I just know this r be abailable in electronic or .mp3 form, but Contentious Politics looks like a damn important and fascinating book for me to read..

Social contention theorists Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly created a great deal of interest in the “mechanisms” approach to social explanation with the publication of their Dynamics of Contention in 2001. The book advocated for several important new angles of approach to the problem of analyzing and explaining social contention: to disaggregate the object of analysis from macro-events like “civil war,” “revolution,” “rebellion,” or “ethnic violence” into the component social processes that recur in various instances of social contention; and to analyze these components as “causal mechanisms.”

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And here is how they want to make systematic, explanatory sense of the heterogeneous examples of social contention that the world presents: to identify and investigate some common social mechanisms that work in roughly similar ways across numerous different instances of social contention.

Social processes, in our view, consist of sequences and combinations of causal mechanisms. To explain contentious politics is to identify its recurrent causal mechanisms, the ways they combine, in what sequences they recur, and why different combinations and sequences, starting from different initial conditions, produce varying effects on the large scale…. Instead of seeking to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for mobilization, action, or certain trajectories, we search out recurrent causal mechanisms and regularities in their concatenation.

They offer these definitions of the key analytical terms:

• Mechanisms are a delimited class of events that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations.
• Processes are regular sequences of such mechanisms that produce similar (generally more complex and contingent) transformations of those elements.
• Episodes are continuous streams of contention including collective claims making that bears on other parties’ interests.

They distinguish among environmental mechanisms (“externally generated influences on conditions affecting social life”), cognitive mechanisms (“operate through alterations individual and collective perception”), and relational mechanisms (“alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks”) (25-26). And they offer a few examples of mechanisms: mobilization mechanisms, political identity formation mechanisms, and aggregation mechanisms.

The approach can be summarized in these terms:

Seen as wholes, the French Revolution, the American civil rights movement, and Italian contention look quite different from each other. … Yet when we take apart the three histories, we find a number of common mechanisms that moved the conflicts along and transformed them: creation of new actors and identities through the very process of contention; brokerage by activists who connected previously insulated local clumps of aggrieved people; competition among contenders that led to factional divisions and re-alignments, and much more. These mechanisms concatenated into more complex processes such as radicalization and polarization of conflict; formation of new balances of power; and re-alignments of the polity along new lines.

This is roughly the conception of social ontology and explanation that was put forward in 2001, and it was a powerful challenge to a more positivistic methodology that insisted on looking for general laws of contention and uniform regularities governing things like revolutions and civil wars.

By 2007, however, Tarrow and Tilly found it necessary to reformulate their views to some degree; and this re-thinking resulted in Contentious Politics. So what changed between the theory offered in 2001 and that restated in 2007? The answer is, surprisingly little at the level of concept and method.

One difference between the two versions of the theory is more substantive. In 2007 Tarrow and Tilly give greater priority to the performative nature of contentious politics: contentious performances and repertoires have greater prominence in the story offered in 2007 than in the analysis of episodes provided in 2001. This is not a new element, since Tilly himself made extensive use of the ideas of performance and repertoire in his earlier analyses of French contentious politics; but the theme is given more prominence in 2007 than it was in 2001.

Overall, it seems reasonable to say that Contentious Politics expresses the same conceptual framework for researching and understanding contention as that found in Dynamics of Contention. There is no fundamental break between the two works. What has changed is more a matter of pedagogy and presentation. The authors have sought to provide a more coherent and orderly presentation of the conceptual framework that they are presenting; and they have sought to provide an orderly and systematic analysis of the cases, in order to identify the mechanisms that recur across episodes.

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Filed under: Academia, Social Science Tagged: charles tilly, Civil War, contention, doug mcadam, rebellion, revolution, sidney tarrow, war