Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Social movement scholars use the concept of tactical repertoires of contention to refer to the strategies used by collective actors to persuade or coerce authorities to support their claims. The tactical repertoires of social movements include conventional strategies of political persuasion such as lobbying, voting, and petitioning; confrontational tactics such as marches, strikes, and public demonstrations that disrupt day-to-day life; violent acts such as bombing, rioting, assassination, and looting that inflict material and economic damage and loss of life; and cultural forms of political expression such as ritual, music, art, theater, street performance, and practices of everyday life that inspire solidarity and oppositional consciousness. If there is a single feature that distinguishes social movements from routine political actors, it is the strategic use of protest – or novel, dramatic, unorthodox, and non-institutionalized forms of political expression. Because participants in social movements lack access to conventional channels of influence, they often disavow politics through proper channels. The tactics used by social movements are increasingly examined in terms of their place in a larger repertoire of collective action. The notion of repertoires of contention grows out of the work of Charles Tilly (1978) , who introduced the concept to explain historical variations ... log in or subscribe to read full text