This seminar investigates the politics of social movements and revolutions.  These are topics that are often thought of as part of the broader field of “contentious politics”–that is, the variety of forms of mobilized or unconventional collective action that seek to promote or prevent social or political change.  Understood in this way, the field includes not only protest politics of the left and right, but also revolutions, riots, strikes, pogroms, vigilante groups, terrorist movements, peasant uprisings, millenarian movements, and many other mobilizational phenomena.  We will not be able to cover all of these topics.  You will, however, have the opportunity to pursue your own interests through a research project or series of review papers.  Along with broad theoretical approaches and an examination of specific issues associated with mobilizational politics, the last portion of the course focuses on the politics of revolution, given its importance for an understanding of regime-change and my own interests in the subject. 

The goals of the seminar are threefold: 1) to provide you with a solid mastery of the variety of approaches, major intellectual debates, methods, and issues within this field; 2) to understand the ways in which these have been or could be applied to concrete phenomena in empirical research; and 3) to help you define a potential research agenda of your own.