Contentious politics and social change

What are the causal links between collective action and social transformation? This paper advocates a relational analysis of contentious politics which emphasises the changing connections between social actors. There are parallels between social movement cycles and revolutionary situations: successful challenges advertise the vulnerability of authorities, supply models for effective claim making, identify possible allies for other claim makers, and threaten the interests of other actors with stakes in the status quo. Under certain conditions contention brings different types of identity into play. Political identities are always relational and collective, and alter with shifts in political networks, opportunities and strategies. Political identities may be embedded or disjoined or somewhere in between. Disjoined identities can become embedded in social relations but they begin elsewhere. As social structure alters, shifts take place from parochial and particularistic forms of claim making to national, modular and autonomous forms. Such shifts involve changes in repertoires. The relationship between shifts in claim making and social change is reciprocal. More is known about how social change causes contention than about how contention causes social change. The paper concludes with a discussion of the effects of contentious politics: the reorganisation of social relations, re‐alignments between contenders for power, changes in the character of repression, and the changes or displacements which occur as a consequence of the realisation of claims.