Social movements have an elusive power but one that is altogether real. From the French and American revolutions to the post-Soviet, ethnic and terrorist movements of today, contentious politics exercises a fleeting but powerful influence on politics, society and international relations. This study surveys the modern history of the modern social movements in the West and their diffusion to the global South through war, colonialism and diffusion, and it puts forward a theory to explain its cyclical surges and declines. It offers an interpretation of the power of movements that emphasizes effects on the lives of militants, policy reforms, political institutions and cultural change. The book focuses on the rise and fall of social movements as part of contentious politics in general and as the outcome of changes in political opportunities and constraints, state strategy, the new media of communication and transnational diffusion.
This book contains the products of work carried out over four decades of research in Italy, France and the United States, and in the intellectual territory between social movements, comparative politics, and historical sociology. Using a variety of methods ranging from statistical analysis to historical case studies to linguistic analysis, the book centers on historical catalogs of protest events and cycles of collective action. Sidney Tarrow places social movements in the broader arena of contentious politics, in relation to states, political parties and other actors. From peasants and communists in 1960s Italy, to movements and politics in contemporary western polities, to the global justice movement in the new century, the book argues that contentious actors are neither outside of nor completely within politics, but rather they occupy the uncertain territory between total opposition and integration into policy.
For the last two decades, Sidney Tarrow has explored "contentious politics"—disruptions of the settled political order caused by social movements. These disruptions range from strikes and street protests to riots and civil disobedience to revolution. In War, States, and Contention, Tarrow shows how such movements sometimes trigger, animate, and guide the course of war and how they sometimes rise during war and in war's wake to change regimes or even overthrow states. Tarrow draws on evidence from historical and contemporary cases, including revolutionary France, the United States from the Civil War to the anti–Vietnam War movement, Italy after World War I, and the United States during the decade following 9/11.In the twenty-first century, movements are becoming transnational, and globalization and internationalization are moving war beyond conflict between states. The radically new phenomenon is not that movements make war against states but that states make war against movements. Tarrow finds this an especially troublesome development in recent U.S. history. He argues that that the United States is in danger of abandoning the devotion to rights it had expanded through two centuries of struggle and that Americans are now institutionalizing as a "new normal" the abuse of rights in the name of national security. He expands this hypothesis to the global level through what he calls "the international state of emergency.
Legal and social movement scholars have long puzzled over the role of movements in moving, being moved by, and changing the meanings of the law. But for decades, these two strands of scholarship only dovetailed at their edges, in the work of a few far-seeing scholars. The fields began to more productively merge before and after the turn of the century. In this Element, the authors take an interactive approach to this problem and sketch four mechanisms that seem promising in effecting a true fusion: legal mobilization, legal-political opportunity structure, social construction, and movement-countermovement interaction. The Element also illustrates the workings and interactions of these four mechanisms from two examples of the authors' work: the campaign for same-sex marriage in the United States and social constitutionalism in South Africa.
Over the past two 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." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/cam021/2001016172.html.
This book examines the development of the language of social movements, revolutions, and terrorism from the seventeenth century to the present and looks at the impact of events such as 9/11 and innovations such as the Internet and social media on social mobilization.
Through his influential writings integrating the heritage of classical political theory with the perspective of modern comparative politics, Mario Einaudi has demonstrated how the twentieth-century political scientist can advance the eighteenth-century philosopher's pursuit of institutions that ensure freedom and civic virtue. Editors Katzenstein, Lowi, and Tarrow have brought together essays illuminating the creative tension in Einaudi's work between the theorist's belief in constitutions as the site for democracy and the realist's understanding of the frailty and contrariness of ordinary people. Eight distinguished scholars here explore the themes that constitute the core of Einaudi's contribution—the interdependence between Europe and America, the role of the comparative method, and the centrality of eighteenth-century theory. Taking individual writings by Einaudi as their starting point, the chapters address a rich diversity of topics.
Revolutions, social movements, religious and ethnic conflict, nationalism and civil rights, and transnational movements: these forms of contentious politics combine in Charles Tilly's and Sidney Tarrow's Contentious Politics. The authors present a set of analytical tools and procedures for study, comparison, and explanation of these very different sorts of contention. Drawing on many historical and contemporary cases, the book shows that similar principles describe and explain a wide variety of struggles as well as many more routine forms of politics. This fully revised and updated edition explores some of the major contentious events that have taken place since the original book was published in 2007, including the Occupy movement in the United States, the campaign for free elections in the city of Hong Kong, insurrections against Middle Eastern dictatorships, and armed conflicts on the border of the former Soviet Union. Comprehensive and empirically rich, Contentious Politics, 2nd edition remains a valuable resource for developing a more nuanced understanding of modern social movements and political conflicts for students and scholars.
Unlike political or economic institutions, social movements have an elusive power, but one that is no less real. From the French and American revolutions through the democratic and workers' movements of the nineteenth century to the totalitarian movements of today, movements exercise a fleeting but powerful influence on politics and society. This study surveys the history of the social movement, puts forward a theory of collective action to explain its surges and declines, and offers an interpretation of the power of movement that emphasises its effects on personal lives, policy reforms and political culture. While covering cultural, organisational and personal sources of movements' power, the book emphasises the rise and fall of social movements as part of political struggle and as the outcome of changes in political opportunity structure.
This book examines the relations between the material and political bases of contentious politics and the construction, diffusion and endurance of contentious language. Beginning with the language of revolution developed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, it examines contentious language at work, in gender and race relations and in nationalist and ethnic movements. It closes with an examination of emotions in contentious politics, reflecting on the changes in political language since 9/11 and assessing the impact of religion and recent innovations in electronic communication on the language of politics.
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