial particulars of any given episode of contention. The study of contentious politics are left to 'area specialists' and/or historians with a thorough knowledge of the time and place in question. Finally, overlaid on these two divisions are stylized theoretical traditions - structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist - that have developed largely in isolation from one another. This book was first published in 2001.

How do a few Third World political movements become global causes celebres, while most remain isolated? This book rejects dominant views that needy groups readily gain help from selfless nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Instead, they face a Darwinian struggle for scarce resources where support goes to the savviest, not the neediest.

This book, first published in 2003, is about how social protest movements become involved with political parties and elections. Most books on social movements treat them as special episodes, apart from normal politics, but this book shows how movements really are a 'normal' part of modern politics, shaping parties and elections.

This book is the first cross-national and historical investigation of State-Mobilized Movements (SMMs). By enlarging the analytical horizons of social movement and civil society research, as well as our understanding of the bases of authoritarian rule, the volume aims to encourage debate and stimulate new research on state-society relations.

The New Transnational Activism, first published in 2005, shows how even the most prosaic activities can assume broader political meanings when they provide ordinary people with the experience of crossing transnational space. This means that we cannot be satisfied with defining transnational activists through the ways they think.

Are there any commonalities between such phenomena as soccer hooliganism, sabotage by peasants of landlords' property, incidents of road rage, and even the events of September 11? With striking historical scope and command of the literature of many disciplines, this book, first published in 2003, 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. Professor Tilly argues that collective violence is complicated, changeable, and unpredictable in some regards, yet that it also results from similar causes variously combined in different times and places. Pinpointing the causes, combinations, and settings helps to explain collective violence and its variations, and also helps to identify the best ways to mitigate violence and create democracies with a minimum of damage to persons and property.

This book explores social movements by analyzing an escalating spiral of tension between the Patriot movement and the state centered on the mutual framing of conflict as 'warfare'. By examining the social construction of 'warfare' as a principal script or frame defining the movement-state dynamic, Stuart A. Wright explains how this highly charged confluence of a war narrative engendered a kind of symbiosis leading to the escalation of a mutual threat that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. Wright offers a unique perspective on the events leading up to the bombing because he served as a consultant to Timothy McVeigh's defense team for eighteen months and draws on primary data based on face-to-face interviews with McVeigh. The book contends that McVeigh was firmly entrenched in the Patriot movement and was part of a network of 'warrior cells' that planned and implemented the bombing.

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 and Li explore the origins, dynamics, and consequences of rightful resistance, they highlight similarities between collective action in places as varied as China, the former East Germany, and the United States, while suggesting how Chinese experiences speak to issues such as opportunities to protest, claims radicalization, tactical innovation, and the outcomes of contention.

Organization theory and social movement theory are two of the most vibrant areas within the social sciences. This collection of original essays and studies both calls for a closer connection between these fields and demonstrates the value of this interchange.

Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe presents a novel account of the origins of religious pluralism in Europe. Combining comparative historical analysis with contentious political analysis, it surveys six clusters of increasingly destructive religious wars between 1529 and 1651, analyzes the diverse settlements that brought these wars to an end, and describes the complex religious peace that emerged from two centuries of experimentation in accommodating religious differences. Rejecting the older authoritarian interpretations of the age of religious wars, the author uses traditional documentary sources as well as photographic evidence to show how a broad range Europeans - from authoritative elites to a colorful array of religious 'dissenters' - replaced the cultural 'unity and purity' of late-medieval Christendom with a variable and durable pattern of religious diversity, deeply embedded in political, legal, and cultural institutions.

Thaxton analyzes how the local Communist Party agents of the Mao-led central government imposed the famine of the Great Leap Forward on one rural village, how villagers remember this traumatic experience, and how they engaged in resistance to escape the famine and the predatory rule it reflected.

This book sheds new light on the relationship between religion and tolerance by investigating the Christian protection of Jews during the Holocaust. It will appeal to those interested in religion, political violence, collective action, mixed methods, altruism, racism, tolerance, the Holocaust, and genocide.

The aim of this book is to highlight and give 'voice' to some of the notable 'silences' evident in recent years in the study of contentious politics. The co-authors hope to redress the present topical imbalance in the field by taking up seven specific topics in the volume.

Gillion demonstrates the direct influence that political protest behavior has on Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court, illustrating that protest is a form of democratic responsiveness that government officials have used, and continue to draw on, to implement federal policies. Focusing on racial and ethnic minority concerns, this book shows that the context of political protest has served as a signal for political preferences. As pro-minority rights behavior grew and anti-minority rights actions declined, politicians learned from minority protest and responded when they felt emboldened by stronger informational cues stemming from citizens' behavior, a theory referred to as the 'information continuum'. Although the shift from protest to politics as a political strategy has opened the door for institutionalized political opportunity, racial and ethnic minorities have neglected a powerful tool to illustrate the inequalities that exist in contemporary society.

The first book-length analysis to explain the character of contemporary protest politics. Street Citizens analyzes original survey data on activists to explain the diverse motivations, social characteristics values and networks that draw them to engage politically to tackle the pressing social problems of our times.

Building Transnational Networks tells the story of how a broad group of civil society organizations came together to contest free trade negotiations in the Americas. Based on research in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, it offers a full hemispheric analysis of the creation of civil society networks as they engaged in the politics of trade. The author demonstrates that most effective transnational actors are the ones with strong domestic roots and that 'southern' organizations occupy key nodes in trade networks. The fragility of activist networks stems from changes in the domestic political context as well as from characteristics of the organizations, the networks, or the actions they undertake. These findings advance and suggest new understandings of transnational collective action.

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. The book uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to gain insight into the political disaffection of Cuban refugees.