ABSTRACT
Early social movement research tended to draw a sharp distinction between peaceful protest and armed conflict. One consequence of this was that social movement researchers tended to focus on stable democratic societies rather than divided societies where political violence was an important part of the repertoire of contention. This sharp distinction between protest and political violence has been strongly challenged over the past two decades by research that locates both forms of contention within a broader continuum of contentious politics and explores the strong links and continuities between them. Della Porta’s groundbreaking work on the transition from protest to violence in 1970s Germany and Italy (1995) was one of the first studies to show just how intimately they were interrelated. Robert White’s work on the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) (1989) was one of the earliest social movement analyses of these links in the Irish context. The development of the contentious politics frame (see, for example, McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly 2003; Tilly and Tarrow 2007) has reinforced this understanding. As Tilly (2003: 238) puts it:
[C]ollective violence […] emerges from the ebb and flow of collective claim making and struggles for power. It interweaves incessantly with nonviolent politics […] and changes as a consequence of essentially the same causes that operate in the nonviolent zones of collective political life.
