Social Movements and Collective Behavior

The goal of this course is to assist advanced students in thinking systematically about contentious politics - processes in which people make conflicting collective claims on each other or on third parties - as they participate in them, observe them, or learn about how they are happening elsewhere. Students will review and evaluate theories of political contention as well as methods for gathering and analyzing evidence. They will examine and analyze specific examples of forms of contention such as social movements, revolutions, nationalist mobilization, and ethnic conflict and how these have worked in different times and places. Students will apply systematic comparative methods to analyze parallels and differences among these, to assess the role of communication in propelling them, and to evaluate theories that explain them.

Fall, Spring