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Cultures of Resistance provides new insight on a long-standing question: whether government efforts to repress social movements produce a chilling effect on dissent, or backfire and spur greater mobilization. In recent decades, the U.S. government’s repressive capacity has expanded dramatically, as the legal, technological, and bureaucratic tools wielded by agents of the state have become increasingly powerful. Today, more than ever, it is critical to understand how repression impacts the freedom to dissent and collectively express political grievances. Through analysis of activists’ rich and often deeply moving experiences of repression and resistance, the book uncovers key group processes that shape how individuals understand, experience, and weigh these risks of participating in collective action. Qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate that, following experiences of state repression, the achievement or breakdown of these group processes, not the type or severity of repression experienced, best explain why some individuals persist while others disengage. In doing so, the book bridges prevailing theoretical divides in social movement research by illuminating how individual rationality is collectively constructed, mediated, and obscured by protest group culture.

Doing the Right Thing examines the use of extraordinary legislative procedures in four cases in the U.S. Congress to accomplish policy objectives that many political scientists would argue are impossible to achieve. It not only shows that Congress is capable of imposing parochial costs in favor of general benefits but it argues that Congress is able to do so in a variety of policy areas through the use of very different kinds of procedural mechanisms that are underappreciated.

The book opens by developing a theory of procedural choice to explain why Congress chooses to delegate in differing degrees in dealing with similar kinds of policy problems. The theory is then applied to four narrative case studies—military base closures, the Yucca Mountain Project, NAFTA, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986—that both show the variety of factors that impact procedural choice and highlight how our national legislature was able to “do the right thing.”

The book concludes by pointing to the variety of ways in which Congress will be confronted with similar policy problems in the coming years and offering some lessons from these cases about what kinds of procedures and policy outcomes we might expect. In short, Congress is remarkably adept at “doing the right thing,” even under difficult circumstances, but only when legislators are willing to manipulate procedures in all the necessary ways.

Divined Intervention provides an innovative institutionalist account for why religion enables political activism in some settings, but not others. Christopher W. Hale argues that decentralized religious institutions facilitate grassroots collective action, and he uses a multimethod approach to test this explanation against several theoretical alternatives. Utilizing nationally representative Mexican survey data, the book’s statistical analyses demonstrate that decentralization by the Catholic Church is positively associated with greater individual political activism across the country. Using case studies centered in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Morelos, the author shows that religious decentralization encourages reciprocal cooperative interactions at a local level. This then increases the ability of religion to provide goods and services to its local adherents. These processes then prompt the growth of organizational capacities at the grassroots, enabling secular political activism.

Because this theoretical framework is grounded in human behavior, it shows how local institutions politically organize at the grassroots level. Divined Intervention also offers an improved understanding of religion’s relationship with political activism, a topic of ever-increasing significance as religion fuels political engagement across the globe. The book further synthesizes seemingly disparate approaches to the study of collective action into a cohesive framework. Finally, there is some debate as to the impact of ethnic diversity on the provision of public goods, and this study helps us understand how local institutional configurations can enable collective action across ethnic boundaries.

Reimagining watersheds as living hydrocommons through which artists and communities create more just and sustainable futures

Hydrocommoning explores how artists, activists, and curators coalesce around water in embodied efforts to contest entrenched and enduring forms of harm and degradation. Against the reduction of rivers, streams, and wetlands to mere resources to be managed, Hydrocommoning centers water as a living web of relations through which artists and communities forge creative means of reconnection by moving, weaving, pumping, eating, and listening.

By charting these aesthetic practices, Hydrocommoning shows how artists and organizers across Latin America oppose extractivism, unequal urbanization, ecological degradation, and the erasure of Indigenous water cultures. To cultivate widespread social attunement to vulnerable waters and raise the call for their defense and care, collectives in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru engage in communal meals, sound art, infrastructural interventions, and other practices that Lisa Blackmore theorizes as “hydrocommoning.”

Grounded in five years of experiential fieldwork, archival research, and curatorial projects in Latin America, Blackmore proposes a methodology to work with water as an analytical framework for collective action. Bridging the gap between theory, curating, and community-based practices, Hydrocommoning offers a promising vision of grassroots organizing that actively confronts some of today’s most urgent ecological threats.

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Whether collective action takes the form of protest campaigns, social movements, political violence or strikes, there is a dynamic nature to the shared goal of effecting change. But whereas most studies look at when collective action begins, the editors and contributors to Processes of Collective Action take a processual approach, looking at how collective action emerges, proceeds, what is achieved, and how different collective actors react to what unfolds.

Bringing together leading scholars of contentious politics, this volume seeks to explore and advance process analysis across different forms of political conflicts, types of actors, and varieties of collective action. Featuring theoretical concepts, methodological tools, and global cutting-edge research, Processes of Collective Action offers a series of case studies and conceptual essays that reflect on crucial issues in and current transformations of collective action.

Contributors: Irina Aguiari, Kenneth T. Andrews, Javier Auyero, Mark R. Beissinger, Kathleen Blee, Donatella della Porta, Mario Diani, Jennifer Earl, Olivier Fillieule, Sarah Gaby, Thomas Hoebel, Chaeyoon Lim, James M. Jasper, Doug McAdam, Anna Milewski, Pamela Oliver, elena pavan, Anastasia Shesterinina, Katherine Sobering, Mary Ellen Stitt, Sidney Tarrow, Katrin Uba, Mattias Wahlström