ABSTRACT
Dissatisfaction with the contentious politics framework has been voiced time and again. Perhaps reflecting the rules of the academic arena, opponents of the dominant model have – while raising fundamental points – mostly used moderate action forms and pursued a reformative agenda, if at times spiced up with provocative language (Goodwin and Jasper, 2004; McAdam et al., 2001; Fillieule, 2006; Armstrong and Bernstein, 2008; Goodwin and Jasper, 2012). The classic agenda offers a mostly static and dichotomous analysis. Some of the founding case studies trace movements over time (McAdam, 1982; Tarrow, 1989), but they tend to stress changes in structural factors over the dynamics of contentious action. Even studies of waves of contention (Koopmans, 2004) mostly build on aggregate data of individual protest events and fail to address the relational character that link one event to the other, different collective actors in those events, and actors with each other in networks or coalitions (for a similar point, see Diani, 2011). The static analysis has, in addition, led to a perspective where a movement's targets are pictured merely as context (Jasper, 2012).
