By Ronald R. Aminzade - Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics: 1st (first) Edition

Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics

by Ronald R. Aminzade

The aim of the book is to highlight and begin to give "voice" to some of the notable "silences" evident in recent years in the study of contentious politics. The coauthors hope to redress the present topical imbalance in the field. In particular, the authors take up seven specific topics in the the relationship between emotions and contention; temporality in the study of contention; the spatial dimensions of contention; leadership in contention; the role of threat in contention; religion and contention; and contention in the context of demographic and life-course processes.

Paperback

First published September 17, 2001

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad as a further development of the notion that contentious politics can serve as a unifying term for what appear to be, on the surface, quite disparate manifestations of political turmoil. Taken as a theoretical unity the idea does have some merit but the individual chapters here are not very progressive. The chapter on religion barely attempts to do what it sets out to: offer a comparative view on the way religion is involved in contentious politics. This rarely moves past the view that the supernatural and ontological bases of religion, oh yes, and the obligatory exploitation of religious symbology, inform the way people behave politically. Instead, it should be, using the book's own terminology, approached from the legitimized institution of religion itself: how do religious precepts and mores become involved in contentious issues? Not the religion itself or its use as a cultural symbol, but as an active agent. Likewise, chapters on emotion and temporality start off well, but fall into the same traps of confused comparisons and sly iconoclasm to really ever mean much. If anything, the volume should show one that perhaps it is just better to approach episodes of contentious politics just as that: episodes. Let's leave field theories to some other part of the humanities. Gender studies, maybe.

[Mills College Library]

303.484 S5827 2001