Study of contentious political challenge focuses primarily on institutions and formal structures: state agencies (police, bureaucracies, politicians) and mobilizing structures (voluntary associations, civil society groups). Yet much of political and social life takes place outside these structures, and even these institutions depend on webs of social relations located in particular physical spaces. This Workshop seeks contributions that provide new conceptual and methodological approaches to the socio-spatial relations that underlie—and are transformed by—contentious political challenge. We are interested in both violent and non-violent forms of challenge and the relationship between the two, taking place in democracies and autocracies.
Social movements and armed insurgencies occur in a built and social context; they arise in, are sustained by, and themselves transform their environment. The primary lens through which they have been studied is their institutional context: state structures that facilitate or inhibit and their own patterns of formal organization (Tilly and Tarrow 2015). Yet social ties outside of formal organizations (Bosi 2013; Mazur 2021), and at the blurry boundaries of state and society (Migdal 2001; Davis 2017), are often critical to mobilization. This suggests a need to understand the “socio-spatial configurations” that impel and undergird challengers’ contentious action (Bosi and Malthaner 2026).
Strands of the literature examine this relational environment, or “radical milieu”, of violent movements (Parkinson 2022; Malthaner and Waldmann 2014), and the ways in which challenge unfolds in physical space (Nicholls 2011; Zhao 1998). Yet work remains (1) to flesh out the relationship between social mechanisms with the built environment in contention (Abuzaid and Mazur 2026), (2) to assess how these socio-spatial configurations mediate the transition between violent and non-violent forms of challenge (Bosi and Malthaner 2026), and (3) to analyse how these processes vary across different political regime types (Tarrow 2022: ch. 6).
This Workshop invites papers that take a close look at movements’ relationship to the urban fabric, in its built and social dimensions. This includes the interaction of the two dimensions, and how the urban itself is altered by contention. It invites contributions from a wide range of methodological and interdisciplinary perspectives.
Abuzaid, Motasem, and Kevin Mazur. 2026. ‘Incubating Revolution: How Social Networks and the Built Environment Sustain Mobilization’. Comparative Political Studies forthcoming.
Bosi, Lorenzo. 2013. ‘Safe Territories and Violent Political Organizations’. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 19(1): 80–101.
Bosi, Lorenzo, and Stefan Malthaner. 2026. ‘Shifting Forms of Political Violence Across Socio-Spatial Configurations’. American Behavioral Scientist: 00027642261461978.
Davis, Diane E. 2017. ‘Informality and State Theory: Some Concluding Remarks’. Current Sociology 65(2): 315–24.
Malthaner, Stefan, and Peter Waldmann. 2014. ‘The Radical Milieu: Conceptualizing the Supportive Social Environment of Terrorist Groups’. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 37(12): 979–98.
Mazur, Kevin. 2021. Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Migdal, Joel S. 2001. State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nicholls, Walter. 2011. ‘Cities and the Unevenness of Social Movement Space: The Case of France’s Immigrant Rights Movement’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 43(7): 1655–73.
Parkinson, Sarah E. 2022. Beyond the Lines : Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Tarrow, Sidney. 2022. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tilly, Charles, and Sidney G. Tarrow. 2015. Contentious Politics. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zhao, Dingxin. 1998. ‘Ecologies of Social Movements: Student Mobilization during the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement in Beijing’. American Journal of Sociology 103(6): 1493–1529.
1: What role, if any, does the built environment play in local communities’ facilitation of challenge?
2: What are the factors, beyond state strategies, that push contentious action towards/away from violence?
3: How do the socio-spatial configurations impelling and sustaining challenge vary across political regimes?
4: What methods are most suited to understanding the relational environment supporting contentious challenge?
5: How do episodes of contentious challenge transform the socio-spatial configurations that supported it?
1: Case studies of urban peripheries over which state authorities are not fully sovereign (‘safe territories’)
2: The role of the social and built environments in local communities’ support for challenge
3: The legacies of contentious challenge for the local communities that produced and supported the challengers
4: How socio-spatial configurations facilitating challenge vary by political regime type
5: Highly disaggregated approaches to protest and violent conflict on urban peripheries (qual or quant)
6: Urban studies, ethnographic, and interdisciplinary approaches to contentious politics
7: The transition between violent and non-violent challenge, focusing on role of socio-spatial configurations
8: Papers using innovative quantitative data (e.g., unusual surveys/co-produced/remotely sensed)
