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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.

Anti-U.S. base protests, played out in parliaments and the streets of host nations, continue to arise in different parts of the world. In a novel approach, this book examines the impact of anti-base movements and the important role bilateral alliance relationships play in shaping movement outcomes. The author explains not only when and how anti-base movements matter, but also how host governments balance between domestic and international pressure on base-related issues. Drawing on interviews with activists, politicians, policy makers and U.S. base officials in the Philippines, Japan (Okinawa), Ecuador, Italy and South Korea, the author finds that the security and foreign policy ideas held by host government elites act as a political opportunity or barrier for anti-base movements, influencing their ability to challenge overseas U.S. basing policies.

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 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.

Drawing on an original survey of more than 5,000 respondents, this book argues that, contrary to claims by the 1994 Zapatista insurgency, indigenous and non-indigenous respondents in southern Mexico have been united by socioeconomic conditions and land tenure institutions as well as by ethnic identity. It concludes that - contrary to many analyses of Chiapas's 1994 indigenous rebellion - external influences can trump ideology in framing social movements. Rural Chiapas's prevalent communitarian attitudes resulted partly from external land tenure institutions, rather than from indigenous identities alone. The book further points to recent indigenous rights movements in neighboring Oaxaca, Mexico, as examples of bottom-up multicultural institutions that might be emulated in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

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 is the first cross-national and historical investigation of State-Mobilized Movements (SMMs). By enlarging the analytical horizons of social movement and civil society research, as well as our understanding of the bases of authoritarian rule, the volume aims to encourage debate and stimulate new research on state-society relations.

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.

How can we get inside popular collective struggles and explain how they work? Contentious Performances presents a distinctive approach to analyzing such struggles, drawing especially on incomparably rich evidence from Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The book accomplishes three main things. First, it presents a logic and method for describing contentious events, occasions on which people publicly make consequential claims on each other. Second, it shows how that logic yields superior explanations of the dynamics in such events, both individually and in the aggregate. Third, it illustrates its methods and arguments by means of detailed analyses of contentious events in Great Britain from 1758 to 1834.

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.

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.

Organization theory and social movement theory are two of the most vibrant areas within the social sciences. This collection of original essays and studies both calls for a closer connection between these fields and demonstrates the value of this interchange.

Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000, first published in 2004, is an analysis of the relationship between democratization and contentious politics that builds upon the model set forth in the pathbreaking book, Dynamics of Contention. Using a sustained comparison of French and British histories since 1650 or so as a springboard for more general comparison within Europe Contention and Democracy goes on to demonstrate that democratization occurred as result of struggles during which (as in 19th century Britain and France) few, if any, of the participants were self-consciously trying to create democratic institutions. Consequently, circumstances for democratization vary from era to era, region to region as functions of previous history, international environments, available models of political organization, and predominant patterns of social relations.