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Rina Agarwala investigates how vulnerable workers are organizing to improve their livelihoods in India. Drawing on 300 personal interviews with women workers in construction and tobacco, she finds these workers are launching an innovative movement to assert their rights.

Why do new social movement tactics spread to some places and not others? Wood argues that inequalities rooted in political history, political economy and local interactions can make social movements more or less able to evaluate and incorporate new tactics.

Growing numbers of citizens find pathways to engagement through simple, everyday discourses shared over social media networks. The Logic of Connective Action offers a framework and a rich set of case studies to explain these increasingly common forms of public engagement with contemporary issues, and shows how they complement more conventional models of collective action in contentious politics.

This study examines the political sources of violence against religious minorities in India. Focusing on Hindu organizations that have asserted dominance over religious minorities, particularly since the late 1980s, Amrita Basu questions the common assumption that Hindu-Muslim violence is inevitable.

This book argues that protest by ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia brought about policy changes and integrated Hungarian minorities into the democratic process. Ethnic protest allowed groups to learn about the nature and limits of each other's claims, facilitating new democratic institutions.

This book examines anti-corporate activism in the United States and traces the shift brought about by deregulation and the decline in organized labor, which prompted activists to target corporations directly. Soule provides a nuanced understanding of the changing focal points of activism directed at corporations.

This book reports the results of a comparative study of twenty communities earmarked for environmentally risky energy projects. The authors find the overall level of emergent opposition to the projects very low, and they seek to explain that variation and the impact it had on the proposed projects.

This book analyzes transnational advocacy by conservatives. Mobilizing around diverse issues, their networks challenge progressive foes. Examining combat over gay rights and gun control, Clifford Bob's conclusions about norms, activists and institutions will change how campaigners fight, scholars analyze policy wars, and all of us understand global politics.

Networks in Contention examines how interactions between different organizations within the international climate change movement shape strategic decisions and the outcomes organizations are able to achieve. It explores how these actors can become more effective and suggests lessons for the future coordination of activism.

Why would authoritarian leaders lose elections? Bunce and Wolchik answer this question by analyzing a remarkable run of electoral victories by the opposition in postcommunist Europe from 1998 to 2005. They conclude that these upset elections occurred because of the work of a transnational network committed to electoral change.

This study explores the contradictory character of African nationalism as it unfolded over decades of Tanzanian history in conflicts over public policies. These policy debates reflected a history of racial oppression and foreign domination and were shaped by a quest for economic development, racial justice, and national self-reliance.

Although it was one of the monumental events, the Cultural Revolution remains one of the most understudied political mass movements. This book will reshape the scholarship on the Cultural Revolution, both because of its stark treatment of political violence and its focus on events in the Chinese countryside.

How did NAFTA catalyze solidarity among US, Canadian, and Mexican unions? By showing how transnational laws and governance institutions constrain and expand transnational social movements, this book argues that, collectively, unions can help shape how the rules governing the global economy are made.

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.

This book examines the success and failure of social movements to bring about change in American society. Joseph Luders focuses on the targets of protests and affected bystanders, their interests, and their responses to explain the diverse outcomes of social movements.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of diverse social movements protesting the free market and advocating socialization ushered in governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Silva offers the first comparative account, analyzing the motive for the protests and the power of the movements behind them.

Thaxton analyzes how the local Communist Party agents of the Mao-led central government imposed the famine of the Great Leap Forward on one rural village, how villagers remember this traumatic experience, and how they engaged in resistance to escape the famine and the predatory rule it reflected.

As the nuclear arms race exploded in the 1980s, a group of U.S. religious pacifists known as the Plowshares movement used radical nonviolence to intervene. Nepstad documents the emergence and diffusion of this international movement and explains why some of these Plowshares groups have persisted while others have collapsed.

This book scrutinizes the series of food riots in Argentina in December 2001. It pays particular attention to the secret relationships among looters, political activists, and police forces. These clandestine relationships constitute the gray zone of politics.

In this book, Silvia Pedraza links Cuba's revolution and its mass exodus not only as cause and consequence but also as profoundly social and human processes that were not only political and economic but also cognitive and emotive. The book uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to gain insight into the political disaffection of Cuban refugees.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the confrontation between popular movements and repressive regimes in Central America for the three decades beginning in 1960, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala. It examines both urban and rural groups as well as both nonviolent social movements and revolutionary movements.

In the twentieth century, indigenous people in Latin America started to speak out, mobilize, and organize in unprecedented ways. This book asks: why are indigenous people mobilizing now and why only in specific places? This book answers these questions with insight into their advancement and reform of democracy.

The aim of this book is to highlight and give 'voice' to some of the notable 'silences' evident in recent years in the study of contentious politics. The co-authors hope to redress the present topical imbalance in the field by taking up seven specific topics in the volume.

How do a few Third World political movements become global causes celebres, 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.

The New Transnational Activism, first published in 2005, shows how even the most prosaic activities can assume broader political meanings when they provide ordinary people with the experience of crossing transnational space. This means that we cannot be satisfied with defining transnational activists through the ways they think.

Where Did the Revolution Go? considers the apparent disappearance of the large social movements that have contributed to democratization. Revived by recent events of the Arab Spring, this question is once again paramount. Is the disappearance real, given the focus of mass media and scholarship on electoral processes and 'normal politics'? Does it always happen, or only under certain circumstances? Are those who struggled for change destined to be disappointed by the slow pace of transformation? Which mechanisms are activated and deactivated during the rise and fall of democratization? This volume addresses these questions through empirical analysis based on quantitative and qualitative methods (including oral history) of cases in two waves of democratization: Central Eastern European cases in 1989 as well as cases in the Middle East and Mediterranean region in 2011.

Are there any commonalities between such phenomena as soccer hooliganism, sabotage by peasants of landlords' property, incidents of road rage, and even the events of September 11? With striking historical scope and command of the literature of many disciplines, this book, first published in 2003, seeks the common causes of these events in collective violence. In collective violence, social interaction immediately inflicts physical damage, involves at least two perpetrators of damage, and results in part from coordination among the persons who perform the damaging acts. Professor Tilly argues that collective violence is complicated, changeable, and unpredictable in some regards, yet that it also results from similar causes variously combined in different times and places. Pinpointing the causes, combinations, and settings helps to explain collective violence and its variations, and also helps to identify the best ways to mitigate violence and create democracies with a minimum of damage to persons and property.

Clandestine Political Violence compares four types of clandestine political violence: left-wing (in Italy and Germany), right-wing (in Italy), ethnonationalist (in Spain) and religious fundamentalist (in Islamist clandestine organizations). Oriented toward theory building, Della Porta develops her own definition of clandestine political violence. Building on the most recent developments in social movement studies, Della Porta proposes an original interpretative model. Using a unique research design, she singles out some common causal mechanisms at the onset, during the persistence and at the demise of clandestine political violence. The development of the phenomenon is located within the interactions among social movements, countermovements and the state. She pays particular attention to the ways different actors cognitively construct the reality they act upon. Based on original empirical research as well as existing research in many languages, this book is rich in empirical evidence on some of the most crucial cases of clandestine political violence.

This book argues that political and economic inequalities following group lines generate grievances that in turn can motivate civil war. Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Halvard Buhaug offer a theoretical approach that highlights ethnonationalism and how the relationship between group identities and inequalities are fundamental for successful mobilization to resort to violence. Although previous research highlighted grievances as a key motivation for political violence, contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed grievances as irrelevant, emphasizing instead the role of opportunities. This book shows that the alleged non-results for grievances in previous research stemmed primarily from atheoretical measures, typically based on individual data. The authors develop new indicators of political and economic exclusion at the group level, and show that these exert strong effects on the risk of civil war. They provide new analyses of the effects of transnational ethnic links and the duration of civil wars, and extended case discussions illustrating causal mechanisms.

Gillion demonstrates the direct influence that political protest behavior has on Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court, illustrating that protest is a form of democratic responsiveness that government officials have used, and continue to draw on, to implement federal policies. Focusing on racial and ethnic minority concerns, this book shows that the context of political protest has served as a signal for political preferences. As pro-minority rights behavior grew and anti-minority rights actions declined, politicians learned from minority protest and responded when they felt emboldened by stronger informational cues stemming from citizens' behavior, a theory referred to as the 'information continuum'. Although the shift from protest to politics as a political strategy has opened the door for institutionalized political opportunity, racial and ethnic minorities have neglected a powerful tool to illustrate the inequalities that exist in contemporary society.