Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics)

McAdam, Doug

ISBN 10: 0521011876 / ISBN 13: 9780521011877

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2001

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9780521011877

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521011876
• ISBN 13: 9780521011877
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Dissatisfied with the compartmentalization of studies concerning strikes, wars, revolutions, social movements, and other forms of political struggle, McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly identify causal mechanisms and processes that recur across a wide range of contentious politics. Critical of the static, single-actor models (including their own) that have prevailed in the field, they shift the focus of analysis to dynamic interaction. Doubtful that large, complex series of events such as revolutions and social movements conform to general laws, they break events into smaller episodes, then identify recurrent mechanisms and proceses within them. Dynamics of Contention examines and compares eighteen contentious episodes drawn from many different parts of the world since the French Revolution, probing them for consequential and widely applicable mechanisms, for example, brokerage, category formation, and elite defection. The episodes range from nineteenth-century nationalist movements to contemporary Muslim-Hindu conflict to the Tiananmen crisis of 1989 to disintegration of the Soviet Union. The authors spell out the implications of their approach for explanation of revolutions, nationalism, and democratization, then lay out a more general program for study of contentious episodes wherever and whenever they occur.

Book Description

Over the past two decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other forms of nonroutine, or "contentious politics," has flourished as never before. And yet theory and research on the topic remain highly fragmented. The first of these divisions reflects the long-standing view that various forms of contention are indeed distinct and should be studied independent of others. A second traditional approach to the study of political contention denies the possibility of general theory, in deference to a thorough grounding in the temporal and spatial particulars of any given episode of contention. Finally, overlaid on these two divisions are stylized theoretical traditions--structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist--that have developed largely in isolation from one another.