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 tru...

Social movements have an elusive power but one that is altogether real. From the French and American revolutions to the Arab Spring, and to ethnic and terrorist movements of today, contentious politics exercises a fleeting but powerful influence on politics, society and international relations. Covering key episodes up to the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021, leading scholar of politics and government Sidney Tarrow uses a number of recent, historical and comparative case studies to...

How do social movements intersect with the agendas of mainstream political parties? When they are integrated with parties, are they coopted? Or are they more radically transformative? Examining major episodes of contention in American politics – from the Civil War era to the women's rights and civil rights movements to the Tea Party and Trumpism today – Sidney Tarrow tackles these questions and provides a new account of how the interactions between movements and parties have been transform...

Movements and parties have given rise to two largely separates specialties in the social sciences. This Element is an effort to link the two literatures, using evidence from American political development. It identifies five relational mechanisms governing movement/party relations: two of them short term, two intermediate term, and one long-term. It closes with a reflection on the role of movement/party relations in democratization and for democratic resilience.

From Contention to Democracy addresses a crucial aspect of contemporary societies: the role of social movements for political and social change. The volume gathers together essays written by prominent social theorists who have been asked to reflect on the relationship between movements and processes of social, political and cultural change.Three broad types of movement-change nexus are distinguished and discussed: incorporation, transformation, and democratization. The cha...

Is there more social protest now than there was prior to the movement politics of the 1960s, and if so, does it result in a distinctly less civil society throughout the world? If everybody protests, what does protest mean in advanced industrial societies? This volume brings together scholars from Europe and the U.S., and from both political science and sociology, to consider the ways in which the social movement has changed as a political form and the ways in which it continues to change t...

Even before the 2016 presidential election took place, groups and individuals angry at Donald Trump, and frightened about what a Trump presidency could mean, were taking to the streets. After the election, and particularly after he inaugural, the protests continued. Over time, the Resistance was joined by a broad variety of groups and embraced an increasing diversity of tactics. In The Resistance, David S. Meyer and Sidney Tarrow have gathered together a cast of eminent scholars t...

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 langu...

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 w...

Globalization and Resistance brings together cutting-edge theory and research about how global economics and politics alter the way ordinary people engage in contentious political action. The cases range from nineteenth-century Irish immigrant networks, to protests against World Bank projects in the Amazon, to contemporary transnational organizing for the environment, to the "battle of Seattle." The volume illuminates the reciprocal effects between globalization processes and soci...

This landmark volume brings together some of the titans of social movement theory in a grand reassessment of its status. For some time, the field has been divided between a dominant structural approach and a cultural or constructivist tradition. The gaps and misunderstandings between the two sides-as well as the efforts to bridge them-closely parallel those in the discipline of sociology at large. This book aims to further the dialogue between these two distinct approaches to social moveme...

In this book, two titans of social movement scholarship bring together the best current research on the nexus between the local and the global in translating the global justice movement into action at the grass roots, and vice versa. Using recent cases of transnational contention_from the European Social Forum in Florence to the Argentinean human rights movement and British environmentalists, from movement networks in Bristol and Glasgow to the Zapatistas_the original chapters by distingui...