Έννοιες και θεωρία : ένα σχόλιο για τη συμβολή του κλάδου της συγκρουσιακής πολιτικής στη μελέτη των κοινωνικών κινημάτων

Abstract

Contentious Politics, a booming research programme with an impressive array of “positive heuristics” (in Lakatos’s sense), has wrested the study of social movements from the obscurity earlier academic approaches (especially “collective behaviour”) had sentenced it to. But certain key tenets of the approach -the way it defines “social movements”; its appraisal of social-movement institutionalisation; and its overall epistemology (especially its penchant for expanding the thematic scope of theorising)- remain in dispute. The goal of this article is to make a contribution to the debate by rebutting certain common misconceptions.