Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics

Book Preface

When the second edition of Power in Movement appeared in 1998,itwas during a period when it seemed to many that advanced industrial democracies such as America’s had entered a period of social movement calm. In East Central Europe, the excitement generated by the collapse of Communism had subsided; in Western Europe, the talk was of postindustrial politics; and the United States was roiled with bitter but low-level conflicts such as that which surrounded the bedroom behavior of President Bill Clinton. In Africa, Latin America, and Southeastern Europe, festering conflicts had exploded into civil wars; to many American scholars, including this one, it seemed as if social conflict was being contained (Meyer and Tarrow, eds. 1998).

Toward the turn of the new century, changes in the “real world” and of contentious politics began to be translated into scholarly work. First, scholars questioned the airtight separation of social movement studies from other forms of contention (McAdam et al. 2001). Next, they began to ask how, if we were living in a social movement society, ordinary people were responding to the dislocations caused by global neo-liberalism. Finally, although the 1990s had been a decade of relatively contained conflict, questions were raised about the violent movements that, here and there, were already roiling the surface of society.

These questions came together in Seattle, when a coalition of domestic and transnational groups exploded onto the streets and shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization. That protest electrified activists around the globe. In rapid succession, similar protests broke out in Genoa, G ¨otenburg, Montreal, Prague, and Washington, DC. In that wave of contention, protesters not only attacked targets beyond the nation-state but began to experiment with a new and imaginative repertoire of contention. They combined peaceful and violent performances, face-to-face and electronic mobilization, and domestic and transnational actions, leaving many convinced of the coming decline of state sovereignty and the rise of a movement for global democracy. They also triggered a new and more aggressive repertoire of protest policing, causing the death of a protester in Genoa and the arrest of many in protests surrounding the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004.

Only a year into the new century, the massacres on 9/11/2001 unveiled a new axis of transnational conflict between insurgent Islamist movements and the United States and its allies. In the wake of those events, scholars and statesmen became aware that the era of contained contention was over. In the United States, police and federal security agencies ratcheted up surveillance of all manner of groups, whether or not they had a relationship with the Islamist threat; in Madrid and London, lethal train bombings led to fear of home-grown Islamist militants in the heart of Europe; meanwhile, in the East, a string of electoral corruption protests shook the quasi-authoritarian systems of Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia, and the violence between Jews and Palestinians in Palestine/Israel ratcheted up with a new Intifada.
And that was not all: Under the government of George W. Bush, the anger, fear, and confusion of Americans at the massacres of September 11 were trans-fused into wars of reprisal and imperial expansion in Afghanistan and Iraq –the latter producing a brief but vital antiwar movement all over the planet. That movement failed to stop the rush to war, but it did give a boost to a new wave of antiwar contention. With its innovative use of the Internet to mobilize sup-porters, the movement sustained the surprising success of Governor Howard Dean in the 2004 primary elections and ultimately fed into the massive defeat of Bush’s Republican Party in the elections of 2006 and 2008. The age of the Internet had entered the world of social movements.

In the meantime, global support for neo-liberalism began to erode. In Latin America, leftwing and indigenous-backed governments rose to power: first, in Venezuela and Chile; then in Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Each built on domestic sources of conflict, but all framed their domestic campaigns against global neo-liberalism. At the same time, in East Central Europe, where post-1989 governments had warmly embraced “the Washington consensus,” a shift away from neo-liberal politics occurred as the costs of neo-liberalism began to sink in. And, finally, following the crisis set off by the Wall Street housing bubble, the entire edifice of the global financial system trembled, and a rhetoric of populism and class conflict spread across the world. Faced by these changes, new waves of contention began to traverse Europe and America.

Scholars were not slow to respond to these changes. The social movement canon that had been gradually constructed in the academy since the 1960s began to give way to new ideas and different perspectives. Some critics observed that scholars had focused too narrowly on Western reformist movements; oth-ers were troubled by the fact that existing models left out culture and emo-tions; still others complained that we had ignored the more violent forms of contention – civil wars, terrorist movements, and ethnic violence – that were spreading across the globe. Meanwhile, other scholars were investigating these broader expressions of contention, often with significant results, for example, in the systematic study of civil wars and guerilla insurgencies (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Collier and Sambanis, eds. 2006; Weinstein 2006).

Could these new efforts be blended with the more established tradition of social movement research? And could the latter encompass both the more violent forms of contention erupting in the global South and the dramatic increase in “nongovernmental organizations” around the planet? Some schol-ars – this author among them – thought the study of social movements could profit from a deliberate effort at integration with the study of other forms of contention and with newer strands of scholarship. With my collaborators, Doug McAdam and the late Charles Tilly, in a book titled Dynamics of Con-tention, we argued for an integration of social movement studies with the analysis of more violent forms of contention (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001).

No one put this argument more pithily than the late Roger Gould, who called for a broadening of the social movement canon to encompass the study of “contentious collective action.” Under this umbrella, Gould called for including in the same framework studies of “contemporary social movements along with peasant jacqueries, bread riots and grain seizures, slave revolts, ‘rough music,’ eighteenth and nineteenth century democratic societies, urban uprisings, arti-sanal blacklists and workshop turnouts, and revolutionary sects” (2005: 286). The second edition of Power in Movement already moved in this direction; this new edition has been revised and updated in the spirit of Gould’s more expansive notion of contentious politics.

In 1998, when the second edition of Power in Movement appeared, it was still too early to integrate many of the new empirical developments and schol-arly initiatives into a book already overloaded with movements, protests, cam-paigns, and evidence from different historical periods. That edition did include a chapter on the growing phenomenon of “transnational contention,” but the book appeared before the major transnational campaigns of the new century erupted; it was too soon to take account of the growing role of the Internet as a vehicle for mobilization. And it was drafted just as its author was beginning to employ a deliberate mechanism and process approach to contentious politics. This edition attempts to fill these gaps.

This edition maintains almost the same structure as the last one. But it attempts to address four lacunae: First, it integrates new material on social movements in Europe and the United States that has appeared over the last decade. Second, the chapter on transnational contention has been expanded to take advantage of excellent new work on contention, beyond borders by Clifford Bob, Donatella della Porta, Jackie Smith, and others. Third, the book draws on new material on civil wars, terrorism, and guerilla movements, espe-cially in the global South. And, finally, it builds on my collaboration with McAdam and Tilly, a partnership whose fruits are most evident in an almost entirely rewritten and expanded Part III.

Ithaca, New York June 30, 2010