Introduction1. Studying War, States, and ContentionPart 1. War and Movements in the Building of New States2. A Movement-State Goes to War: France, 1789-17993. A Movement Makes War: Civil War and Reconstruction4. A War Makes Movements: The Strange Death of Illiberal ItalyPart 2. Endless Wars5. From Statist to Composite Wars6. Wars at Home, 1917-19757. The War at Home, 2001-20138. The American State of Terror9. Contesting HegemonyPart 3. Internationalization and the New World of Contention10. The Dark Side of InternationalismConclusionsNotes
References
Acknowledgments
Index

For the last two decades, Sidney Tarrow has explored "contentious politics"-disruptions of the settled political order caused by social movements. These disruptions range from strikes and street protests to riots and civil disobedience to revolution. In War, States, and Contention, Tarrow shows how such movements sometimes trigger, animate, and guide the course of war and how they sometimes rise during war and in war's wake to change regimes or even overthrow states. Tarrow draws on evidence from historical and contemporary cases, including revolutionary France, the United States from the Civil War to the anti-Vietnam War movement, Italy after World War I, and the United States during the decade following 9/11.

In the twenty-first century, movements are becoming transnational, and globalization and internationalization are moving war beyond conflict between states. The radically new phenomenon is not that movements make war against states but that states make war against movements. Tarrow finds this an especially troublesome development in recent U.S. history. He argues that that the United States is in danger of abandoning the devotion to rights it had expanded through two centuries of struggle and that Americans are now institutionalizing as a "new normal" the abuse of rights in the name of national security. He expands this hypothesis to the global level through what he calls "the international state of emergency."

Sidney Tarrow is Maxwell Upson Emeritus Professor of Government and Visiting Professor of Law at Cornell University. He is the author of many books, including most recently The Language of Contention: Revolutions in Words, 1688-2012 and Strangers at the Gates: Movements and States in Contentious Politics.