Sidney Tarrow - Ideas

Ideas

Tarrow's first area of interest was the study of communism in the 1960s. In the 1970s he moved to the study of comparative local politics and in the 1980s to the study of social movements and protest cycles (or 'cycles of contention'). A specialist in European politics and society, Sidney Tarrow has written widely on Italian and French politics, centre-periphery relations, new social movements, and contentious politics. Tarrow is a leading expert on new social movements and, more broadly, the phenomena of contentious behaviour.

His 1998 book Power in Movement analyses the cultural, organizational and personal sources of social movements' power, stressing that the life cycle of social movements is a part of political struggle influenced by the existence (or lack of) the political opportunity structures. Tarrow's five political opportunity structures includes: 1) increasing access, 2) shifting alignments, 3) divided elites, 4) influential allies and 5) repression and facilitation. Tarrow writes that unlike political or economic social institutions, social movements power is less obvious, but as real. In the book Tarrow tries to explain the cyclical history of social movements (visible in the form of the protest cycles). He also shows how movements can affect various spheres of life, such as personal lives, policy reforms and political culture. In that book he also lists four prerequisites of sustainable social movements: 1) political opportunities, 2) diffuse social networks, 3) familiar forms of collective action (also known as the Charles Tilly's repertoires of contention), and 4) cultural frames that can resonate throughout a population.

In 2001, Tarrow, with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly, published Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge 2001), in which the authors broadened the social movement framework to cover a broader spectrum of forms of contention. This was followed by Tarrow's New Transnational Activism (Cambridge 2005), in which he applied the framework to the new transnational cycle of contention, and by a textbook with Tilly called Contentious Politics (Paradigm, 2006). He is currently working on international human rights.

He is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working in for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace.