Introduction

Abstract

Students from divergent academic disciplines share an interest in the phenomena of social movements and collective action. Through a variety of disciplinary approaches and techniques, researchers seek to understand the emergence and development of social movements, protest, and contentious politics. Their different perspectives have contributed to development of research and theory in the field of social movements. The last few decades social movement studies have proliferated enormously, covering a wide array of movements, issues and places, as evidenced by the rapid growth of the number of journal articles on social movements published since the 1980s (see Fig. 1.1).