Contentious Politics

Catalog description

On any given day, a newspaper reader is likely to come across several reports of contentious politics from around the world: Mass mobilization for racial justice in the U.S.A, protests in London over COVID-19 restrictions; ethnic cleansing in Myanmar; civil war in Syria; military coup in Mali; the rise of nationalist and White Supremacy groups in Europe; or terrorist attacks in Paris or Nigeria. A common feature of these political struggles is the disruptive, non-institutionalized, and episodic nature of political action. In contrast to the institutionalized, rule-based, and regulated everyday business of bureaucratic administration, lobbying, tax collection, law enforcement, information gathering, ceremonies of the state, etc. contentious political action involves public and collective claim-making with the intention of altering specific elements in the rules and regulations that govern the interaction between citizens or between citizens and the state. In this perspective, contentious politics can be viewed as a public and collective deliberation or negotiation of the social contract. Sometimes such deliberations and negotiations have little impact on the existing political institutions, at other times they lead to huge revolutionary changes to the entire political and economic order. Contentious politics is a relatively new, interdisciplinary field of study that covers a wide variety of political conflicts ranging from independence struggles and nationalistic movements to revolutions, democratic transitions, terrorism, ethnic conflicts, indigenous movements, and genocide. This course examines the dynamics of contention and how it relates to the development of political institutions. It explores the competing ideas about citizenship, rights, and justice that motivate political struggles between state and society or between groups within a society. As these ideas…