9 - HARMONIZING THE VOICES: THEMATIC CONTINUITY ACROSS THE CHAPTERS

Summary

Throughout this volume we have deployed auditory images and analogies to suggest what we are up to. We have talked of silences that have developed in this or that field; viable scholarly topics that have been drowned out by the dominant voices within a particular scholarly community. Our aim in undertaking this volume – and one of the central goals of the broader project in which the volume was conceived and nurtured – was to mute these voices and, by crossing narrow subfield boundaries that have developed in the study of political contention, reclaim some of the silences that seem especially central to a broader, more comprehensive understanding of contentious politics in all its rich variety. The preceding chapters represent an illustrative sampling of the analytic riches we think are available to anyone willing to think beyond the dominant concepts and perspectives that animate their particular part of the topical elephant and to think more synthetically and creatively about the broad topic of contentious politics.

But in calling for a larger chorus of voices than the ones we typically hear in any given subfield, who is to say we are not simply encouraging more noise; merely promoting a confusing analytic cacophony at the expense of the admittedly narrower, but also more coherent, theoretical motifs developed within these distinct scholarly literatures? One need only reflect on the Old TeStanent story of the Tower of Babel; of how an ambitious building project collapsed amidst the chaos and confusion of too many voices and the absence of a unifying language.