Books in the Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics series

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.

Based on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork on the Unemployed Workers' Movement in Argentina (also known as the piqueteros), Proletarian Lives provides a case study of how workers affected by job loss protect their traditional forms of life by engaging in progressive grassroots mobilization. Using life-history interviews and participant observation, the book analyzes why some activists develop a strong attachment to the movement despite initial reluctance and frequent ideological differences. Marcos Perez argues that a key appeal of participation is the opportunity to engage in age and gender-specific practices associated with a respectable blue-collar lifestyle threatened by long-term socioeconomic decline. Through their daily involvement in the movement, older participants reconstruct the routines they associate with a golden past in which factory jobs were plentiful, younger activists develop the kind of habits they were raised to see as valuable, and all members protect communal activities undermined by the expansion of poverty and violence.

Strikes, protests, and riots by Chinese workers have been rising over the past decade. The state has addressed a number of grievances, yet has also come down increasingly hard on civil society groups pushing for reform. Why are these two seemingly clashing developments occurring simultaneously? Manfred Elfstrom uses extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis to examine both the causes and consequences of protest. The book adopts a holistic approach, encompassing national trends in worker-state relations, local policymaking processes and the dilemmas of individual officials and activists. Instead of taking sides in the old debate over whether non-democracies like China's are on the verge of collapse or have instead found ways of maintaining their power indefinitely, it explores the daily evolution of autocratic rule. While providing a uniquely comprehensive picture of change in China, this important study proposes a new model of bottom-up change within authoritarian systems more generally.

Why do communities form militias to defend themselves against violence during civil war? Using original interviews with former combatants and civilians and archival material from extensive fieldwork in Mozambique, Corinna Jentzsch's Violent Resistance explains the timing, location and process through which communities form militias. Jentzsch shows that local military stalemates characterized by ongoing violence allow civilians to form militias that fight alongside the government against rebels. Militias spread only to communities in which elites are relatively unified, preventing elites from coopting militias for private gains. Crucially, militias that build on preexisting social conventions are able to resonate with the people and empower them to regain agency over their lives. Jentzsch's innovative study brings conceptual clarity to the militia phenomenon and helps us understand how wartime civilian agency, violent resistance, and the rise of third actors beyond governments and rebels affect the dynamics of civil war, on the African continent and beyond.

This collection of essays examines political involvement's socio-biographical effects by drawing on a global range of case studies. It will appeal to social movement scholars as well as scholars of life course sociology in an interactionist perspective.

Sidney Tarrow offers a new account of how the interactions between social movements and parties have been transformed throughout American history, also impacting the character and resilience of American democracy. The book is for scholars, students, and lay readers interested in American politics and American history.

Two decades after Indonesia's transition to democracy, Indonesia's labor movement is a vibrant political actor. This book provides the first in-depth analysis of this development, investigating the unique tactics Indonesia's labor movement used to gain a strategic foothold in a country with no recent history of union engagement in politics.

A detailed study of 60 contentious episodes in European politics where governments' austerity policies and institutional reforms were opposed during and after the Great Recession (2008-2015). The book provides methods and tools for the systematic analysis of the interactions between governments, their challengers, and third-party actors.

This book highlights the important role of informal norms in structuring state-protester interactions, mitigating conflict, and explaining regime resilience amid mounting unrest. It will appeal to scholars of social movements, comparative politics, civil society, international relations, governance, democratization, and area studies.

Mukherjee shows how colonial indirect rule and land tenure create weak state capacity, land inequality and ethnic grievances which have led to Maoist insurgency in India. His research includes archival data, interviews, analysis of Maoist documents, and statistical testing using sub-national datasets, and helps to explain insurgency world-wide.

Examining both the promise of grassroots environmental activism and the challenges activists face, Staggenborg provides an inside look at grassroots organizing across five diverse organizations. This book is for scholars and students of political science and sociology, as well as anyone interested in pressing environmental issues.

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.

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.

This study of twenty-nine protest cases in ten global cities shows how residents facing displacement - in the forms of urban redevelopment and gentrification - mobilize their neighborhoods and change policies. Heretofore understudied, creative residents emerge as the key to mobilization, as they craft hip and transformative protest experiences.

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 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.

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.

This book is aimed at readers who want a better understanding of one of the key drivers of growing economic inequality: union decline. In explaining why Canadian unions remain stronger than their US counterparts, it shows the limits of conventional explanations and presents a novel approach to this perplexing question.

When it is illegal for organizations to rally people to take to the streets, what do they do? This book theorizes a new pathway of civil society mobilization in contemporary China - mobilizing without the masses. It is for scholars, students, policymakers, NGO practitioners, and the educated reader.

The book gives the first systematic account of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 and its aftermath using a contentious politics framework. The book will be used by academics, upper-level undergraduates and postgraduate students interested in the Arab Spring.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the book's subject matter, it will be of interest to historians, political scientists, and sociologists. In particular, the book will appeal to readers, with a geographical interest in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. The book may be adopted for use in upper-level undergraduate courses in social sciences.

This book will be used in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on East Asia, authoritarianism, contentious politics, human rights, comparative politics, protest and repression, and international relations.

Focusing on the transnational LGBT movement that has gained unprecedented momentum, this study is a timely contribution to debates both scholarly and popular.

The book is about how memories of Mao era suffering, particularly memories of suffering and loss in the Great Leap Forward Famine, have seeped into the present day post-Mao reform period to shape the way in which rural famine survivors see and resist state power and injustice today.

This book will appeal to anyone interested in social movements, responses to market reforms, responses to privatization, responses to free trade, politics and cultures of food and water, and the rise of the left in Latin America. It would also appeal to people interested in recent Bolivian and Mexican politics.

This book argues that social movement death is the outgrowth of a coevolutionary dynamic whereby challengers, influenced by their understanding of what states will do to oppose them, attempt to recruit, motivate, calm, and prepare constituents while governments attempt to hinder all of these processes at the same time.

Rina Agarwala investigates how vulnerable workers are organizing to improve their livelihoods in India. Drawing on 300 personal interviews with women workers in construction and tobacco, she finds these workers are launching an innovative movement to assert their rights.

Why do new social movement tactics spread to some places and not others? Wood argues that inequalities rooted in political history, political economy and local interactions can make social movements more or less able to evaluate and incorporate new tactics.