War, States, and Contention

A Comparative Historical Study

By: Sidney Tarrow

Narrated by: Greg Tremblay

For the last two decades, Sidney Tarrow has explored "contentious politics" - disruptions of the settled political order caused by social movements. These disruptions range from strikes and street protests to riots and civil disobedience to revolution. In War, States, and Contention, Tarrow shows how such movements sometimes trigger, animate, and guide the course of war and how they sometimes rise during war and in war's wake to change regimes or even overthrow states.

In the 21st century, movements are becoming transnational, and globalization and internationalization are moving war beyond conflict between states. The radically new phenomenon is not that movements make war against states but that states make war against movements. Tarrow finds this an especially troublesome development in recent US history. He argues that that the United States is in danger of abandoning the devotion to rights it had expanded through two centuries of struggle and that Americans are now institutionalizing as a "new normal" the abuse of rights in the name of national security. He expands this hypothesis to the global level through what he calls "the international state of emergency."

©2015 Cornell University (P)2016 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"War, States, and Contention is a necessary book for any serious discussion of our global future." (John R. Hall, University of California, Davis)

"Sidney Tarrow breaks important new ground."(David Cole, Georgetown University Law Center)

"An intellectually ambitious and deeply passionate book that ranges widely across time and space. It is a remarkable book." (Ronald R. Krebs, University of Minnesota)

a brilliant analysis of social movements constrain

and opportunities to fight for rights and liberties in times of extended interlinks between army state bureaucracy and corporations to control and dominate societies.