Contention

We are delighted to introduce the five excellent pieces in this article, which represent a broad cross section of contentious political cases and objects of study. We have in this issue studies from cases on three different continents, and two remarkable theoretical interventions of wide-ranging relevance.

Differential participation in violent protests has been explained in terms of protesters’ personal values, biographical availability, and network embeddedness. However, the form of mass protest may be influenced less by the microstructure of protesters and more by their collective past experiences of resistance. Through the South Korean candlelight protests of 2008 and 2016–2017, this article examines novices’ and repeaters’ perceptions of nonviolent protest. Onsite survey and interview data show that previous frustrating protest experiences in 2008 made repeater protesters more perseverant, even when violence was expected. Repeaters had little faith in “disciplined” protests, whereas novices hoped for change through “peaceful” protests. I argue that previous experiences of resistance and their outcomes influenced protesters’ perceptions on the efficiency and legitimacy of violent protest. By examining protesters’ varying perseverance, which mediates the condition of violence, this article advances the relationship between violence and civic participation.

Extinction Rebellion emerged in 2018 in the United Kingdom, and their activism quickly attracted the media spotlight, leading to similar groups springing up around this world. This swift ascendancy led to considerable interest in what is new or different about them. In this article, we review existing theories about this, and add an additional perspective. We argue that their most innovative feature is how they connect their tactics to their goals—i.e. their disruptive strategy. We use an original survey of members to support this argument. Our conclusions help pinpoint what is innovative about Extinction Rebellion UK, as well as to better understand their lessons for the broader environmental movement, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article explains how an interracial alliance that promotes a radical restructuring of agriculture, featuring African American small-scale producers, farmers of Euro-American descent, Latino farmworkers, and Indigenous people, has come into existence. As I argue, this coalition formed due to changes in international political economy and within transnational activist networks. Specifically, the implementation of neoliberal international trade deals beginning in the 1970s disrupted farmers’ livelihoods in the Global North and South. It drove migrants from countries such as Mexico and Guatemala to the United States with their experiences of agrarian reform, and it saw US farmers simultaneously begin to engage farmers of color in new and important ways. The transnational activist networks that facilitated visits and meetings subsequently provided opportunities for activists to learn from one another and have new experiences, which, as I explore, led people from diverse backgrounds to agree on various principles and forge a common vision.

Ethnoracial violence is a dynamic and multilayered phenomenon whose definition is at stake not only in academe but also in reality itself. It comes in two varieties, expressive and instrumental, when it serves to buttress the other four elementary forms of racial domination, namely, categorization, discrimination, segregation, and seclusion. I point out that the phenomenon is relatively rare and burdened with heavy moral baggage. I introduce distinctions based on directionality (vertical, horizontal), scale of the actors involved (individual, group, or state), degree of spectacularization, and type of ethnic classification system (categorical, gradational). The imperial domain offers an especially fruitful terrain for the comparative investigation and theoretical elaboration of the dynamics of racialization, violence, and the state. Students of human brutality in history should join hands with comparative scholars of race to throw new light on their explosive intersection.

In this article, I offer an engagement with Wacquant's checkerboard of ethnoracial violence. Drawing on material from the digitalized W. E. B. Du Bois archive, I focus on two theses of Du Boisian thought that I believe can enrich Wacquant's theorization of ethnoracial violence. In particular, I highlight how Du Bois emphasized (1) the process by which colonial violence gets (mis)recognized as nonviolence; and (2) how ethnoracial violence connects to capital accumulation as an essentially profitable enterprise. Bringing Du Bois’ work into the picture, I invite Wacquant to consider the relationship between ethnoracial violence and racial capitalism and to engage in a fuller discussion about the struggles in social space over the very definition of violence itself. I conclude by questioning how we might connect Wacquant's contemporary theorization with the work of intellectuals—such as Du Bois—who have put ethnoracial violence at the center of their concerns.