About the Series 

Cambridge Elements series in Contentious Politics provides an important opportunity to bridge research and communication about the politics of protest across disciplines and between the academy and a broader public. We publish pieces of 20,000-30,000 words that allow in-depth yet concise treatment of an issue or case. 

Our focus is on political engagement, disruption, and collective action that extends beyond the boundaries of conventional institutional politics. Social movements, revolutionary campaigns, organized reform efforts, and more or less spontaneous uprisings are the important and interesting developments that animate contemporary politics; we welcome studies and analyses that promote better understanding and dialogue. 

We welcome case studies of the broad range of contentious politics, as well as explicitly comparative analyses that look at similar campaigns or constituencies in different contexts. We are interested in presenting studies that focus on the organization, politics and culture within social movements as well as treatments of their interactions with mainstream political institutions, including legislatures, courts, and elections. 

The series is committed to discussion across a range of disciplines and to methodological pluralism. We also welcome summaries of the state of knowledge on particular issues in contentious politics, explicitly theoretical work on how the politics of protest works in different settings, including different countries and regions of the world, as well as methodological advances that offer useful direction on how to study political contention.   

Series Editors

David S. Meyer is Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. He has written extensively on social movements and public policy, mostly in the United States, and is a winner of the John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior.  

Suzanne Staggenborg is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. She has studied organizational and political dynamics in a variety of social movements, including the women’s movement and the environmental movement, and is a winner of the John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior.

Contact the Editors

David S. Meyer: dmeyer@uci.edu

Suzanne Staggenborg: suzstagg@pitt.edu