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 have evolved through history contentious politics too have undergone major changes. The course traces these changes and discusses how the impact of globalization on state sovereignty is fueling the emergence of new contentious issues. The course is divided into three parts. It starts out by taking a closer look at how contentious politics as a new, interdisciplinary field was born out of an explicit critique of the various discipline-specific subfields that focus on different forms of non-routine or disruptive politics. Instead of treating democratic transition, nationalism, civil war, independence struggles, revolution, social movements, coup d¿état, large-scale ethnic violence and genocide as unique phenomena in need of sui generis explanations, proponents of the new framework call for a broader and more synthetic approach to theory and empirical research. From here, the course moves on to discuss the underlying dynamics that inform and motivate political contention. It discusses how ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, rights, and justice have fueled collective struggles and how new forms of contention have emerged through history in response to the rise of novel ideas. Next, we will investigate a number of different forms of contention ranging from revolution, and genocide to pro-democracy and indigenous movements. Among the many instances of contentious processes that we will cover are Black Lives Matter Movement, the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle, the rise of White Supremacy groups in the U.S.A. and genocide in Sudan. The course concludes with a discussion of how globalization, supranational states structures such as the EU, and new information technologies are producing new forms of contentious politics.
Continuing Education Units (CEU) :