Contention

This issue of Contention brings together a veritable smorgasbord of offerings. The six publications in this issue span a broad variety of different engagements, from debates and symposia to conventional articles and an insightful research note.

Loïc Wacquant's “A Checkerboard of Ethnoracial Violence” offers a sharp analysis of racial violence, highlighting its varying forms, functions, and scales. We aim to enrich Wacquant's framework by unpacking the idea of cumulative radicalization. Originally developed in Holocaust studies, this concept allows one to specify connections between different forms and functions of violence by interrogating the interplay between different levels of analysis. It also sheds light on why the scale of violence sometimes shifts in destructive ways and provides mechanisms for why racialized boundaries lend themselves to mass murder. Deeper engagement with cumulative radicalization transforms checkers into simultaneous chess, as it helps us formulate a multilevel theory of violent escalation.

This article offers three recommendations for researchers who study comparative race and human brutality, doing so in dialogue with Loïc Wacquant's recent “A Checkerboard of Ethnoracial Violence.” The first pertains to the importance in research on ethnoracial violence of distinguishing between categorization, classification, and valuation processes. The second pertains to the importance of testing how biologized and essentialized classification schemes influence violence, in comparison to those that are more fluid and malleable. The third pertains to the process of selecting cases for comparative analyses on race and violence. Each recommendation is intended to extend Wacquant's “checkerboard” by further exploring how macro-level dynamics of racialization and violence influence micro-level cognitive, relational, and situational dynamics on the ground. Each is therefore interconnected with the other two, with the second building on the first, and third building on the first and second.

I am grateful to my four critics for taking kindly to my intrusion into the social science of race and human brutality in history and for responding to my sketch of “The Checkerboard of Ethnoracial Violence” (Wacquant 2023a) with earnest and productive comments. In the spirit of their articles, I will rejoin to their propositions and then enroll them to suggest further pathways to a better understanding of the specificity and historicity of racialized violence, individual and collective.

Two major anti-sweatshop groups—United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and SweatFree Communities—pursued similar goals in different social arenas: college campuses and city governments. This article examines their shared strategy of gradual escalation, demonstrating how social movements must balance coercion and consent to effectively pressure authorities. Both groups aimed to enforce pro-labor rights codes for apparel industry partners, using distinct yet escalating strategies. USAS employed extra-institutional tactics like sit-ins and hunger strikes, while SweatFree Communities leveraged electoral politics. Both began with awareness-raising efforts, such as teach-ins and film screenings, before escalating to coercive tactics—protests and sit-ins for USAS and mobilizing key voting blocs for SweatFree Communities. Despite operating in different arenas, both groups followed a pattern of building legitimacy before applying structural power.

The Arab Spring of 2010–2011 marked the beginning of a process of sociopolitical transformation in several societies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This series of mobilizations represented a turning point for a generation of young people who lived and experienced them. This research note examines a small number of young Egyptians who participated in mobilizations against Hosni Mubarak, with an emphasis on their subjectivities and ways of understanding this moment and their latter exile in a town (Dahab) in Egypt a decade later. After briefly reviewing relevant literature on the Arab Spring, I report on in-depth interviews with young Egyptians who were part of these mobilizations as activists.

Transformative events are typically analyzed in relation to repression, whereas the conditions under which human-made disasters spur social mobilization remain understudied. This article addresses this gap showing how disaster-induced contention is uniquely tied to a human factor: emergency events become catalysts for protest through human (in)action, allowing activists to politicize state neglect and lack of accountability structures. This process faces distinct logistical and strategic challenges that distinguish disaster-induced contention from backlash protest in reaction to state violence. Through a comparison of the 2023 dam collapse in the Libyan city of Derna, the 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, and the 2020 Beirut port explosion, we identify external and internal pressures that shape post-disaster mobilization, offering a framework for understanding the challenges of contentious politics in emergency contexts.