Abstract
Collective behavior and social movement (CBSM) scholars should be quite familiar with the writings of Sidney Tarrow, unless they have been living under a rock without an internet connection for the last twenty-five years. Tarrow has been incredibly productive, and his work is central to the vitality of the emergent CBSM intellectual community. Colleagues outside of the CBSM community not familiar with Tarrow’s work will find Strangers at the Gates a felicitous introduction to his broad oeuvre, his elegant writing, and his extraordinary skill at synthesizing wide bodies of research and scholarship. In these essays, Tarrow provides an easily accessible glimpse at a number of questions which have been central to the dialogue of the intellectually vital CBSM community in recent years, ones that have continued to occupy Tarrow’s attention. If you appreciate watching a playful, widely-read mind at work on interesting political-sociological puzzles, you should take a look at this book.
Tarrow is probably best known for his masterful summaries of the evolving theoretical consensus within the structural wing of the CBSM community as it expanded almost exponentially during the last three decades. Each revision of his influential Power in Movement (1994, 1998, 2011)—now in its fourth edition if one counts its origins in the modest pamphlet Tarrow published with the Center for International Studies at Cornell in 1983 (Struggling to Reform)—has continued voraciously to integrate new waves of scholarship around its central themes of the birth of the national social movement, the power of movements, and movement dynamics. I have taught the several editions of this book for twenty-five years in graduate seminars in social movements, and in my judgment it offers the most comprehensive integration of political strands of CBSM theory and research that exists. The essays comprising Strangers at the Gates provide a brief glimpse at Tarrow’s latest takes on the current status of many core CBSM ideas and debates. I will touch on only a few of the interesting issues and debates in what follows.
In the first chapter, “Theories of Contentious Politics,” Tarrow reprises his many earlier descriptions and assessments of the evolution of the theoretical tool kit available to analysts of political social movements. The chronological account includes an explication of conceptual tools drawn from Marx and Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Weber, Tocqueville, Wallerstein, Skocpol, the post-WWII collective behavior theorists (e.g., Kornhauser), new social movements theorists (notably Touraine), resource mobilization theorists (e.g., Zald and McCarthy), political process theorists (importantly Tilly and McAdam), and finally mechanisms and processes of interactive contention (McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow).
Tarrow’s own work has privileged the political opportunity approach and, in recent years, an interactive process mechanisms approach for understanding the emergence and trajectories of what he and colleagues term contentious politics, and both approaches are on display here. They have effectively, and now explicitly, narrowed the scope of attention from collective social movement action to contentious political action, substantiating John Lofland’s early warning to beware of political scientists bearing gifts. Each of these approaches has elicited extensive criticism from other CBSM scholars, but almost none of that critical scholarship is acknowledged in these essays.
Tarrow is probably best known for his original work and his syntheses of the work of others around the concept of political opportunity, which he defines here as “. . . consistent—but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national signals to social or political actors that either encourage or discourage them to use their internal resources to form social movements” (p. 78). Chapter Five nicely brings together many of his previous discussions and ruminations on the implications of the idea. These ideas have spawned an immense amount of empirical research, not all consistent with their expectations, however, and have recently spurred what I suspect will come to be seen as a very productive critical dialogue about how best to understand political opportunity in explaining the emergence of protest (e.g., Goodwin and Jasper 2012).
Chapter Six, entitled “The Phantom at the Opera,” explores the role of political parties and elections in facilitating and shaping contentious politics, pretty much neglected (oddly) by North American CBSM scholars. In doing so, Tarrow maps a comprehensive research agenda for bringing parties and elections into a central place for understanding the dynamics of social movements.
An empirical puzzle that has intrigued movement scholars since the world-wide burst of movement activity in the late 1960s is that of waves or cycles of movement activity, particularly protest activity, which is the focus of Tarrow’s well-received Democracy and Disorder (1989). In Chapter Seven, “From Eventful History to Cycles of Contention,” and Chapter Eight, “From ‘Moments of Madness’ to Waves of Contention,” he revisits the many pieces of the puzzle summarizing the subsequent scholarship that characterizes the consistent features of protest waves as including “. . . heightened conflict, broad sectoral and geographical extension, the appearance of new organizations and the appropriation of old ones, the creation of new ‘master frames’ of meaning, and the invention of new forms of collective action” (p. 133). The highlights of these two essays occur when Tarrow brings social historians’ intense analyses of key contentious events in history (e.g., the taking of the Bastille) into dialogue with the more recent and more ahistorical analyses of waves and cycles, along with a reanalysis of the data he used in his original analyses of the Italian protest wave in his 1989 book using theoretical tools that have since accumulated in the study of waves.
Tarrow very early began to explore transnational social movements (see especially his paper with Sarah Soule on the 1848 Revolutions), and Chapters Eleven and Twelve in this volume touch upon some of the theoretical and empirical questions regarding their dramatic rise in the late twentieth century. So, too, has Tarrow struggled with how to integrate meaning into the analysis of contentious politics, especially as the “cultural turn” has increasingly influenced the work of younger CBSM scholars skeptical of the main theoretical questions that motivate the contentious politics approach. Chapter Ten, “‘What’s in a Word?’ How Contention Shapes Contentious Language,” provides an introduction to his current thinking about how to integrate meaning into the study of contentious politics, much expanded in his recent book, The Language of Contention: Revolutions in Words, 1688–2012 (2013).
There is much to appreciate in Sidney Tarrow’s work, well displayed in these essays. Nevertheless, a primary focus upon contentious political collective action ignores a large swath of contentious collective action by social movement actors, many of whose efforts are aimed at not only, or even, political actors, but corporate actors of many other kinds, including firms, universities, media institutions, and cultural institutions, including religious groups. It ignores also the vast literature on the contextual and social psychological factors shown to be important in understanding individual social movement participation. There exists a large and rapidly expanding body of CBSM research seeking to understand collective action and individual social movement participation in these other domains that many of its practitioners believe requires theoretical tools not provided by a contentious politics approach to social movements. But that is another part of the story, much of it succinctly summarized by Snow and Soule (2009).