Preface and Acknowledgments

Summary

This project began as a stimulating series of graduate seminars on power, social theory, and contentious politics; and so, my first debt of gratitude goes to the students who accompanied me on that adventure. They nurtured and inspired me. We concluded that the dominant literature on transitions to market economies and liberal democracy missed important facts about those processes. It explained away inequality, denied the legitimacy of claimants when demonstrations occurred, or argued (with patent relief) that destabilizing mobilization had been vanquished. Some studies noted that radical neoliberal reformers were courting social explosion, but offered no further explanation. Yet in the midst of all that theorizing, evidence mounted that neoliberal economic, social, and political reforms were clearly contributing to mobilization by labor, the indigenous, peasants, and the popular sector in general who experienced neoliberalism as exclusion and injustice. This fact nurtured a burgeoning literature in subaltern studies that analyzed particular national or local events in contentious politics, as well as individual movements, especially the indigenous, women, shantytown dwellers, the unemployed, and labor. This rich literature celebrated their unique properties and qualities, thus emphasizing fragmentation and particularity. As valuable as these studies were, I thought they missed a bigger picture. It was time to explore what all this collective “shouting” amounted to on a broader canvas. What if the myriad protests also formed streams of contention in which movements, organizations, and individuals forged horizontal linkages out of frustration and rage against political elites who arrogantly and contemptuously dismissed them?