Dynamics of Contention: A Great Leap Forward?

Charles Tilly and his colleagues' effort in Dynamics of Contention is a colossal one. They aim to develop a new way of looking at contentious politics and try to gauge similar patterns in what have so far been regarded as distinct phenomena. Such an effort ends up having merits as well as handicaps, though. I will try to address three issues in this paper (one merit and two handicaps).

The place of case studies in comparative research has long been an issue of debate. Given that all empirical analyses in Dynamics of Contention are eventually case studies, the virtue of the arguments developed in this book might support/undermine the overall virtue of case studies regarding comparative research. Obviously, the arguments and conclusions of Tilly and his colleagues cannot be generalized from their pair-studies, and these scholars admit this from the very start anyway. Yet if we consider theory-building a process comprising of several steps, rather than an end point where we finalize our propositions, case studies become useful tools that we can benefit from in most of the steps of theory building. What makes case studies in general and Tilly and his friends' research in particular important is that via thorough analyses of individual cases, this type of research is better equipped to capture the "mechanism" and "processes" that connect relevant phenomena. And this gives them a relative advantage over large-N studies in speculating about causal relationships. Indeed, then, if Dynamics of Contention is not a theory-building research, it is a very good hypothesis-generating one.

Yet it seems to me that Tilly et al. are doing what Sartori once criticized as excessive abstraction. The primary aim of the authors of Dynamics of Contention is to go beyond the previous static approaches and develop a dynamic approach to contentious politics. Though this sounds very exciting and promising, Tilly and his colleagues seem to achieve dynamism mostly through emptying the substantive elements of their arguments. Their relational approach focuses on the general question of "how" contentious politics influence social life; but this approach has very little to say about more concrete questions like "who", "what", or "when"; all these substantive questions are left to be answered where I felt most at home-, I started to doubt the novelty of Tilly and his colleagues' dynamic approach. Tilly et al. criticize the previous research on democratization for focusing on conditions rather than mechanisms. They then offer a dynamic account of democratization with mechanisms operating on three domains: public politics, inequality, and networks of trust. Yet it seems to me that these three domains have already been identified increasing inequality between the capitalist and labor classes- was the primary cause of the development of democracy in the Western world; and finally Lipset (1959) and others contend that rising civic virtues as a result of educational and demographic improvements, which alter existing relations of trust, play an important role in democratization. Tilly and his colleagues might still criticize these accounts for being partial. Yet in this case, what we need would be a synthesis of some current research, rather than a novel approach which they try to develop.

a spectacular bellyflop

If you are an academic involved with the field of social movements, you need to read this book, simply because so much of the current debate in the field is about it. If you are not such a person, don't bother. Dynamics of Contention is immensely disappointing. Within the field of social movement studies, the authors are supposed to be the equivalent of Olympic-level divers--but what they deliver is a spectacular bellyflop. I give the book two stars because the core ideas lying behind it are good. The authors want to break down the artificial academic barriers separating various fields that all deal with "contentious politics"--social movements, revolutions, ethnic conflict, etc. They also want to move beyond their own structurally oriented work, so central to the academic field of social movements, to try to incorporate the ideas of their cultural constructionist critics, plus introduce more of a focus on social relations. Instead of trying to create an invariant model, they want to search for patterns that recurr in widely different types of social conflicts, with different outcomes. Finally, their methodology of comparing unlike cases to find the common patterns is intriguing. Unfortunately, they never really develop a solid intellectual framework for all this. They identify some common patterns, but never explain the dynamics underlying them or why they are so common. They are rather inept in their attempts to bring culture into the picture, engaging in very thin description. In their attempt to create a more relational approach, they completely abandonn all the valuable structurally oriented work they've done. Finally, despite their attempt to focus on relationships and dynamic social actors, human agency--as in so much academic work on social movements--falls out of the picture. Although the authors obviously put a lot of work into this book, it just does not come together.