This paper assess how suitable is the “mechanism-and-process approach” to contentious politics (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001) for studying non-violent collective action in contexts of protracted violence. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the analysis of a key question in social movement research: how particular political contexts affect the repertories of collective contentious action and the form of social movements? This approach, designed and developed mainly for the study of contentious politics in Western democracies, builds on a set of key concepts that designate the variables that should be analyzed, in a relational fashion, while studying different forms of collective contention. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to analyze how these concepts can be re-created in the study of non-violent collective action looking at the case of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in Colombia. Three key conceptual tools of this approach are examined. First, this paper appraises how this type of collective action can be classified as contentious politics. In doing so, distinctions among contained and transgressive as subcategories of contention (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, 2001:7) and disruption, violent, and contained behavior as part of the repertoire of contention (Tarrow, 2011:98-105) are taken into account. Second, it explores the forms that political opportunities and threats take in this specific context; more concretely, it deals with the question of how violence can serve as an incentive/disincentive for people to engage in collective contentious action and it can open/close the prospects for sustainability and success. Finally, drawing on della Porta and Diani (2006) and Tarrow (2011), it examines the extent to which the community in consideration can be considered a social movement. This exercise seeks to contribute to the identification and specification of mechanisms and processes that underlie the dynamics of non-violent contention in contexts of protracted violence. This single case study aims to serve as the basis for a broader comparative analysis that looks for recurrences and variations among mechanism that concatenate into longer chains of processes of non-violent resistance.
