The main subject of this book is political protest: a range of actions, including strikes, hunger strikes, sit-ins, blockades, occupations, marches, and other actions used by groups of people from time to time to make demands on the state or on other private people whose behavior can be influenced by the state. These are the kinds of actions known to social scientists as contentious politics. As Charles Tilly (2004) and others have shown, what kinds of contention we see in a given place depends to a significant extent on the nature of the political regime in which protest takes place, and in particular on whether the country in question is democratic and provides a high degree of legal protection for protest, or is authoritarian and does not. Protest in turn often has significant effects on the nature of the broader political regime and usually plays a major role in both transitions to democracy and in transitions away from democracy (Collier 1999, Bermeo 2003).

However, in the contemporary world, many political regimes do not fit neatly within this picture of democracies that permit protest and autocracies that repress it. Instead, there are a great many countries that possess some attributes of democracy and some of autocracy; places in which protest is often allowed, but in which the state goes to considerable lengths to control, manipulate, and channel it in ways not consistent with democratic principles.