Books in the Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics series

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.

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.

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.