Contentious Politics
Definition
The academic frame — developed by Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, and Doug McAdam in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge, 2006) — for sustained collective claim-making by ordinary people against powerful targets, outside institutional politics and routine interest-group channels.
It treats protests, strikes, riots, and revolutions as a single analytical field: episodes of contentious performance in which previously unpoliticised actors make claims on authorities that have previously been excluded from routine politics. The McAdam / Tarrow / Tilly volume codifies the frame in terms of mechanisms — recurring causal pathways such as brokerage (linking previously unconnected actors), diffusion (spread of a campaign form across space or time), certification (third-party endorsement), and radicalisation (shift in scale or intensity, often in response to repression) — and processes — historical sequences such as insurgence, deterioration, reactive coalescence, brinkmanship, and expansion. [source: dynamics-of-contention]
Practitioners read the framework for its diagnostic vocabulary (political opportunity structure, threat/opportunity spirals, modular vs autonomous collective action frames) and use it to plan when and how to escalate.
Full page: [[contentious-politics]].