Contention

This issue of Contention is definitvely international, featuring data and cases from dozens of countries including Rwanda and China. We are proud to be a journal sought out by scholars working on diverse non-Western cases as well as by those conducting ambitious international analyses. As editors, we firmly believe that an interdisciplinary journal is best served by also being international, and as the journal continues to grow, we are looking to turn our attention toward building editorial teams featuring excellent scholars from around the world. We hope that the variety of international cases in our pages will one day be mirrored by a similarly international community of authors, reviewers, and editors.

Recent years have witnessed a turn in the field of contentious politics toward the study of political violence, yet scholars have yet to focus their lens on genocide. Moreover, research on genocide is characterized by fundamental disagreements about its definition, origins, and dynamics, leading to a lack of generalizable theory. As a remedy, this article suggests that research on genocide can be improved by incorporating concepts from social movements. After reviewing the history of research on social movements and genocide, I analyze civilian participation in the Rwandan genocide as an example of how social movement theory helps explain civilian mobilization for genocide. Finally, I propose that a contentious politics approach to genocide would consider it one among many forms of contentious collective action, analyzable within the existing framework of social movement theory.

This article examines data from the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive and the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset on protest events, levels of welfare generosity (the extent to which welfare protection is provided by non-market actors), and welfare state regimes in 18 advanced industrialized countries across the period 1971–2002. Using a direct measure of protest events in terms of frequency of riots, demonstrations, general strikes, political assassinations, and attempted revolutions, the article finds that there is a significant relationship between welfare generosity, welfare state regimes, and protest events. The findings demonstrate that more extensive welfare arrangements—conceptualized through the use of empirical data—not only ameliorate social disadvantages and thus legitimate market economies and capital accumulation, but also bring about stability and social order.

Institutional distrust has become a pervasive element of global society in general and European society in particular. Concurrently, participation in institutions is also declining, raising concerns about the effectiveness of civil society. Distrust of institutions like the political, education, legal-judicial, and law enforcement systems is linked to declining participation in mainstream political behaviors like voting, but it is unclear how individuals’ trust of and participation in certain institutions affects social movement activity and participation in protest. Here, I use recent European protest movements to better understand the link between institutional distrust, institutional participation, and social protest. Using the 7th wave of the European Social Survey, I construct several multilevel mixed-effects logistic regressions predicting participation in four forms of protest: signing petitions, boycotting products, wearing protest badges, and participating in demonstrations. It turns out that, while institutional distrust is moderately and positively linked to certain forms of protest, those who partake in mainstream political institutions are far more likely to participate in all forms of protest.

This article provides a multidimensional approach to understanding the interactional dynamics of political contention. By reexamining the highly influential case of the Beijing student movement in 1989 with newly published memoirs from top party leaders and central student figures of the movement, we show more clearly that the escalating conflict between the government and protesters and their nuanced interplay grew, developed, and took on its own identity as the process evolved. It was the increasingly boisterous divisions within both the Communist Party and the student body itself, coupled with their close interactional relationship and interdependence, that resulted in a violent outcome that neither party had envisaged or intended. This finding suggests that multidimensional interactions may have triggered causal processes that escalated both the scale and the influence of the mobilization.

Responding to the debate that was carried on in recent issues of this journal, this article argues that the era of revolutions is not by any means over, but that an “evolution of revolution” has occurred over the past few decades that has fundamentally transformed what revolutions are. This development forces us to rethink how we approach revolutions as sociological phenomena. Instead of employing strict definitions that make sharp distinctions between revolutions and nonrevolutions, we are better served by more inclusive approaches to revolutionary change. The article outlines some of the ways in which revolutions have evolved and how we might go about understanding them.

If there is a single academic craft that is most sorely neglected in doctoral programs, most infrequently honed over the course of one's career, and most inconsistently exhibited at the top ranks of the academy, it is the practice of reviewing an article. Reflecting on conversations with editorial colleagues at Contention and other broad-scope journals, this essay draws together some brief guidelines on how best to compose the three most basic components of any academic review: criticism, praise, and recommendations to the editor.