Blame Doug McAdam and Sid Tarrow. It all started in 1995, before an astonished Amsterdam audience. With Ron Aminzade, Doug and Sid plotted and executed a visually vibrant parody of my work: they dressed as sans-culottes and gave a rap performance. For two years before the Amsterdam spectacular, McAdam and Tarrow had been grousing together about the poor connections between studies of social movements and analyses dealing with other sorts of popular politics. They thought, for example, that my own work on revolutions, state transformations, contentious repertoires, and popular mobilization articulated badly with current analyses of social movements.

At the Amsterdam meeting, McAdam, Tarrow, and I made peace by agreeing to work together on new approaches to contentious politics, with the particular hope of coming up with ideas that would span multiple varieties of mobilization and contention. Through Bob Scott's initiative and Harriet Zuckerman's patronage, the Mellon Foundation awarded the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences a capacious three-year Sawyer Seminar grant for workshops, fellowships, and sojourns at the Center. The group eventually included fifteen graduate students, seven faculty members, and a great many more temporary participants.

As Sid, Doug, and I were warming up for a year of intense work together at the Center, we wrote a few programmatic papers. We presented one of them to the 1997 meeting of the American Sociological Association as “Democracy, Undemocracy, and Contention.”