Abstract

Sidney Tarrow’s book, the subject of this symposium, takes inspiration from the work of Charles Tilly. Tilly, as Tarrow points out in the introduction to the book, saw states and war as mutually constitutive, each changing the other and causing develop- ments through negotiations between citizens and authorities. Tarrow extends the point: “When states make war, this changes internal contention and thus the nature of the future state” (p. 7). To delve into how contention and the state constitute one another around wars, the book discusses three processes: mobilization for war, war- making and the conflicts that arise after wars end: the role of political contention at these different points forms the focus of the accounts contained in the book.