In recent years it has become fashionable to question purported long-term structuralist biases in the study of contentious politics - from social movements, to revolutions, to various forms of political violence. To fill the space left by the low ebb of 'structure', scholars of contentious politics have pointed instead to culture, to emotions, to contingency, to strategy and strategic interaction, and above all to 'agency'. A small number of scholars have carried this debate in the direction of time and temporality. There have been correspondences between concerns with temporality and many of the main points of the wider debate about 'structure' and 'agency'. For instance, William H. Sewell, Jr.'s attacks on the implicit "teleological" temporality of much historical sociology parallels attacks on 'structuralism', and his argument for "eventful" history and sociology parallels arguments for attention to agency and contingency in explaining the course of contentious politics episodes, and their relationships to wider bouts of social and political change. But as scholars continue to look for new and better ways to talk about agency and contingency, there is little discussion as to how - or whether - this relates to the question of temporality - or, to paraphrase Sewell, how "long-term change processes" can sometimes lead, contingently, to "transformative events", which can sometimes be "transformative" enough to lead in turn to new "cycles of contention" - which can often change social and political arrangements decisively. As scholars continue to eagerly invoke new ways of addressing the structure-agency problem, these conceptual and theoretical questions need to be tackled. This paper will consider these questions in light of an empirical case study of the Irish independence struggle in the early twentieth century - a case almost untouched by social scientists. It will consider, more specifically, the way that in Ireland, the temporality of the longue duree - or of long-term change processes - collided with the contingency of the transformative event to produce a new and unexpected cycle of contention that would change the country in unpredictable ways.
