Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (review)

Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politicsattempts to demonstrate the importance of hitherto undervalued topics in the study of "contentious politics." In the book's introduction, Sidney Tarrow explains that this phrase refers to transgressions of sanctioned political participation "broader than social movements but narrower than all of politics" (7). Thus, "many subjects in contentious politics do not reduce to classical social movement organizations" (6). The authors propose to address this inadequacy by "exploring aspects of contentious politics that have not been given sufficient attention by scholars of western social movements" (5). In the authors' words, the primary contribution of the volume is "an expansion of the boundaries" of social movement research (13).

The subject matter of Silence and Voiceis generally relevant to rhetorical inquiry, given that its interpretive frame identifies the "[c]ollective making of conflicting claims" as "the special territory of contention within the broader zone of public politics" (7). At the very least, rhetorical scholars of revolutions and social movements will find many potential links to their own research throughout this volume. Readers both within and without rhetorical studies should be aware, however, that the title of the book is somewhat misleading. The political function of social and historical "silences" or "voices" is not its object of study; rather, the volume scrutinizes topics about which the sociological study of social movements largely has been silent, and seeks to articulate their importance to such research. Rendering "silence" and "voice" plural in the book's title would have provided a more accurate description of its contents.

The book's chapters seek to offer "focused, structured comparisons between and within various types of polities" that demonstrate "how similar mechanisms concatenate differently in different kinds of contention in different social and historical settings" (7, 8). In chapter 2 (the first after the book's introduction), Ron Aminzade and Doug McAdam address the current "silence" regarding "the mobilization of emotions as a necessary and exceedingly important component of any significant instance of collective action" (14). After surveying the small body of sociological literature in this area, they "identify certain emotions as central to movement emergence, growth, and decline" and "explore how emotion work and feeling rules shape public expressions of certain emotions during different points in the trajectory of movement development" (15).

Chapter 3 claims that most social scientific literature on social movements "has treated space as an assumed and unproblematized background, not as a constituent aspect of contentious politics that must be conceptualized explicitly and probed systematically" (51–52). Its author, William H. Sewell Jr., proposes "to provide a rudimentary theoretical vocabulary for thinking about space in contentious politics and to begin putting such a vocabulary to work" (52). "By shaping social interaction," Sewell argues, "the built environment also shapes the nature and possibility of social protest" (61).

In chapter 4 McAdam and Sewell maintain that, although existing sociological research includes substantial commentary on the protest cycles of given movements, "specific temporal rhythms have been emphasized at the expense of others" (89). While long-term change processes and protest cycles traditionally have served as the primary models of temporality, the authors argue for the significance of two alternative models: "transformative events," or contingent and singular episodes that serve as crucial touchstones in the development of a larger movement, and "cultural epochs of contention," or "'master templates' of contention . . . repeatedly activated in a wide range of places and circumstances" (101, 112).

Chapter 5 argues for a new perspective on the role of leadership in contentious politics. Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, and Elizabeth J. Perry acknowledge that a "vast outpouring of scholarship" has been devoted to this topic, but contend that most of it "has focused on explaining leadership itself, rather than on its effects" (126). In particular, they propose "a new direction for the study of movement leadership" that avoids both "the well trodden paths of a fascination with the uniquely (aberrant...