This volume arose from a unique collaborative project that began in the early 1990s and stretched into the new millennium. Ultimately, the project involved twenty-one core participants and a host of others who attended one or more of the nine mini-conferences that structured the project. In form and function, the project resembled nothing so much as an extended collaborative conversation concerning the nature and dynamics of “contentious politics.”

Motivated by a shared concern that the study of social movements, revolutions, democratization, ethnic conflict, and other forms of nonroutine, or contentious, politics had grown fragmented, spawning a number of insular scholarly communities only dimly aware of one another, the project was committed above all else to exploring possible lines of synthesis – empirical and theoretical – that might transcend some of the scholarly conventions that still largely divide the field. Among these conventions are persistent theoretical divisions between rationalists, culturalists, and structuralists; putative differences between various forms of contention (e.g., social movements, revolutions, peasant rebellions, industrial conflict); and the long-standing assumption of area specialists that any general phenomenon -such as contentious politics – can only be understood in light of the idiosyncratic history and cultural conventions of the locale in which it takes place. While respectful of these conventional distinctions, the project has been committed to exploring their limits and embracing promising new approaches and topics in the study of political contention.