Introduction From: Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (Cambridge U Press, 1994) Power and movement: two words that seldom appear together in learned or popular discourse. Yet all through history, ordinary people have erupted into the streets and exerted considerable power - if only briefly. In the last thirty years, alone, the American Civil Rights movement, the peace, environmental and feminist movements, and revolts against authoritarianism all over the world have brought masses of people into the streets demanding change. They often succeeded; but even when they failed, their movements had profound effects, and set in motion important political and international changes. Power in movement grows when ordinary people join forces in contentious confrontation with elites, authorities and opponents. Mounting, coordinating and sustaining this interaction is the peculiar contribution of the social movement. Movements are created when political opportunities open up for social actors who usually lack them. They draw people into collective action through known repertoires of contention and by creating innovations around their margins. At their base are the social networks and cultural symbols through which social relations are organized. The denser the former and the more familiar the latter, the more likely movements are to spread and be sustained. Triggered by the incentives created by political opportunities, combining conventional and challenging forms of action and building on social networks and cultural frames is how movements overcome the obstacles to collective action and sustain their interactions with opponents and with the state. How they do so, and the dynamics and outcomes of the protest cycles they produce, are the main subjects of this book. There are three major puzzles in the relations between power and movement. First, although ordinary people possess the resources for collective action during many periods of history, they mainly accept their fate or rise up timidly, only to be repressed. Under what conditions does the power in movement arise? A second question relates to the dynamics of movement. Popular power arises quickly, reaches a peak and soon evaporates or gives way to repression androutine. Is there a common dynamic in the careers of social movements, linking their enthusiastic births to peaks of contention to their disillusioned ends? The third question relates to movement outcomes. Do movements have an impact beyond the short-lived mobilizations that fill the evening news? The deterrents are considerable: Participants tire and defect; early protests that succeed create opportunities for others and for countermovements; elites control dissidence through reform or repression, while counterelites lead discontent off in new directions. If the impact of movements is so mediated and short lived, is the power in movement real? THE APPROACH OF THE STUDY These are the questions that I will address in this study. I will not attempt to present a history of the social movement. Nor will I press a particular theoretical perspective on the reader or attack others - a practice that has added more heat than light to this area of study. Instead, I will offer a broad framework for understanding the social movements, protest cycles and revolutions that began in the West and spread around the world over the past two centuries. Too often scholars have focused on particular theories or aspects of movement to the detriment of others. An example is how the subject of revolution has been treated. As Charles Tilly observes in a recent book, "great" revolutions are usually studied as sui generis phenomena (1993b), which makes it impossible to say how they differ from less great ones or from rebellions, social turmoil, riots and routine contention. The systematic study of "violence," which began in the wake of the American riots of the 1960s, has been segmented from that of peaceful protest. Movement organizations have frequently been detached by scholars from the mass phenomena that are thought to produce them and from the institutional politics that surround them. Strikes and industrial conflict have produced their own academic specialty, with little attention paid to the intersections between labor insurgency and the political struggle. The irreducible act that lies at the base of all social movements and revolutions is contentious collective action. Collective action takes many forms - brief or sustained, institutionalized or disruptive, humdrum or dramatic. Most of it occurs within institutions on the part of constituted groups who act in the name of goals that would hardly raise an eyebrow. It becomes contentious when it is used by people who lack regular access to institutions, act in the name of new or unaccepted claims and behave in ways that fundamentally challenge others. It produces social movements when social actors concert their actions around common claims in sustained sequences of interaction with opponents or authorities. Contentious collective action is the basis of social movements; not because movements are always violent or extreme, but because it is the main, and often the only recourse that most people possess against better-equipped opponents. 2routine. Is there a common dynamic in the careers of social movements, linking their enthusiastic births to peaks of contention to their disillusioned ends? The third question relates to movement outcomes. Do movements have an impact beyond the short-lived mobilizations that fill the evening news? The deterrents are considerable: Participants tire and defect; early protests that succeed create opportunities for others and for countermovements; elites control dissidence through reform or repression, while counterelites lead discontent off in new directions. If the impact of movements is so mediated and short lived, is the power in movement real? THE APPROACH OF THE STUDY These are the questions that I will address in this study. I will not attempt to present a history of the social movement. Nor will I press a particular theoretical perspective on the reader or attack others - a practice that has added more heat than light to this area of study. Instead, I will offer a broad framework for understanding the social movements, protest cycles and revolutions that began in the West and spread around the world over the past two centuries. Too often scholars have focused on particular theories or aspects of movement to the