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  3. Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics

Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics breaks apart the narrow disciplinary and subfield boundaries that have fragmented the study of both traditional social movements and their non-routine politics. The exploration of noninstitutionalized political actions, including revolutions, democratization, cycles of protest, and ethnic conflicts, enables the connections between a wide array of political and social phenomena to be examined in national, comparative, and global perspective.

  • General Editors: David S. Meyer, University of California, Irvine
  • Associate Editors: Mark Beissinger, Princeton University, New Jersey, Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Jack A. Goldstone, George Mason University, Virginia, Doug McAdam, Stanford University, California and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, California, Holly J. McCammon, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, Sarah Soule, Stanford University, California, Suzanne Staggenborg, University of Pittsburgh, Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University, New York, Elizabeth J. Wood, Yale University, Connecticut, Deborah Yashar, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Founding Editors: Doug McAdam, Stanford University, California, Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University, New York, Charles Tilly, Columbia University, New York

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78 results in Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics

Page 4 of 4

Contention and Corporate Social Responsibility
  • Sarah A. Soule
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    17 August 2009
  • This book examines anti-corporate activism in the United States, including analysis of anti-corporate challenges associated with social movements as diverse as the Civil Rights Movement and the Dolphin-safe Tuna Movement. Using a unique dataset of protest events in the United States, the book shows that anti-corporate activism is primarily about corporate policies, products, and negligence. Although activists have always been distrustful of corporations and sought to change them, until the 1970s and 1980s, this was primarily accomplished via seeking government regulation of corporations or via organized labor. Sarah A. Soule traces the shift brought about by deregulation and the decline in organized labor, which prompted activists to target corporations directly, often in combination with targeting the state. Using the literatures on contentious and private politics, which are both essential for understanding anti-corporate activism, the book provides a nuanced understanding of the changing focal points of activism directed at corporations.

Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics
  • Ronald R. Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, Doug McAdam, Elizabeth J. Perry, William H. Sewell, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilley
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    17 September 2001
  • The aim of this book is to highlight and begin to give 'voice' to some of the notable 'silences' evident in recent years in the study of contentious politics. The seven co-authors take up seven specific topics in the volume: the relationship between emotions and contention; temporality in the study of contention; the spatial dimensions of contention; leadership in contention; the role of threat in contention; religion and contention; and contention in the context of demographic and life-course processes. The seven spent three years involved in an ongoing project designed to take stock, and attempt a partial synthesis, of various literatures that have grown up around the study of non-routine or contentious politics. As such, it is likely to be viewed as a groundbreaking volume that not only undermines conventional disciplinary understanding of contentious politics, but also lays out a number of provocative new research agendas.

Contentious Performances
  • Charles Tilly
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    04 August 2008
  • 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.

Ethnic Struggle, Coexistence, and Democratization in Eastern Europe
  • Sherrill Stroschein
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 May 2012
  • In societies divided on ethnic and religious lines, problems of democracy are magnified – particularly where groups are mobilized into parties. With the principle of majority rule, minorities should be less willing to endorse democratic institutions where their parties persistently lose elections. While such problems should also hamper transitions to democracy, several diverse Eastern European states have formed democracies even under these conditions. In this book, Sherrill Stroschein argues that sustained protest and contention by ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia brought concessions on policies that they could not achieve through the ballot box, in contrast to Transcarpathia, Ukraine. In Romania and Slovakia, contention during the 1990s made each group accustomed to each other's claims and aware of the degree to which each could push its own. Ethnic contention became a de facto deliberative process that fostered a moderation of group stances, allowing democratic consolidation to slowly and organically take root.

Dynamics of Contention
  • Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    10 September 2001
  • 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.

Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution
  • Yang Su
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 February 2011
  • The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass killings and contributes to the historiography of the Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly focused on events in urban areas.

Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries
  • Valerie J. Bunce, Sharon L. Wolchik
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    30 June 2011
  • From 1998 to 2005, six elections took place in postcommunist Europe that had the surprising outcome of empowering the opposition and defeating authoritarian incumbents or their designated successors. Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik compare these unexpected electoral breakthroughs. They draw three conclusions. First, the opposition was victorious because of the hard and creative work of a transnational network composed of local opposition and civil society groups, members of the international democracy assistance community and graduates of successful electoral challenges to authoritarian rule in other countries. Second, the remarkable run of these upset elections reflected the ability of this network to diffuse an ensemble of innovative electoral strategies across state boundaries. Finally, elections can serve as a powerful mechanism for democratic change. This is especially the case when civil society is strong, the transfer of political power is through constitutional means, and opposition leaders win with small mandates.

Putting Social Movements in their Place
  • Explaining Opposition to Energy Projects in the United States, 2000–2005
  • Doug McAdam, Hilary Boudet
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    07 May 2012
  • The field of social movement studies has expanded dramatically over the past three decades. But as it has done so, its focus has become increasingly narrow and 'movement-centric'. When combined with the tendency to select successful struggles for study, the conceptual and methodological conventions of the field conduce to a decidedly Ptolemaic view of social movements: one that exaggerates the frequency and causal significance of movements as a form of politics. This book reports the results of a comparative study, not of movements, but of communities earmarked for environmentally risky energy projects. In stark contrast to the central thrust of the social movement literature, the authors find that the overall level of emergent opposition to the projects has been very low, and they seek to explain that variation and the impact, if any, it had on the ultimate fate of the proposed projects.

Media Bias, Perspective, and State Repression
  • The Black Panther Party
  • Christian Davenport
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    23 November 2009
  • 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.

Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America
  • Eduardo Silva
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    31 August 2009
  • At the turn of the twentieth century, a concatenation of diverse social movements arose unexpectedly in Latin America, culminating in massive anti-free market demonstrations. These events ushered in governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela that advocated socialization and planning, challenging the consensus over neoliberal hegemony and the weakness of movements to oppose it. Eduardo Silva offers the first comprehensive comparative account of these extraordinary events, arguing that the shift was influenced by favorable political associational space, a reformist orientation to demands, economic crisis, and mechanisms that facilitated horizontal linkages among a wide variety of social movement organizations. His analysis applies Karl Polanyi's theory of the double movement of market society to these events, predicting the dawning of an era more supportive of government intervention in the economy and society.

Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion
  • Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle
  • Lesley J. Wood
  • Published online:
    05 May 2012
    Print publication:
    30 April 2012
  • What are the micro-level interactions and conversations that underlie successful and failed diffusion? By comparing the spread of direct action tactics from the 1999 Global Justice Movement protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle to grassroots activists in Toronto and New York, Lesley Wood argues that dynamics of deliberation among local activists both aided and blocked diffusion. To analyze the localization of this cycle of protest, the research brings together rich ethnography, interviews, social network analysis and catalogs of protest events. The findings suggest that when diverse activists with different perspectives can discuss innovations in a reflexive, egalitarian manner, they are more likely to make strategic and meaningful choices.

Politics, Identity, and Mexico’s Indigenous Rights Movements
  • Todd A. Eisenstadt
  • Published online:
    04 April 2011
    Print publication:
    21 March 2011
  • Drawing on an original survey of more than 5,000 respondents, this book argues that, contrary to claims by the 1994 Zapatista insurgency, indigenous and non-indigenous respondents in southern Mexico have been united by socioeconomic conditions and land tenure institutions as well as by ethnic identity. It concludes that - contrary to many analyses of Chiapas's 1994 indigenous rebellion - external influences can trump ideology in framing social movements. Rural Chiapas's prevalent communitarian attitudes resulted partly from external land tenure institutions, rather than from indigenous identities alone. The book further points to recent indigenous rights movements in neighboring Oaxaca, Mexico, as examples of bottom-up multicultural institutions that might be emulated in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

Building Transnational Networks
  • Civil Society and the Politics of Trade in the Americas
  • Marisa von Bülow
  • Published online:
    05 October 2010
    Print publication:
    13 September 2010
  • 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.

Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000
  • Charles Tilly
  • Published online:
    29 May 2010
    Print publication:
    10 November 2003
  • 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.

The Marketing of Rebellion
  • Insurgents, Media, and International Activism
  • Clifford Bob
  • Published online:
    24 May 2010
    Print publication:
    06 June 2005
  • How do a few Third World political movements become global causes célèbres, 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. Examining Mexico's Zapatista rebels and Nigeria's Ogoni ethnic group, the book draws critical conclusions about social movements, NGOs, and 'global civil society'.

Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China
  • Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village
  • Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr
  • Published online:
    14 May 2010
    Print publication:
    05 May 2008
  • This book documents how China's rural people remember the great famine of Maoist rule, which proved to be the worst famine in modern world history. Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr., sheds new light on how China's socialist rulers drove rural dwellers to hunger and starvation, on how powerless villagers formed resistance to the corruption and coercion of collectivization, and on how their hidden and contentious acts, both individual and concerted, allowed them to survive and escape the predatory grip of leaders and networks in the thrall of Mao's authoritarian plan for a full-throttle realization of communism – a plan that engendered an unprecedented disaster for rural families. Based on his study of a rural village's memories of the famine, Thaxton argues that these memories persisted long after the events of the famine and shaped rural resistance to the socialist state, both before and after the post-Mao era of reform.

States, Parties, and Social Movements
  • Edited by Jack A. Goldstone
  • Published online:
    26 February 2010
    Print publication:
    03 March 2003
  • Studies of social movements and of political parties have usually treated them as separate and distinct. In fact they are deeply intertwined. Social movements often shape electoral competition and party policies; they can even give rise to new parties. At the same time, political parties and campaigns shape the opportunities, personnel, and outcomes of social movements. In many countries, electoral democracy itself is the outcome of social movement actions. This book, first published in 2003, examines the interaction of social movements and party politics since the 1950s, both in the United States and around the world. In studies of the US Civil Rights movement, the New Left, the Czechoslovak dissident movements, the Mexican struggle for democracy, and other episodes, this volume shows how party politics and social movements cannot be understood without appreciating their intimate relationship.

Political Movements and Violence in Central America
  • Charles D. Brockett
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    21 February 2005
  • This book offers an in-depth analysis of the confrontation between popular movements and repressive regimes in Central America during the three decades beginning in 1960, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala. Examining both urban and rural groups as well as both nonviolent social movements and revolutionary movements, this study has two primary theoretical objectives. First, to clarify the impact of state violence on contentious political movements. Under what conditions will escalating repression provoke challengers to even greater activity (perhaps even the use of violence themselves) and under what conditions will it intimidate them back into passivity? Second, to defend the utility of the political process model for studying contentious movements, indeed, finding in this model the key to resolving the repression-protest paradox. The study is based on the most thorough set of events data on contentious political activities collected from Latin American countries.

Page 4 of 4