Book Review: Dynamics of Contention

In Dynamics of Contention (2001), Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly develop an innovative theoretical framework based on comparative analysis to identify and explain causal mechanisms and processes of contentious politics for democratization, nationalism, revolution, ethnic conflict, and social movement. The authors, critical of the classic social movement agenda static, single actor models of explaining events such as revolutions and social movements present alternative explanations to these events by breaking these events into smaller episodes and identifying recurrent mechanism and processes within them. The authors examine and compare fifteen contentious episodes drawn from different parts of the world since the French Revolution, probing them for consequential and widely applicable mechanisms. In examining other episodes in contemporary times, the authors spell out the implications of their approach for explanation of revolutions, nationalism, and democratization by laying out a more general program of study of contentious episodes wherever and whenever they occur.