An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty—which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on earlier versions of this paper in a series of seminar presentations. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-9876477 and SES-9876530); support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences with funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; valuable research assistance from Ebru Erdem, Nikolay Marinov, Quinn Mecham, David Patel, and TQ Shang; sharing of data by Paul Collier.

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Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

The growing technical uncertainties and complexities of problems of global concern have made international policy coordination not only increasingly necessary but also increasingly difficult. If decision makers are unfamiliar with the technical aspects of a specific problem, how do they define state interests and develop viable solutions? What factors shape their behavior? Under conditions of uncertainty, what are the origins of international institutions? And how can we best study the processes through which international policy coordination and order emerge? While a variety of analytic approaches have been used to address the problems of international cooperation, the approaches have yielded only fragmentary insights. At its core, the study of policy coordination among states involves arguments about determinism versus free will and about the ways in which the international system is maintained and transformed. Among the overlapping topics of debate are whether national behavior is determined or broadly conditioned by system-level factors, unit-level factors, or some complex interplay between the two; whether state policymakers can identify national interests and behave independently of pressures from the social groups they nominally represent; and whether states respond consistently to opportunities to create, defend, or expand their own wealth and power, to enhance collective material benefits, or to promote nonmaterial values.' A related question of

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Introduction: epistemic communities and international policy coordination

Past analysis of social movements and social movement organizations has normally assumed a close link between the frustrations or grievances of a collectivity of actors and the growth and decline of movement activity. Questioning the theoretical centrality of this assumption directs social movement analysis away from its heavy emphasis upon the social psychology of social movement participants; it can then be more easily integrated with structural theories of social process. This essay presents a set of concepts and related propositions drawn from a resource mobilization perspective. It emphasizes the variety and sources of resources; the relationship of social movements to the media, authorities, and other parties; and the interaction among movement organizations. Propositions are developed to explain social movement activity at several levels of inclusiveness-the social movement sector, the social movement industry, and social movement organization.

Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

It is increasingly common for social scientists to describe political processes as “path dependent.” The concept, however, is often employed without careful elaboration. This article conceptualizes path dependence as a social process grounded in a dynamic of “increasing returns.” Reviewing recent literature in economics and suggesting extensions to the world of politics, the article demonstrates that increasing returns processes are likely to be prevalent, and that good analytical foundations exist for exploring their causes and consequences. The investigation of increasing returns can provide a more rigorous framework for developing some of the key claims of recent scholarship in historical institutionalism: Specific patterns of timing and sequence matter; a wide range of social outcomes may be possible; large consequences may result from relatively small or contingent events; particular courses of action, once introduced, can be almost impossible to reverse; and consequently, political development is punctuated by critical moments or junctures that shape the basic contours of social life.

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Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics

El reciente fallecimiento del sociólogo e historiador Charles Tilly (Lombard, Illinois, 1929-Bronx, Nueva York, 2008) puede servir de pretexto para rememorar una trayectoria investigadora sin duda excepcional, plasmada a lo largo de medio siglo en más de 600 artículos y 51 libros y monografías, que le convirtieron en el más influyente especialista en el análisis de la confrontación política en su relación con los grandes procesos de cambio social. Su audiencia mixta de historiadores interesados en sus métodos de análisis innovadores y de sociólogos que buscan modelos alternativos de acción colectiva y estrategias de investigación histórica que den respuesta a las cuestiones teóricas se explica en buena parte porque empleó un lenguaje ambivalente, pero razonablemente comprensible, y una metodología que siempre aspiró a situarse en el cruce entre la historia y la sociología. Su trayectoria intelectual puede ser contada como un dilatado tránsito desde el reduccionismo estructuralista de sus orígenes hacia lo que él mismo llamó “realismo relacional”: una nueva perspectiva de observación donde las transacciones, los vínculos sociales y las conversaciones se convertían en el tejido constitutivo de la vida social.

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From Mobilization to Revolution.

The word "mobilization" conveniently identifies the process by which a group goes from being a passive collection of individuals to an active participant in public life. Demobilization is the reverse process. Offensive mobilization is, however, often top-down. In the offensive case, a group pools resources in response to opportunities to realize its interests. Preparatory mobilization is no doubt the most top-down of all. In this variety, the group pools resources in anticipation of future opportunities and threats. Governmental repression is uniquely important because governments specialize in the control of mobilization and collective action: police for crowd control, troops to back them, spies and informers for infiltration, licensing to keep potential actors visible and tame. Contention for power links the mobilization model to the polity model. The word "socialism" itself originally represented the vision of a social order in which producers would control their own fates.

From mobilization to revolution

Part I. What's the Problem?: 1. What are they shouting about 2. Lineaments of contention 3. Comparisons, mechanisms, and episodes Part II. Tentative Solutions: 4. Mobilizations in comparative perspective 5. Contentious action 6. Transformations of contention Part III. Applications and Conclusions: 7. Revolutionary trajectories 8. Nationalism, national disintegration, and contention 9. Contentious democratization 10. Conclusions.

Dynamics of Contention

In recent decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other non-routine politics has flourished. And yet research on the topic remains highly fragmented, reflecting the influence of at least three traditional divisions. The first of these reflects the view that various forms of contention are distinct and should be studied independent of others. Separate literatures have developed around the study of social movements, revolutions and industrial conflict. A second approach to the study of political contention denies the possibility of general theory in deference to a grounding in the temporal and spatial particulars of any given episode of contention. The study of contentious politics are left to 'area specialists' and/or historians with a thorough knowledge of the time and place in question. Finally, overlaid on these two divisions are stylized theoretical traditions - structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist - that have developed largely in isolation from one another. This book was first published in 2001.

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This chapter claims war makes states, and discusses that mercantile capitalism and state making reinforced each other The reflections that follow merely illustrate analogy of war making and state making with organized crime from few hundred years of European experience and offer tentative arguments concerning principles of change and variation underlying experience War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and external violence Government's provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering European states built up their military apparatuses through sustained struggles with their subject populations and by means of selective extension of protection to different classes within those populations The agreements on protection constrained the rulers themselves, making them vulnerable to courts, to assemblies, to withdrawals of credit, services, and expertise

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Charles Tilly

Papers

From Mobilization to Revolution.

From mobilization to revolution

Dynamics of Contention

Dynamics of Contention

War Making and State Making as Organized Crime