[Current Perspectives in Social Theory] Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes Volume 27 || Domination, contention, and the negotiation of inequality: A theoretical proposal

Current Perspectives in Social TheoryEmerald Book Chapter: Domination, contention, and the negotiation of inequality: A theoretical proposalViviane Brachet-Márquez

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To cite this document: Viviane Brachet-Márquez, (2010),"Domination, contention, and the negotiation of inequality: A theoretical proposal", Harry F. Dahms, Lawrence Hazelrigg, in (ed.) Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 27), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 123 - 161

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DOMINATION, CONTENTION,

AND THE NEGOTIATION OF

INEQUALITY: A THEORETICAL

PROPOSAL

Viviane Brachet-Marquez

ABSTRACT

I propose a theoretical framework that specifies dynamic principlesinvolving the generalized and ubiquitous everyday interaction of societyand state actors alternately in upholding and undermining the rules thatspell the unequal distribution of power and resources. The framework pro-posed brings together a historically specific micro-process – contention –with a general macro-principle of permanence and change in thedistributive rules – the creation, renegotiation, and occasional destructionof a generally durable yet continuously contested ‘‘pact of domination.’’Inequality represents simultaneously a central organizing principle ofsocial life and a recurring source of conflict over rights and rules, thelatter being the practical rules that govern interaction in specific cases ofcontention, giving governing agencies the necessary flexibility to actcasuistically, giving in here, and throwing its weight there, with newformal rules sometimes following that process, or old ones falling indisuse.

Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes

Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 27, 123–161

Copyright r 2010 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2010)0000027008

123

dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2010)0000027008

In this scheme, the state is a historically created organizational andcoercive agent embodying and enforcing the currently valid pact, mostlythrough legal/coercive, but also ideological power over its territory ofjurisdiction. State forms are specific to each historically constructed pactof domination, so that there is no such thing as a state in general, but aseries of historically constructed states, each with its rules of ‘‘who shouldget what’’ and peculiar ways of maintaining inequality between dominantand dominated.

Why do people comply unquestioningly, most of the time, with rules thatdefine an unequal distribution of access to power and resources? Inequalityis omnipresent and justified in a variety of institutional arenas, fromkinship to religion to work environments, so that we are literally trained andretrained every day of our lives, to accept that we will take our places, andtake for granted the places of others, in the hierarchy of power and wealth.In doing so, we are also trained to reproduce inequality, enforcing its ruleson kin and subalterns, while bowing to the authority of our hierarchicalsuperiors. Yet we do not always comply. We often bicker, temporize,protest, and drag our feet, and sometimes we simulate compliance whilequietly sabotaging rules and inventing alternative ones tacitly shared byselect groups. We also get into disputes over who owns what or should getwhat. In such cases, higher authorities are often called in to help settle thedispute: in premodern times, the priests and local lords; today, the policeand the courts. And here again, in the process of settling the dispute,inequality may be either reinforced or weakened in the particular instance.

In the perspective presented here, inequality is the result of a complex setof interactions taking place between agents1 over time – in other words, aprocess.2 Inequality is embedded in macro-historical processes, as differentregions and nations have acquired, through their history, widely differentlevels of inequality, and institutional systems maintaining it.3 But it is alsopresent in everyday micro-processes whereby individuals, groups, andcollectivities either confirm or question one or another aspect of inequalitythrough their transactions and, in doing so, alternately validate or transgresssome rule spelling inequality. These rules are not invariably clearly spelt out,and the authorities enforcing them are not always equipped to impose them.They evolve over time in societies that are never static: people move up anddown hierarchy ladders, acquire rather than inherit wealth and status,higher authorities often mediate disputes rather than impose order fromabove, and courts and cases vary in their interpretation of the law.

VIVIANE BRACHET-MARQUEZ124

To understand theoretically how inequality is instituted, reproduced, andtransformed, we must therefore be able to grasp how these everydaydynamic processes shape their respective societies’ historical trajectories.

To express the workings of these dynamic processes, I propose atheoretical framework that brings together contention, a concept designatinginteractive conflictive micro-/meso-processes, with a general transhistoricalprocess4 of the renegotiation and occasional destruction of a broad set ofrules over ‘‘who should get what’’ or pact of domination. In this framework,states5 are continuously engaged in engineering and enforcing rules thatspell inequality, but these attempts are also continuously being resisted andrenegotiated through contention by societal actors (elite as well assubaltern). In short, inequality is seen as representing simultaneously acentral organizing principle of social life and a perennial source of changewithin society.

In order to bring together these two conceptions of conflictive interaction,I draw from two distinct intellectual traditions with no connecting doorsbetween them, and no specific interest in the problem of inequality. Oneviews inequality as generated from above as states conquer territories anddominate their population, whereas the other focuses on everydayconflictive interactive nexi through which people confront each other inthe pursuit of what they perceive as their interests. I will briefly review bothso as to make clear what aspects will be incorporated in the model proposed.

1. STATE MAKING6AS CREATING AND ENFORCING

INEQUALITY FROM ABOVE

Although the 1960s saw the birth of crucial pioneering work in the historicalstudy of state making (Hintze, 1975; Hobsbawm, 1962; Moore, 1967),enduring interest in the subject would take roots from the 1970s on, withsuch landmarks as Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State(1974a), Tilly’s Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975), andMichael Mann’s (1986, 1993) monumental study of the historical birth andshaping of particular civilizations, empires, and nation-states.7 These works,which emphasized such activities as war making, taxation, policing, controlof food supply, and the formation of bureaucratic cadres, ‘‘which weredifficult, costly, and often unwanted by large parts of the population’’ (Tilly,1975, p. 6), opened the way for the systematic study of the history of statebuilding in Europe. In many of these studies, Western states were seen to

Domination, Contention, and the Negotiation of Inequality 125

have emerged from the history of territorial conquests and losses betweenmilitarized elites (Hintze, 1975; Finer, 1975; Downing, 1992; Tilly, 1990,1993; Tallett, 1992; Porter, 1994). The argument supporting the militaryconception of state making centered on the impact of war making on therationalization of state coercive, fiscal, and organizational capacities (Finer,1975). Enduring domination over a conquered territory by a victorious elitewas therefore seen as inseparable from the creation of an extractive/administrative apparatus – the state – dedicated to securing and enhancingthe power of the conqueror become sovereign, along with that of his closefollowers, or ‘‘polity members’’ (Tilly, 2000). In other words, to reap thefruits of conquest, inequality had to be created and enforced via extractingresources from the local population. As Tilly later put it, ‘‘some conquerorsmanaged to exert stable control over the populations in substantialterritories, and to gain routine access to part of the goods and servicesproduced in the territory; they became rulers’’ (1990, pp. 14–15). States alsoharnessed preconquest inequalities to their own ends by coopting the localelite, or simply destroy it, as did Spanish and Portuguese conquerors.

The thrust of state making (also called state formation) studies thatflourished from the 1980s onwards was in tracing the growth of states’apparatuses and power over their territories in different periods andlocations. In antiquity, conquest was said to have generated fiscal revenuesby producing enough crops to maintain conquering armies through the slavelabor acquired with conquest, so that ‘‘battle fields provided the manpowerfor cornfields, and vice-versa’’ (Anderson, 1974b, p. 28).8 In medievalEurope, rulers initially extracted surplus resources from agriculturallaborers on their own (initially appropriated) land, as did their vassals whowould cofinance the costs of war. In Spanish America, extracting tributefrom the indigenous population was the first step to consolidating conquest.Even where state building was based more on trading than direct extraction,that is, more capital than coercion intensive (Tilly, 1990), armies had to beraised and trade routes protected, so that fiscal capacity fed into militarypower and military power into fiscal expansion of the state. In ourcontemporary world, Hitler’s attempt to conquer Europe or Russia’s successin keeping her colonial conquests until the end of the short twentieth centuryare unthinkable without formidable coercive/extractive capacities supple-mented, at given junctures, by slave labor.9 More than a mere conceptualdefinition of states, coercive and extractive control over a given territory wastherefore found to be a requirement for the stabilization of any kind ofdomination, hence the creation of specialized bodies – states – to ensure acontinuous flow of resources and military manpower via forced


cooperation. Administration, in this context, refers to the more or lesseffective ways in which these basic resources are collected and managed.

Following this general line of enquiry, studies of the formation ofEuropean states offer a rich pageant displaying the ways in which theserequirements were fulfilled in early states,10 with important variations in thedegree to which they were achieved, and in the role of representativeassemblies in limiting royal power of taxation (and hence war-makingpropensity). On the other side of the debate, however, it has been pointedout that not all states were born through war (Mann, 1986, 1988), and thatEurope was engaged in wars for very long periods without new states beingproduced (Centeno, 2002, p. 104). England also figured as a primecounterexample to the war-making/state-making thesis by remaininguninvolved in European wars from the end of the Hundred Years war to168811 (Brewer, 1988). So, the military view was mostly based on Spain andFrance, typical cases of early involvement in European wars, although alsoof entrenched inefficient administrative practices that drove them to fiscalbankruptcy at the close of the eighteenth century, crowned by revolution forFrance and by the loss of her empire in the early 1800s for Spain. Moreover,comparing the war record of European states with that of Latin Americanstates was said to indicate that the first has been a unique unreplicatedphenomenon (Centeno, 1997, p. 1569).12

Interest in Latin American state formation13 is less developed than studiesof European states for a number of reasons, mostly the enduringpreponderance in scholarship on this region of the ‘‘development’’ paradigmthat dominated academia until dependence replaced it, following thepublication in 1966 of Cardoso and Faletto’s path-breaking study.14 Yet,as attention shifted to class structure and to transnational relations ofexploitation between core and periphery, the state remained in the shadowof class processes. With O’Donnell, however, the state made a forcefulcomeback as the political component of domination in a territoriallydelimited society, and as an organizational–institutional complex endowedwith administrative and coercive capacities (1984, p. 200). The importanceof this conception lies in its being grounded in the principle of inequality‘‘arising out of the differential control of given resources, according towhich it is usually possible to obtain that the dominated adjust or controltheir behavior to fit the express, tacit or presumed will of the dominant’’(1984, pp. 200–201).

The same dual conception of the state is expressed synthetically by OscarOszlak who defines state formation as ‘‘implying simultaneously theformation of a political instance articulating domination in society and


the materialization of this instance in a set of interdependent institutionsallowing for the exercise of domination. The state is, in this way, socialrelation and institutional apparatus’’ (1997, p. 16). Here, state making is notonly the acquisition and exercise by states of specific capacities over aterritory but also a relational historical process between state and societythat shapes the conditions of domination.

The main contribution to the study of state making in Latin America(mainly by historians) consists, however, not in verifying the degree to whichstates achieved domination over their territories during given periods but inshowing that peasants do engage in national political struggles, althoughtheir participation is often subsequently submerged, and their demands leftunmet.15 Following the ‘‘liberal revolution’’ of the 1850s in Mexico in whichpeasants in Morelos, Guerrero, and Puebla allied with the liberals againstthe French/conservative coalition, the Mexican state is said to haveincorporated some demands from below as part of its popular agenda, incontrast with the Peruvian state that has repeatedly repressed populardemands and participation in national struggles (Mallon, 1995, p. 311),although that might be debatable, judging from the despoiling effect ofMexico’s liberal laws (1857–1910) on peasant access to land.

At stake was not merely to establish that peasants were in fact involved inspecifically national political struggles (as opposed to the local defense ofland and community), but to demonstrate that the cross-class alliancesformed between disaffected elites and peasants (often in addition to otherlower class groups) shaped the trajectory and marked the turning points ofstate making in the nineteenth century (Guardino, 1996) and beyond(Mallon, 1995; Knight, 1986). Mallon (1995), for example, asserts thatMexico’s peasants were participating in a ‘‘democratic revolution,’’ whereasZeitlin (1984) adduces that Chilean peasants who joined in the elite uprisingof the 1850s were taking part in a bourgeois revolution that failed. Yet it isequally possible that these peasant soldiers were primarily defending theircommunities,16 and that rebelling elites were more inspired by the prospectof consolidating their regional power and local autonomy than by such loftygoals as democracy and equal citizenship (Sinkin, 1979; Bazant, 1985).

In any case, victorious liberals in Mexico did little (beyond officialdiscourse and the never implemented 1857 Constitution) to incorporatetheir lower class allies into a set of democratic rules of domination, adoptinginstead a specific brand of authoritarian liberalism soon to be followed by a32-year dictatorship. What followed in the Chilean case from the 1850s’rebellions was the transformation of a narrowly conservative autocraticsystem into a parliamentary oligarchic one, which soon incorporated the


previously rebellious elites (Loveman & Lira, 1999) but left out their lowerclass allies.

Focusing our attention on regional interelite and popular struggles thatmarked state making in Latin America also destroys the myth of a unitedcapitalist class and the instrumentalist view of the capitalist state asexclusively protecting capitalist interests. To consolidate state power undertheir hegemony, the victors in coups d’etats turned to repress mainlymembers of their own class: stopping the losers from plotting to unseattheir government (or inviting a foreign power to do so), ensuring that taxeswere not hoarded in provincial/state treasuries, and that no local armieswere raised in preparation for a coup. To keep the passive cooperation ofthe masses, they also had to limit the exactions imposed by elites on thepopulations under their jurisdiction, not unlike premodern state elites inEurope had done centuries earlier.

In a way, European and Latin American studies of state making can beconsidered complementary in their views of the relation between state andsociety. The first have concentrated on the conditions for the acquisition byincipient state apparatuses of administrative, fiscal, and coercive capacitieswhile leaving on the margins what kinds of power configurations, principlesof domination over society, and social inequalities were thereby created.The second, by contrast, have emphasized that states act as agentsarticulating and enforcing the principles of domination that structuresociety, yet have shown relatively little interest (excepting Centeno, 2002) inthe processes whereby state capacities grow and wane. At the same time,both camps have tended to make evolutionist assumptions, either bydefining the acquisition of key capacities as the process toward fullydeveloped statehood, implicitly understood as the finishing line, or byinsisting on a historical endpoint in the capitalist bourgeois state (Oszlak,1997; Torres Rivas, 2006). Therefore, both views predefine the direction inwhich states in formation will progress, implicitly pronouncing the end ofhistory (or assuming an entirely different postformation process) whenrelatively stable state institutions have been established.

From the perspective taken in this chapter, both traditions have alsofailed to emphasize the processes whereby states are engaged through theirinstitutional apparatuses in reinforcing the power and economic hegemonyof dominant (classes, large corporations, elite corps, etc.) over dominatedgroups in society, thereby enforcing these relations of inequality. Althoughthe Latin American scholars cited above opened the door for thisconceptualization, they fell short of defining the arenas within which theseinteractions between states and society could be observed and researched.


Likewise, students of early European states have treated selected statedecisions (to make war, raise taxes, etc.) as evidence of a process of state for-mation taking place, but detached from the give-and-take between stateand society that generated, modified, or nullified these decisions. In suchaccounts, we rarely know how various elites reacted to specific state actions,and even less how ordinary people dealt with them. Although relativelyrecent work on ‘‘everyday state making’’ has aimed at filling this gap (Scott,1985, 1990; Knight, 1994; Gilbert & Nugent, 1994), it has usually presentedthe dominated as intent on blunting state actions through resistance andquiet sabotaging rather than conflictively engaged in opposing them.

In sum, what is needed in order to turn the study of state making into alens making visible, the dynamics of inequality is the definition of a processwhereby state and society actors engage each other, either peacefully in thesense of taking for granted the ways in which power and resources aredistributed, or conflictively when states or nonstate actors trigger violentcollective responses when attempting to increase the level of exactions thatshape inequalities in society.

2. MAKING AND CONTESTING THE RULES

FROM BELOW: CONTENTION

The first step to an interactive theory of the dynamics of inequality is todefine a process taking place in empirically observable arenas. We aretherefore not talking about ‘‘self-propelled’’ phenomena (Tilly, 1995)inferred from interrelations between variables (as in urbanization, secular-ization, or differentiation), but about real people pursuing objectives and, indoing so, coming in contact with state agents endowed with variablylegitimate legal and coercive power.

A crucial contribution in that direction is the model for the process ofcontentious politics proposed by Charles Tilly and his group of colleagues(hereafter, Tilly & col. mainly McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001; Tilly &Tarrow, 2007; Tilly, 1995, 2001, 2008a, 2008b; Aminzade et al., 2001).17

Contention signifies confrontation between collectives18 over disputed rightsor property in which the state is involved. Interest focuses not on ordinarycontention that designates ‘‘making claims that bear on someone else’sinterests’’ (Tilly & Tarrow, 2007, p. 4) but on political contention (hereafter,contention or contentious politics) defined as ‘‘episodic, public, collectiveinteraction among makers of claim and their objects when (a) at least one


government is a claimant, an object of claim, or a party to the claim, and(b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of theclaimants’’ (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 5). This definition excludes conflicttaking place privately, or public conflict to which the state is not party. It alsoexcludes conflictive interaction in which one party submits to the other’spower, as in public flogging or other forms of inflicting punishment when itsobject does not (or more likely cannot) resist, and is therefore in no positionto dispute who is entitled to what. Furthermore, it excludes spontaneousconflictive encounters in which violence may be used, but no particular claimsare issued, as in verbal assaults, fist fights, riots, or bar broils. Finally,although the definition does not specify it, it is clear from the examples citedas illustration that the state includes legislative and judicial functions.A further distinction is drawn between contained and transgressive politicalcontention, where the first refers to contention in which ‘‘all parties to theconflict were previously established as constituted political actors’’ (McAdamet al., 2001, p. 7) and the second to contention in which ‘‘at least some partiesto the conflict are newly self-identified political actors, and/or at least someparties employ innovative collective action’’ (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 8).19

The authors’ interest (as well as mine in this chapter) favors the transgressiveside of political contention, although they note that the two forms mostfrequently grow out of each other and interact, so that the distinctionbetween institutionalized and uninstitutionalized politics is said to be anartificial one. In transgressive contention, however, we are unlikely to findcontention over bankruptcy or breach of contract, but wage disputes mayoccasionally go beyond institutionalized channels of collective bargaining.

The point of proposing such a broad definition is to bring under the sameconceptual and processual umbrella diverse forms of political contention,such as strikes, public demonstrations of protest, social movements,rebellions, and revolutions, previously studied with widely separatetheoretical instruments. The whole theoretical thrust of the model proposedis to show that once divided up into their respective dynamic ‘‘mechanisms,’’or ‘‘recurrent causes which in different circumstances and sequencescompound into highly variable but nonetheless explicable effects’’ (Tilly,1995, p. 1610), the most diverse forms of contention will be comparable, asthey will share a number of mechanisms that will ‘‘produce essentially thesame effects in a wide range of circumstances’’ (Tilly, 2001, p. 20).Commonalities in mechanisms will demonstrate that very different kinds ofcontentious interactions represent, in fact, the same broad phenomenon.20

Among the mechanisms most cited are those of competition, negotiation,mobilization, repression, and radicalization.


Leaving aside, for the moment, whether contentious politics of all kindsand shapes display various combinations of the same mechanisms, which, inthe end, is an empirical question,21 I would like to draw attention to anumber of aspects of the contention model that are problematic from thepoint of view of a theory of inequality: the reasons for which people willcontend; the relationship of contendants’ claims to the established order andthe role of the state; the nature of mechanisms in relation to agency; and theproblem of going from micro- to macro-forms of contention.

2.1. Why People Get Involved in Contentious Interactions

On the basis of the definition of contention above, only ‘‘interests’’ appear tobe at stake in the decisions to participate in claim making (‘‘the claim, ifrealized, would affect the interests of one of the claimants’’). Yet in the samework, ‘‘historically accumulated culture’’ (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 22) is alsosingled out as an important element in contention, and so is identity,repeatedly mentioned as subject to shifting in the course of the process ofcontention. Both concepts speak to the more emotional aspects of contention,yet are neither part of its definition nor mentioned as ‘‘mechanisms’’ movingparticipants in one direction or another. Grievance, on the other hand,appears only once, but not in the sense normally understood. What of thelong nursed grievances of eighteenth-century French peasants in the face ofresurgent feudal rights (Anderson, 1974a)? Or should we think of La GrandePeur22 as some irrational behavioral manifestation irrelevant to protestagainst the French Ancien Regime and unrelated to the demands for equalityinscribed in the Cahiers de Doleances? Or how should Mexican peasants of theliberal era (1854–1910) have felt when their land was declared public and soldto haciendas, or simply confiscated by the latter? Interests are neutral withrespect to feelings of ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘wrong,’’ whereas grievances expresssentiments of injustice (Moore, 1978). If, contrary to Tilly & col., we postulatethat grievance is a possible and, indeed, frequent ingredient of contention, itsessence is contestation over who holds the legitimate claim in a dispute andshould therefore, by right, win over the other.

2.2. Based on What Norms and on Whose AuthorityAre Contentious Claims Settled

The qualification of claims as legitimate or illegitimate implies the existenceof rules and norms that are known to the contestants, so that the dispute is


really about what principles (law or custom) should prevail in decidingwhose claim will be recognized as ‘‘right.’’ But who will be the judge ofwhich of the claimants is ‘‘right,’’ and who will apply the sentence?According to Tilly & col.’s definition, the state appears as ‘‘a claimant, anobject of claim, or a party to the claim’’; in other words, as a contestant ofthe same kind and on the same level as any other, with interests and claimsof its own.23 This definition fails to acknowledge the role of the state as ruleenforcer, so that its presence in a dispute necessarily involves its power topronounce legitimate this rather than that claim, and enforce a settlement infavor of the winner of the best claim. In addition, some claims will bedirected against actions perpetrated by the state, considered illegitimate bysome of the contendants, also with reference to a set of rules, in which casewhat is being disputed is the state’s use or misuse of the established rules.

In apparent contradiction with the definition of contention cited above,the relationship between contendants’ claims and the established order isclearly indicated on Fig. 2.1 in McAdam et al. (2001, p. 45) that opposeschallengers or opponents to the regime to polity members, its defenders. Theinteractive sequence depicted in the figure is said to involve at least one set ofstate actors and one insurgent (sic) group. There is, therefore, unresolvedambivalence in the conception of contentious politics Tilly & col. propose.

2.3. Mechanisms or Strategic Decisions?

What moves the process of contention? Although in their case analyses,McAdam et al. (2001, pp. 41–50) show reflexive actors engaged in strategicinteraction and using resources innovatively, these same actors are never-theless assumed to repeatedly reenact a limited set of strategies abstracted asmechanisms, or ‘‘class(es) of events that alter relations among specified setsof elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations’’(p. 24). The notion of mechanism in Tilly & col. rests, therefore, oncontradictory assumptions: either contendants are conscious strategic actors,and therefore constantly invent new ways of pursuing their objectives, orthey are habitus-bound reproducers of cultural patterns (Bourdieu, 1977), inwhich case it is ingrained cultural habits rather than actors that movecontentious interaction. In one case, we have infinitely variable resourcesprompting variable strategies and hence far too many mechanisms, whereasin the other, we have a both predictable and limited repertoire of responsesrepeating themselves, yet providing no key to the interactive dynamics ofcontention. Granted that contenders on the ground will, most usually,


combine known with new strategies and repertoires, it remains that theinnovative character of transgressive contention – a central concern inTilly & col. – is insufficiently specified theoretically, even though suchspecifications have been proposed on both sides of the debate. On the habitusside, Wacquant (1989, p. 45), unlike Bourdieu (1977), concedes that actorsmay consciously carry out strategic cost and benefit calculations, but insiststhat such calculations are all determined by habitus. Sewell (1992), on theother hand, spells out four conditions enabling people engaged in interactionto ‘‘invent’’: the multiplicity of structures, transposability of schemas,unpredictability of resource accumulation, and resource polysemia.

The debate on agency in relation to the generation of ‘‘new’’ or ‘‘old’’contentious ‘‘mechanisms’’ becomes even more complex when we bring ininequality, as we must then specify what real choices contendants have inview of their unequal access to power and resources, and to what extentinnovative contention can change such parameters. Participants in conten-tion will, in principle, be both enabled and limited in their choices ofstrategic decisions and repertoires by the rules of access to power andunequal distribution of resources. But transgressive contention is preciselythe attempt to overstep authorized (or at least tolerated) ways in whichpeople exercise power and to find resources and schemas to win their cause,so that the very same process of contention, if successful in restructuringsome portion of political reality, may effect changes in the value ofconventional resources (e.g., the value of being a man rather than a woman,or an aristocrat rather than a commoner).

2.4. From Micro- to Macro-Contention

In addition to providing explanatory devices, the notion of recurringmechanisms by Tilly & col. provides a bridge from micro- to macro-processes, by stipulating that small and large contentious processes can beanalyzed with these same instruments. As Tilly states:

regularities in political life are very broad, indeed, trans-historical, but do not operate in

the form of recurrent structures and processes at a large scale. They consist of recurrent

causes which in different circumstances and sequences compound into highly variable

but nonetheless explicable effects. Students of revolution have imagined they were

dealing with phenomena like ocean tides, whose regularities they could deduce from

sufficient knowledge of celestial motion, when they were actually confronting

phenomena like great floods, equally coherent occurrences from a causal perspective,

but enormously variable in structure, sequence and consequences as a function of

terrain, previous precipitation, built environment, and human response’’. (1995, p. 1610)


To dispense with large processes, or the problem of specifying how smallcontentious processes become large ones, Tilly & col. divide streams ofcontentious politics into event segments to each of which a mechanism isattached. They then treat these constructed segments as ‘‘processes,’’ so thatthe only difference between micro- and macro-contention will be in thenumber of such segments, with large numbers of them being said toconstitute episodes. For example, the July 1789 facet of the FrenchRevolution is said to be an episode consisting of ‘‘some combination ofmobilization, identity shift and polarization, three very general but distinctprocesses and mechanisms in contentious politics’’ (McAdam et al., 2001,p. 28). Mechanisms, on the contrary, are considered causal insofar as theyrepeatedly ‘‘alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical orclosely similar ways’’ (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 24). Yet, taking mobilizationas one such mechanism, can we really say that the mobilization of theParisian populace in July 1789 implies the same transformations as, forexample, that of farmers blocking roads with tractors in protest over lowagricultural prices (a typically French contemporary contentious event)?In one case, the authority of the state is being directly attacked, whereas inthe other, discontent is voiced and change is demanded, publicly andtransgressively, but with no intent to challenge the regime. Althoughnational conflagrations such as the French Revolution can be described byconcatenations of different abstract elements representing groups of events(such as mobilization), such descriptions will do little to bring out thedynamics of institutional transformation, which is what students ofrevolution have been trying to do.

Granting that contentious politics must stay grounded in the collectivemobilization of real people interacting in real time and places, it does notfollow that such processes should exclusively be understood from thecollectively defined perspective of the people engaged in that process. Weshould be able to make a distinction between such group dynamics and theplace occupied by particular episodes of these small-scale processes in large-scale processes of transformation of the relations between state and society.To go back to the events of July 1789, a micro-interpretation of the deedswould tell us what threats were perceived by the contendants (the regimentsencircling the city), the objectives they were pursuing (finding weapons todefend the city), why they went to the Bastille (to find gun powder to loadtheir weapons), and also probably why they were angry (they felt betrayedby the King’s failure to hold his promises). But July 1789 must also belooked at from the perspective of how it links up with various othercontentious nodes openly challenging the bankrupt French state, such as the


Third Estate declaring itself National Assembly and abolishing feudal rightson its own self-proclaimed authority. The French Revolution, in that view,is not a sum of small segments describing what contendants did or how theyfelt as a result, but a loosely coordinated set of contentious networksorganizing attacks on the established order and proclaiming new rules andprinciples of authority: the end of feudalism, of royal absolutism, and ofprivileges. In Sewell’s words, we are looking at a set of ‘‘events’’ that ‘‘touchoff a chain of occurrences that durably transform previous structures andpractices’’ (2005a, p. 227). If, by the latter we understand primarily the rulesof domination and inequality that characterize a society at a particularmoment, we can make a claim that contention is the process through whichdurable ruptures in structures are created, and that we should thereforeanalyze them from the macro-perspective of a process of institutionalchange.

By reducing explanations of large processes24 to an enumeration of acombination of mechanisms extracted from small ones, Tilly & col. offer apeculiar solution to the problem of aggregation that deserves furtherexamination. But first we must make some distinctions that will clarify thediscussion. The problem of aggregation from small to large is twofold: first,we must ask under what conditions a small contentious episode may eitherlink up with, or blossom into, a large national contentious complex: that is,a problem of shifting levels of analysis. Second, we must ask if we are tryingto go from a single unit act, such as who started the American Revolution,to sequences of typified events, such as mechanisms, and or to a genericentity, such as contention or revolution. The latter is a problem of shiftinglevels of abstraction25. Table 1 shows the different combinations of thedistinct levels along these two dimensions.

From Table 1, we can see what option Tilly & col. have adopted to solvethe problem of aggregation. They avoid the common sin of explaining ageneric entity, for example, revolution, by summing up a set actions situatedon the unit or small societal acts levels of analysis, and of inferring fromthere to the large societal level. Instead, they first assert that revolution as ageneric phenomenon is a misnomer, and choose instead ‘‘contention’’ torefer generically to either the small or the large societal analytical levels (cells6 and 9 of Table 1).26 They then break up the process of contention – andthis is where aggregation takes place – into sequential segments of agent-driven occurrences abstracted as ‘‘mechanisms’’ that operate on a level ofabstraction intermediate between single acts and generic entities (cells 5 and8 of Table 1). At this point, however, they implicitly merge the two highestlevels of abstraction by treating mechanism as a generic term in its own right


(instead of merely a list of typified events), on the strength of the hypothesisthat empirical narratives, once analyzed, will invariably yield a limited list ofvariously combined mechanisms.27 Finally, mechanisms are said to ‘‘explaincausally’’ the historical sequences under study.

What can we say about aggregation between levels of analysis in Tilly &col.? Despite their insistence that many local unit struggles (such as theGdansk strike among shipyard workers analyzed in Tilly & Tarrow, 2007)often blossom into large societal ones (in this case, the Polish solidaritymovement), they provide no theoretical rule stating how the shift shouldtake place. There is no encounter between single dissident groups, no linkinginstitution (although the Catholic Church loomed large in that particularcontention), and no strategic deliberations by smaller with higher leaders orcoalitions of smaller groups with the incipient national movement: a largenational movement just coalesced.

On Table 2, I have removed the assumption that the last two highest levelsof abstraction can be merged, so that contention remains in the intermediatelevel of abstraction corresponding to a list of mechanisms extracted by the

Table 1. Levels of Analysis and Abstraction in Tilly & col.

Levels of Abstraction

Levels of

analysis

Single unit action sets Sequences of typified

events

Generic

entities

1 2 3

Individual X X X

4 5 6

Small societal Strike in Lenin shipyard,

Gdansk 1980aSocial appropriation,

certification, and

diffusion mechanisms

Contention

7 8 9

Large societal Formation of cross-class

coalition of

contenders to regime

in Nicaragua 1970sb

Infringement of elite

interests, suddenly

imposed grievances,c

and decertification

mechanisms

Contention

aCase analyzed in Tilly and Tarrow (2007, pp. 115–118).bCase analyzed in McAdam et al. (2001, pp. 196–207).cDefined as ‘‘singular events that dramatize and heighten the political salience of particular

issues’’ (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 202), in this case the Managua earthquake of 1974 dramatizing

the ills of the Somoza dictatorship.


analyst. Additionally, I have distinguished between different generic types ofcontention, so that the latter term becomes a family of generic conceptsrather than a single generic one.

In Table 2, aggregation takes place on both scales. Along the scale ofabstraction, cells 1, 4, and 7 are single instances of occurrences (or cases)which are, in turn, typified via mechanisms in cells 2, 5, and 8 respectively.The latter, in turn, are each identified as members of a generic class ofevents, respectively, called dispersed, localized rebellious, and revolutionarycontention.28 The logical link between the first and last level of abstractionis, therefore, instantiation, as it also is in the cases in Table 1. Aggregationfrom small to large units of analysis in Table 2 is achieved by linking theindividual, small societal, and large societal through strategic agency.Agency here means that the collectives that confront each other incontention deliberate, enter coalitions, seek alliances, negotiate with theopponents or the state, renege on their promises, etc. This means that wemust view the growth from small to large not as something that

Table 2. Levels of Analysis and Levels of Abstractionin the Model Proposeda.

Levels of Abstraction

Levels of

analysis

Single unit action sets Sequences of typified events Generic entities

1 2 3

Individual Zapata occupies land

with armed men

Violation of norms via land

confiscation in multiple

cases

Dispersed

contention

4 5 6

Small societal Anenecuilco and other

villages attempt in

vain to reclaim their

land

Negotiation, invasion, and

repression mechanisms

Localized

rebellious

contention

7 8 9

Large societal Zapata group joins

Madero’s struggle

against Dıaz regime

Phases a, b, c of Mexico’s

revolutionary process:

alliances, alliance

breakups, negotiations,

and reneging on

commitments mechanisms

Revolutionary

contention

aCase analyzed in Brachet-Marquez and Arteaga Perez (2010).


spontaneously or mysteriously happens, but as a result of intra- andintergroup deliberative processes in which internal hierarchies and leader-ship play important roles: the ‘‘small’’ history of the Mexican Revolutionstarted in various parts of the country, particularly in the village ofAnenecuilco, whose land had been stolen by a neighboring hacienda andwhose members collectively decided to occupy it by force. Subsequently,they allied with other villages through a political club, and collectivelydecided to offer their services to a much ‘‘larger’’ contentious process led byFrancisco Madero who had declared his decision to start an armed rebellionagainst Dictator Porfirio Dıaz,29 on the strength of an article in the Plan deSan Luis Potosi electoral platform stipulating that illegally appropriatedland should be returned to its rightful owners. Between the two contentioussets of events, there is no necessary link, except a very risky collectivedecision to use force (probably very much influenced by Zapata, the de factochief of the village coalition), one that could very well not have been taken,leaving as the only option for Anenecuilco villagers to be peons on their ownsequestered land, as had happened in countless other villages (Womack,1969). The links between cells 2, 5, and 8 follow the same rule: step one isrepresented by the individual facts that land has been confiscated byhacienda owners in various parts of the state of Morelos, Guerrero, andPuebla; in step two are the mechanisms of contentious politics used to fightback despite the threat of repression; and step three categorizes the previoussteps as rebellious contention. On this last level, there is progression in theintensity and spread of the generic phenomenon of contention fromscattered to localized and to revolutionary contention, which summarizes inmore abstract generic terms the upward shift in unit of analysis that hastaken place in cells 1-4-7 and 2-5-8, respectively. In sum, in both tables, theconcatenation of mechanisms of contention is the general process takingplace at intermediate levels of abstraction on any of the three analyticallevels identified. The main difference between the two tables lies in the ruleof aggregation from small to large units of analysis, and the qualification ofcontention (respectively, as dispersed, localized and revolutionary) at thehighest abstraction level in Table 2. Of course, identifying agency as thecondition making possible the passage from small to large in contentionprocesses leads us to open a new Pandora’s box, as it leaves unanswered thequestion of what impels contendants to act this rather than that way in anygiven situation, leaving contingency as the last resort solution. But agency,at least, points us in the right direction: internal deliberation, internaldissentions, and frequent splits within the contending collectives, debates,and changes in the group discourses elaborated in defense of the claims,


changes in membership, and/or leadership, etc. It also conforms to thepostulate, implicit in both the contention and state making perspectivespresented, that things happen because actors make strategic choices,whatever their interpretation of the situation, as when French peasantsburn castles rather than join the Parisian contentious crowds, or whenMorelos villagers erroneously believe that Madero will return their landonce elected.

Based on the critical considerations and suggested changes presented insections 1 and 2 of the chapter, we can now turn to the task of building atheoretical bridge between state making and contention, two initiallyincommensurate perspectives, and theorize the process by which therelations between state and society can be seen to generate and reproduceinequality.

3. STATE MAKING AND CONTENTION

AS COMPONENTS OF AN INTERACTIVE

VIEW OF INEQUALITY: THE ‘‘PACT

OF DOMINATION’’ APPROACH

State making, although it takes place over centuries, represents adiscontinuous process with unforeseen stops, regressions, and manytransformations taking place by fits and starts. To encompass this widevariety of movements therefore requires a longue duree time framework.Contention, on the contrary, erupts at particular moments and develops inthe courte duree. To make compatible these two time frameworks, I willrecast the interactions between state and society that state making representsas the historical structuring of complex and differentiated sets of rules, orpacts of domination designating ‘‘who should get what’’ in the exercise ofpower and the apportionment of economic surplus (Table 3). Contention,on the other hand, will be defined as the dynamic process driving the changetaking place 3 in the pact of domination take place.

The notion of ‘‘pact and domination’’ juxtaposes compliance to knownrules (pact) and the possible use of coercion (domination), both jointlypresent in historical arrangements, to express the idea that a givendistribution of power and resources will be complied with, often over verylong periods, although never becoming fully or permanently hegemonic.The notion of pact also implies that given levels of inequality are acceptedand taken for granted as ‘‘normal.’’


Given that distributive arrangements are never final, any currentlyundisputed level of inequality therefore represents, in a longue dureeperspective, a momentary pause or stalemate between the parties fighting fora bigger share of power, privileges, and economic surplus, during whichcontention is low, and mostly restricted to resistance.

In keeping with a view of state making as the alternation between thecreation, reproduction, and destruction of pacts of domination, theauthority exercised by states is conceived as both legitimate and contestedat all times, so that hegemony in the sense of an endpoint is never finallyachieved. Yet, state rule does stabilize for variably long periods in the senseof being taken for granted by the majority, although never in any finalmanner. In addition to dominating their population through the threat ofcoercion, states must therefore also acquire skills at building legitimatingdiscourses that make domination more palatable and inequality lessvisible.30

An interactive view of state making also directs us to see theincorporation into official ideologies not only of rules favoring the wealthy

Table 3. The Dynamics of State and Society Pact of Domination:‘‘Who Is Entitled to What’’.

Rules of Access to Power Rules of Access to Wealth

Who may engage in contestation (assembly,

deliberation, association, demonstration)

and consultations (plebiscite, suffrage, and

holding office)

Who may own sources of wealth, (land, mines,

rights to trade, etc)

Who is exempt from public justice

Who pays taxes and how much

Who may rule

Who may engage in what economic activities

Who may be represented

How should work be remunerated

To whom is the ruler accountable

State Mediation of the pact of domination

Regulates or represses contestation

Allows or prohibits consultation

Judges and punishes according to privilege/law

Appoints and fires governmental officers

Has monopoly over the means of coercion

Taxes according to privileges or law

Distributes monopolies, franchises, and offices

Assigns, protects, or confiscates property

Makes or proposes laws


and the powerful, but also of deeply ingrained popular cultural transcripts(including discrimination toward minority groups), of demands from belowfor improvements in social and economic conditions, and of the legitimacyof protests against the abuses of specific officials or elites. The most extremeexample is the populist state31 that dignifies the ‘‘people’’ by professing torule in its name and do its biddings while ruling in a paternalistic andauthoritarian fashion, especially when backed by military power (as fascistItaly or peronist Argentina) or by a powerful one-party state (as Mexico formost of the twentieth century). Yet there is no doubt that the populist state,in order to stay in power, must meet some demands from below (some real,others more symbolic), so that some important transactions between topand bottom will take place.32

Nationalism,33 invented during the American and French Revolutionsand perfected in the twentieth century through two world wars, is, however,the quintessential example of the engineering from above of a politicalculture, based on the promise of emancipation from contested conditions ofdomination. Nationalism may rally the people against the external enemythreatening the community of ‘‘free citizens,’’ or mobilize against thecolonizer with the promise of forming an independent nation. As withpopulism, the nationalist discourse must deliver on some of its promises, sothat nationalisms, will, willy-nilly, breed nations (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm,1992). Yet, it is to be understood as a continuously contested and negotiateddiscourse, the outcome of transactions between dominant and dominated.

Given that states are only variably successful at establishing a legitimatingdiscourse while controlling their subject populations, the history ofterritories under their jurisdiction can be seen as a succession of variablylong periods during which compliance is generally assured, followed byepisodes of intensifying contention in response to the state’s attempts to gainmore power, increase fiscal exactions, or tolerate more despotic/exploitativeexactions on subaltern groups by its elites, in other words, redefine the pactof domination in ways that negatively affect the share of power and surplusto which the population at large, or selected elites, feel they are entitled.

Some conceptual clarifications are in order, lest the notion of pact as it isused here, may be misunderstood. Pact is to be taken heuristically ratherthan literally, in the sense that everything looks as if there were anagreement between members of a society not to fight over the disposition ofpower and resources, and accept (enthusiastically or grudgingly) a stabilizedform of domination and distribution as ‘‘normal’’ and even, for some,‘‘legitimate.’’ The notion of pact, as understood here, has little to do with‘‘contract,’’ in which subordinate people would be seen as ‘‘agreeing’’ to


explicitly, defined rules. Far from constituting undisputed and sharedknowledge (as a contract would), pacts of domination are continuouslysubject to strategic redefinitions and manipulations by state or societalactors of opposed interests. The discrepancy between the public transcript ofdomination and that culturally elaborated by various groups will alternatelyfoment hegemony, accumulate private rage, or provoke collectively voicedfeelings of injustice (Moore, 1978).

Neither should we think of a pact of domination as a unique set of clearrules neatly dividing society between the dominant and the dominated, orapplying uniformly to all within each of these social categories, but as amultiplicity of smaller overlapping sets of rules, so that there is not onesingle mode of power and exploitation but a large collection of crisscrossinglegal and normative principles connecting the dominated to the dominantthrough rights and obligations: workers to capitalist employers, share-croppers to landowners, domestic servants to household heads, women totheir fathers or husbands, etc.

Finally, it is important to note that although democratic pacts ofdomination generally put an end to radical forms of contention and hencesudden political change, the same general mechanisms of contention overrules operate in them, although they take on more gradual institutionalizedforms. Democracies are therefore distinguished not only by the list ofattributes that identify them as such, but by the historically specificinterrelations and mutual expectations they establish between state andsociety, by their distinct political cultures, their widely shared standards oflegitimate rules of the game, and so on. We may therefore speak ofqualitatively different families of democracy, as for example corporatist,liberal, and social democracy, none of which is, in principle, moredemocratic than the others, but each characterized by its style of interactionbetween state and society, role of the state, and redistributive schemes.Additionally, far from having abolished inequality in the distribution ofpower and resources, democracies, especially emergent ones, publicizeequalizing discourses while often preserving stark economic differences.34

Rather than exceptions to the general contentious dynamics of permanenceand change, democracies can therefore be regarded as a family of pacts ofdomination with basic similarities but also important internal differences.

A hypothetical succession of pacts of domination (PD) is shown in Fig. 1,beginning at T2 through T3 with violent conquest, followed by militaryoccupation, coercive ‘‘pacification,’’ and a division of the spoils among thevictors, followed by the coercive institution of rules stabilizing the distributionof power and resources. Thereafter follows the institutionalization of these


rules during PD1, which gradually becomes natural and taken for grantedthroughout T4, with mostly everyday forms of resistance and nonviolentcontention. But at T5, the system returns, under changed historicalcircumstances, to a situation of increased contentious politics between new(or old) sets of contendents, opening a new cycle of confrontations andnegotiations over the distribution of power and resources (T5–T6), whichcreates a new set of rules of domination under PD2, in turn followed by theirinstitutionalization throughout T7. History is not frozen at this point, so thatwe must represent the continuation of these recurring cycles of powerreconfigurations as a future PD3.

In this general model, state forms are specific to each historicallyconstructed pact of domination, and therefore will rise and fall with them.The state exists as an instance of domination of a particular kind as well as aset of agencies enforcing it (Oszlak, 1978, 1997; O’Donnell, 1984).Therefore, there is no such thing, empirically, as a general state form, noteven a general ‘‘capitalist’’ or a ‘‘socialist’’ state form, but instead a largecollection of historically constructed states, each with its rules of ‘‘whoshould get what’’ and peculiar ways of maintaining order through acombination of the carrot and the stick. The military state in Argentina, forexample, literally collapsed under defeat in the Malvinas War with GreatBritain35, and this very breakdown made possible the resurgence, in 1983, ofdemocratic rule. The set of state institutions that were then created anew, farfrom being final, subsequently went through a crisis of elite contention

T1

T2

T3

T4

T5

T6

T7

T1 PD0 institutionalized = established order T2 Challenge and state response = critical junctureT3 PD1 imposed = new order established coercively T4 PD1 institutionalized = return to order T5 Challenge and state response = critical junctureT6 PD2 imposed = new order established coercively T7 PD2 institutionalized = return to order Etc.

App

rent

ices

hip

PD3PD2PD1

Fig. 1. From One Pact of Domination (PD) to the Next.


triggering galloping inflation that spelt the collapse of the economy andmost state functions in the late 1980s, followed by the restabilization of arestricted democracy (O’Donnell, 1994; Alonso, 1998). States are thereforenever finally structured but will take on different power configurations,giving birth to new or transformed pacts of domination.

From this general perspective, the history of the relationship betweenstate and society is that of a succession of temporary (although often verylong) ‘‘pacts’’ marked, at turning points, by tightly concatenated clusters ofstructure-changing contentious episodes when these pacts are renegotiatedeither nonviolently (as in central Europe in the 1990s) or through some formof social upheaval.36

To effect such structural changes in pacts of domination, there is no needto rely on extraordinary or unusual macro-processes. I propose to base thedynamics in pacts of domination on contentious politics, regarded as aneveryday omnipresent process of interaction within society and betweenstate and society, which normally only reproduces the rules of domination,but periodically transforms them. In this perspective, the historicaltrajectory of societies can be seen as periodically punctuated by momentsof more frequent and intense forms of contentious politics likely to bringabout ruptures (some large, others barely visible) in established structures(Sewell, 2005a). Whereas contentious episodes are, in normal circumstances,no more than manifestations of local discontent attached to limiteddemands that can be accommodated within the status quo, they acquire,at such critical junctures, the capacity to bring about pact changing eventsby multiplying and variously combining their forces. The Cuban revolution,for example, was an event that marked the history of Latin America as acritical juncture triggering in other countries demands from below for lessunequal resource distribution in the form of contentious politics that rangedfrom peaceful (yet severely repressed) student protest to extended guerillawarfare. The event also stood as a landmark for conservative forces all overLatin America that gave their full support to the cold war in the form of‘‘dirty war’’ practices that ran the whole gamut of mass imprisonment,torture, ‘‘disappearances,’’ and genocide in the case of Guatemala (Vela,2009). Critical junctures, however, are rarely predictable and often notalways clearly visible (except retrospectively), as, for example, the 1974Managua earthquake that showed to all, including elites, how Nicaragua’sdictator Somoza chose not to distribute international aid to a devastatedpopulation. But even an apparently subdued population, violently purged ofopponents for almost two decades, such as Chile’s under Pinochet, couldsuddenly join in contentious street demonstrations of protest in the late


1980s, openly expressing its disaffection from the 16-year-old supposedlyinstitutionalized (and even ‘‘constitutionalized’’) dictatorship.37

Revolutions are rare events, and successful revolutions even rarer, butmore than other forms of contention, they are the process by which pacts ofdomination are swept away and replaced. But most of the time, when wethink of contention as potentially event-creating interaction between stateand society, we are not referring to a single all encompassing process, buteither to regionalized or to sector-specific contentious movements thatchallenge only partially the established order (e.g., a strike, an emancipatoryreligious movement, or an independent party in an authoritarian regime), orto a myriad of mostly unconnected small or intermediate processes ofcontention, all different in timing, kind, and intensity. Such minor tremorsare usually absorbed by the system with only casuistic solutions applied,38

or institutionally nested (in factories, small towns, and large complexorganizations), so that the rules being contested and transformed bringchanges that are relatively insulated between one sector and another.African-Americans, for example, may have achieved lower degrees ofinequality in comparison to white Americans with respect to education andjobs, while remaining largely segregated socially and residentially. Womenhave obtained increased access to education since World War II, but theyare still paid less for the same job levels and must still face many forms ofculturally entrenched inequality in their homes.

Bringing contention to bear on institutional change also poses theproblem of aggregation with contention understood now as part and parcelof the process of interaction between state and society. To understand howunits of contention go from small to large remains an empirical question, asindicated earlier. But given that we have opted for the creation of events(understood as structural ruptures) through agency, we are under obligationto show how contentious episodes become connected to each other to formlarger contentious networks, or fail to connect either as a result of strategicdecisions by the collectives engaged in the contentious struggles or by divideand rule manipulations by the state.39 Tilly & col.’s methodology ofanalyzing contentious episodes is particularly helpful in this respect, as itforces us to go step by step through each contentious process and registerwhen it connects with or disconnects from other such processes. But in orderto do this kind of analysis, we must also turn our lens to the processesinternal to contention collectives insofar as these lead us to understand theircapacity for gaining popular appeal and obtaining powerful allies, andhence to spread territorially and provoke class coalitions, something that isabsent in but not incompatible with Tilly & col.’s perspective.


The problem of aggregation also leads us to ask what difference any singleor group of contentious nodes represents for potential changes in the pact ofdomination. This is probably where the most intractable problem ofaggregation lies. We could try to hypothesize that the more local the contextin which a contentious episode emerges, the less likely it is of expressingdemands and grievances directly relevant to shifts in the pact of domination,and vice versa that contentious episodes of national scope would be morelikely to have constructed a discourse addressing the validity or legitimacyof central aspects of the pact of domination. But I suspect we would findmany counterexamples of initially insignificant local contentious episodesgrowing in appeal and impact due to their very radicalism, whereas somewidely diffused national ones may remain ‘‘light’’ on challenging the pact ofdomination.40 Yet it stands to reason that although aggregation along theunit of analysis dimension is not logically related to impact on rules, smalllocalized contentious events are less likely than large publicly visible ones tohave much impact on any portion of the pact of domination, unlesscontendants can form alliances with other contending groups and eitherjointly negotiate changes with the state, or challenge the latter in directconfrontation. But in any case, the passage from the group dynamics ofcontention to the societal dynamics of inequality is a big leap for which thereis no ready solution except to say that whether the ‘‘resolutions’’ applied bystate agents to any particular contentious episode (be they concessions orrepression) have any impact outside of and beyond the initial cases ofcontention is still an open question that requires further scrutiny.

Finally, when trying to establish a bridge between contention and changesin the pact of domination, we are under obligation to establish the linkbetween inequality and the nature of the claims expressed in contentiousprocesses, which will almost invariably be indirect. Clearly, not all forms ofcontention are about inequality, but many will be, and we will usually beable to interpret whether the demands voiced are translatable as demandsfor more (or less) political equality o for better (or worse) economicequality.41 The translation is, of course, easier in revolutionary processes inwhich mobilizing discourses usually promise more social justice and equalitybetween citizens. In smaller contentious events, the disputes may morefrequently be about one group claiming rights, property, or electoral victoryover the other, but the outcome will still be about giving more or fewerresources and power to one subaltern group in relation to a dominant one.

In synthesis, the proposed model sees the social ordering of inequality inthe distribution of power and resources simultaneously through the makingand transformation of a pact of domination, a transhistorical macro-lens


that is conceptually identified across historical periods but assumes differentempirical forms and parameters,42 and through the micro-lens of real-timeand place-bound processes of contention over a variety of issues defined byeach contentious episode. The basic process to be studied is thereforecontention: its dynamics, the creativity of its participants, its visibleimmediate outcomes, and its hypothetical long-term repercussions. At thesame time, however, contention is envisioned as the dynamic principle thatmakes domination both sustainable and contestable, so that the makingand unmaking of rules of domination through contention is held to be acentral organizing principle of social life: through contention, the rules ofunequal distribution of power and material resources are being alternatelyreproduced and challenged, and tacitly or actively sanctioned by stateagents. But although, as Sewell put it, ‘‘‘Structures’ are constructed byhuman action, and ‘societies’y are continually shaped and reshapedby the creativity and stubbornness of their human creators’’ (2005b,p. 110), the latter rarely envisage or control the long-term consequences oftheir contentious actions. The effects of the events of July 1789, for example,went far beyond anything its participants had anticipated or struggledfor: the king pulled back the troops that had encircled Paris, called backNecker, the popular Swiss finance minister, and could do nothing againstthe National Assembly becoming the de facto political authority, soon tobecome de jure as well. Yet, as Sewell (1992) also insists, social reality isfractured, and the structural opportunities for effecting change throughthese micro-processes are inherently open-ended, discontinuous, andcontingent (2005b, p. 110).

Finally, and most importantly, there are crucial structuring processes otherthan contention – primarily market and transnational relations – thatcompete with and often transform the processes I have delineated. Sometypes of state actions, for example, cannot be achieved via coercion, as thewarring sovereigns of premodern Europe discovered early on, leading themto coax rather than coerce capital into financing their military adventures.Today’s states also make considerable concessions to capital, in open orcovert violation of the rules that apply to ordinary citizens, and are prone todictate regressive social or fiscal distributive policies in response to pressuresfrom creditor countries. The pressures and policy influence that powerfulforeign powers can exert on small polities, on the other hand, are commonknowledge in our contemporary globalized world. But geopolitics is nonewcomer, so that we can assert that state power has always been limited, toa variable extent, by external power configurations, especially in the capitalistperiphery. The fact that such processes have not been included in the model


proposed in this chapter is no indication that they are being discounted, onlythat they are considered as pertaining to processes exogenous to it.

4. CONCLUSION

Summing up the argument presented, the chapter has examined two generalmodels of interaction between state and society, with a view to selectivelyappropriating them in the construction of a theory of the reproduction andtransformation of inequality. The theoretical framework proposed definesdynamic principles involving the generalized and ubiquitous everydayinteraction of society and state actors alternately in upholding andundermining the rules that spell the unequal distribution of power andresources in society. The framework proposed brings together a historicallyspecific micro-process – contentious politics – with a general yet historicallyembedded macro-principle of permanence and change in distributive rules –the pact of domination. Together, they configure the process of the creation,renegotiation, and occasional destruction of generally durable yet con-tinuously contested rules and norms underlying the unequal apportionmentof power and resources. In this scheme, inequality has been shown torepresent simultaneously a central organizing principle of social life and arecurring source of contention over rights and rules in which the state playsthe vital role of enforcing current rules and sanctioning deviations, but alsoof creating unifying ideologies (e.g., citizenship, nationalism), making caseby case concessions, or responding to pressures by modifying said rules.This view is informed by the dual conception of the state as a politicalinstance of domination and organizational–institutional complex endowedwith administrative, coercive, and ideological capacities. In this generalframework, state forms are historically constructed entities shaping andshaped by the pacts of domination to which they are respectively attached,each with its rules of ‘‘who should get what’’ and peculiar ways ofmaintaining inequality between dominant and dominated.

We can now attempt to provide a theoretically informed answer to thequestion that initiated this chapter, namely, why people unquestioninglycomply, most of the time, with rules that define an unequal distribution ofaccess to power and resources. We could represent the answer to thisquestion as a continuum going from ideological hegemony at one extreme tocoercion at the other, with contention in the middle taking up most of thespace but ranging from mere resistance to defiance. These possiblecontentious and noncontentious responses to state making are represented


in Fig. 2. When they participate in contentious politics, people start from abasic capacity for creative agency, pursuing objectives that relate toimmediate situational pressures that they interpret within the confines oftheir local collectively elaborated frames of reference. It is thereforeirrelevant to ask whether such and such a contending group was being‘‘patriotic’’ as opposed to narrowly egoistic in its aims when it launched anepisode of contention: Parisian crowds were moved to attack the Bastille inJuly 1789 by what they perceived as an emergency situation requiringimmediate action, while a small group of Mexican peasants unwittinglystarted a revolution when occupying forcefully their illegally confiscatedfields, and then only for the express purpose of sowing the corn they neededfor survival.43 In combination with other contentious processes, both ofthese contentious episodes were instrumental in profoundly changing therules of unequal distribution of power and resources in their respectivesocieties. In the macro-analytical perspective of the dynamics of change in apact of domination, what counts is how individual contentious incidentsmultiply and combine their forces, often (but not invariably) constructing inthe process a unifying discourse, such as ‘‘the nation in danger’’ (in 1792France) or the Agrarian reform (in 1910–1920 Mexico).

In the theoretical scheme proposed, I have defined three interrelatedanalytical levels – people’s cognitive capacity for creative agency, group levelcontention, and the societal transformation of the pact of domination (Fig. 3).The processes taking place at each level have been integrated in the followingways: first, creative agency is linked to the capacity to oppose reflexively(instead of reproducing practically) the rules of who should get what viatransgressive contention; second, contention is said to be the process throughwhich people express their discontent and voice their specific demands formore access to power and a greater share in wealth; and third, changes in thepact of domination are seen as contingently produced through the process ofcontention, which itself depends on creative agency. These analytical levels donot refer to the aggregation from small to large or from concrete to abstractdiscussed earlier; the first level represents a postulate on which the second isdependent; the second, in turn, represents the observable process that we,social scientists, must examine, analyzing it first on its own level of theprocesses that propel people to act out their recriminations and theirgrievances or seek their interests; and the third level represents the perspectiveof long range changes in the rules of inequality or pact of domination,independently of actors’ intentions or comprehension of such processes.

The model proposed is grounded in a real observable and researchableprocess, based on the postulate of creative agency, but this process is


AState Making

BConditions of

coercion & extractionresentedas unfair

CConditions of

coercion & extractionfound acceptable

HResistance

JDefiance

Institutionalized ortolerated: march,charivari, carnival

Extra-institutional &repressed if detected:pilfering, sabotaging,

banditism

Non-violent:petitions,

demonstrations,heresies

Violent:riot, guerilla

warfare,uprising

DContention

IContestation

Institutionalized ortolerated:

pamphlets, clubs,parties, elections

Extra-institutionaltolerated or out-

lawed: socialmovements, mobil-izing for rebellion

ECompliance

GThick hegemony

FThin hegemony

Fig. 2. State Making via Compliance vs. Contention.

Dominatio

n,Conten

tion,andtheNegotia

tionofInequality

151

interpreted from the perspective of the social ordering of inequality asfeatured in the concept of pact of domination. As stipulated by Tilly & col.,limited collective conflicts are amenable to study with the same theoreticalcategories and analytical levels as wider social conflagrations, but only if weagree to link small to large contention networks via agency and distinguishthe micro-dynamics of contention from their macro-implications forchanges in the pact of domination. Tilly & col.’s stipulation that nomacro-processes should be invoked to explain macro-contention has alsobeen incorporated in the proposed model, for indeed, the pact ofdomination is no solid entity to be moved through collective humanagency, but an interpretive device that focuses the researcher’s lens on thechanging division of power and modes of extraction of the economicsurplus, and relates these patterns to the process of contention regarded asthe dynamic principle that shapes the social ordering of inequality in society.The notion of pact of domination therefore serves to represent analyticallythe temporarily crystallized yet ever changing outcome of the continuousprocess of interaction between state and society that alternately spellscompliance and contention over who gets what, and in doing so reproducesand transforms the structure of inequality.

Level I AGENCY(postulate)

CreativeAgency

ReproductiveAgency

Level II COLLECTIVERESPONSE

(social process)

Contention Compliance

Level III PACT OFDOMINATION(interpretative

scheme)

Long Waves ofChanges in

Society

Permanencewithin Waves of

Changes

Fig. 3. Postulate, Process, and Interpretive Scheme.


NOTES

1. I am using Giddens’ definition: ‘‘To be an agent is to be able to deployy arange of causal powers, including that of influencing those deployed by othersyAction depends upon the capability of the individual to make a difference to apreexisting state of affairs or course of events’’ (1984, p. 14).2. Processes will be defined here as time-ordered sequences of occurrences

following a causal plot (Abbott, 1992; Sewell, 2005b; Somers, 1994), and events asconcatenations of occurrences that ‘‘significantly transform structure’’ (Sewell,2005a, p. 100).3. On contemporary interregional differences in levels of inequality and a

discussion of historical processes underlying these differences, see Mann and Riley(2007).4. By transhistorical, I mean a process that is conceptually identified across

historical periods but assumes different empirical forms, parameters, and duration indifferent locations and historical periods.5. For reasons that will become clear below, the state is defined here as the

political instance of domination and organizational–institutional complex endowedwith administrative and coercive capacities over its territory of jurisdiction(O’Donnell, 1984; Oszlak, 1997).6. In what follows, I would not be assuming that the state is the power supreme

independent of class or elite power, simply that the state is a necessary instrument ofdomination in any but the most simple societies, regardless of who are the politymembers, or whether they govern directly or are merely the beneficiaries of the rulesenforced by state agencies.7. Although not encompassing a whole society, we should also mention E. P.

Thompson’s immensely fruitful contributions from his studies of English culture, inits historical and class variations (1975, 1991, 2001).8. Mann’s (1986) study of ancient civilizations suggests, however, that the logistics

of state conquest and surplus extraction in the ancient world were a great deal morecomplex than this lapidary formula would suggest, as the capacity of states tocontrol territory was greatly constrained by the limited range within which troopsand supplies could be transported. In addition to conquest, therefore, diplomacy andalliances with conquered elites were used, not without risks of backfiring.9. According to Mann (2005), up to one-third of Nazi Germany’s war preparing

labor force was, at some point, made up of camp prisoner labor, and many dye-in-the-wool Nazis were opposed to the final solution on the grounds that it took awayworkers necessary to the war effort. The Japanese use of Asian slave labor duringWorld War II is also well known, as is Stalin’s use of Gulag prisoners as slave labor,mainly through Solzhenitsyn’s work.10. For studies of state making in Europe, see Aminzade (1993), Anderson

(1974a), Brewer (1988), Downing (1992), Ertman (1997), Gorski (2003), Mann (1986,1988, 1993), and Tilly (1975, 1978, 1986, 1990, 1997a, 1997b, 2005a, 2005b).11. In response to Louis XIVth’s expansionary drive to conquer the countries

adjoining France’s borders. (‘‘les frontieres naturelles’’, as he claimed).12. This rebuttal leads Centeno (1997, p. 1569) to propose three prerequisites for

wars to strengthen the state that were generally absent in early Latin American state


making: the state’s ability to draw financial resources and political support from its ownpopulation, sufficient administrative skills prior to war preparations to face the ensuingexplosion of revenues and expenditures, and undisputed hegemony over a territory.One might add, also, the ingrained corruption practices inherited from 400 years ofresisting Spanish control over people and resources (which West European countriesalso suffered from, but perhaps not with the same intensity, especially England).13. For studies of structuring state power from above in Latin America, see

Chiaramonte (1997), Dunkerley (2002), Gootenberg (1989), Lopez-Alves (2000),O’Donnell (1976, 1980, 1984), Oszlak (1978, 1981, 1997), Peloso and Tennenbaum(1996), Torres Rivas (1979, 2006), Walker (1999), and Williams (1994).

14. Dependencia y desarrollo en America Latina (Cardoso & Faletto, 1966) wouldappear in its English revised version in 1979, more than 10 years after its publicationin Spanish had spawned a rich homegrown literature on dependence, whichnevertheless neglected the subject of state making.15. See, for example, Stern (1987), Katz (1988), Nugent (1988), Mallon (1983, 1994,

1995), Meyer (1973, 1974), Gilbert and Nugent (1994), Knight (1986, 1994), Guardino(1996), Manrique (1981), Warman (1976), Tutino (1986, 1987), and Reina (1980).16. For example, Mexico’s nineteenth century civic militias pertaining to the

National Guard recruited peasant soldiers who were often called upon to defendagainst French invaders the very same villages where their families lived.17. In what follows, I will exclude from the discussion Tilly’s Durable Inequality

(1998), which represents inequality as generated within organizations through theirincorporation of ascriptive cultural definitions of unequal pairs (men/women, white/nonwhite, etc.).18. Collectives refer to organized groupings such as villages, agrarian commu-

nities (as, e.g., ejidos in Mexico), firms, unions, professional associations, politicalclubs, etc. But the term does not include state agencies.19. Action is considered innovative ‘‘if it incorporates claims, selects objects of

claims, includes collective self-representation, and/or adopts means that are eitherunprecedented or forbidden within the regime in question’’ (McAdam et al., 2001,p. 8). We should note that these provisos would include terrorist attacks (as in car orairplane bombs), along with erstwhile sit-ins as innovative forms of collective action.20. Ohlin Wright has referred to this form of theorizing as ‘‘combinatorial

structuralism’’ whereby a menu of elementary forms is provided (in this casemechanisms) and ‘‘more complex structural configurations, then, are analyzed asspecific forms of combination of these elementary forms’’(2000, p. 460).21. The model developed by Tilly & col. is debated point by point in Brachet-

Marquez and Arteaga Perez (2010).22. La Grande Peur (or the Great Fear), a peasant movement that developed in

May–July of 1789, was triggered by rumors that bandits had been recruited byaristocrats to destroy crops and hoard grain in order to sell it at the highest price(something that had been done periodically during the Ancien Regime). The fear ofthese bandits spread rapidly throughout the countryside, causing peasants to attackand burn castles.23. A few pages on, the authors mention that government may operate as

mediator, target, or claimant (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 5), but there is no mention ofgovernment acting as arbiter or rule enforcer.


24. In what follows, I will not qualify processes as ‘‘large’’ or ‘‘small’’ or‘‘intermediate’’ rather than ‘‘micro’’ or ‘‘macro’’ because the present discussion is notabout generalizing from the individual to the whole society, but from smallaggregated interactive processes to extended ones over a national territory.25. I owe this distinction to Alford and Friedland (1985, p. 20).26. Even though one of the subtitles reads ‘‘Mechanisms in Revolutionary

Contention’’ (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 198), implying that there are different kinds ofcontention.27. We studied six cases of contention in Brachet-Marquez and Arteaga Perez

(2010) and found an extremely wide spread of mechanisms with very few (such asnegotiation, coalition, or repression) repeating themselves, even though the cases ofcontention under study were limited to three villages situated in Morelos within atime period from 1909 to 2009. One of these villages, Anenecuilco, is EmilianoZapata’s native village, where the first contention leading to the Mexican Revolutiontook place, according to our analysis.28. The reason why contention is qualified in cells 3, 6, and 9 will be explained in

Section 3.29. At that point, there is still no ‘‘revolution’’ as Madero’s intent is simply to oust

the dictator so as to reestablish the 1857 Constitution that has stipulates a noreelection rule. After his assassination in 1913, the group of opponents to the newdictatorship will call themselves ‘‘constitutionalists’’ for the same reason. It will be thesmall contention born in Anenecuilco that will eventually inject revolutionary elementswhich the other allied contendants will be unable to exclude, despite all their efforts.30. Scott’s (1990) distinction between ‘‘thick’’ and ‘‘thin’’ hegemony may be

usefully mentioned here, insofar as not questioning state authority does notnecessarily imply identifying with its symbols and shibboleths, but merely complyingwithout much enthusiasm.31. For a discussion of populism in Latin America, see Ianni (1968), Conniff

(1999), Moscoso Perea (1990), and Quintero Lopez (2004).32. This has been argued, for example, in a revisionist version of peronism in

Argentina, first interpreted as a straight dictatorship, and later viewed as receptive tolabor demands (Portantiero & Murais, 1969).33. I am not including in this definition stateless nationalism, as in Basque,

Breton, or Quebecquois nationalisms.34. On the recent rise of inequality in developed countries, see Alderson,

Beckfield, and Nielsen (2005) and Moller, Alderson, and Nielsen (2009).35. It is important to note, however, that such defeat was not the cause of the

generalized disaffection by conservative elites and opponents to the regime alike;what precipitated the fall of the generals was the fact that they publicly declaredmilitary victory while sending young men (and boys) to their certain death, andcollecting extra moneys from the civil population in order to support a war that hadalready been lost.36. In the special case of democratic pacts of domination, change is no longer

achieved by challenging the PD in toto, but through the electoral process and the useof rules (e.g., parliamentary rules) stipulating legitimate ways of effecting change.Nevertheless, contention as the collective expression of demands, as is well known, isnever absent from democratic social formations.


37. General Pinochet had a constitution ‘‘approved’’ in 1980 in which he was toact as life senator.38. That is, solutions that solve the case, but do not have any repercussions

outside of it.39. For example, Zapata’s failure to join forces with Villa in the Aguascalientes

Convention when together they had the military upper hand on Carranza, and thelatter still did not have the support of the United States.40. The Mexican revolution exemplifies this situation. It is said to have started in

1909, at the national level, with Francisco I. Madero’s declaration to become apresidential candidate. But his mobilizing discourse almost exclusively consisted inreviving the no reelection constitutional rule that had been disregarded for 30 years,along with the rest of the 1857 constitution. We may say, in this case, that Maderowas aiming at breaking a (de facto) rule of access to power, but nothing much else,and that he was appealing, mostly to disaffected elites who would not have dreamedof starting a social revolution. After his escape from jail and declared intent to unseatDıaz, Madero accepted an offer of military help by a small insignificant politicalgroup (the Melchor Ocampo club), led by a young peasant called Emiliano Zapata.That insignificant group which pursued a program that directly attacked theeconomic status quo (to give the land back to their rightful peasant owners) offeredits help on the strength of article 3 in Madero’s Plan of San Luis that stipulated thatillegally taken land should be restituted. The article was there, but not the intent, asthe future would show. Soon enough, conflict would break out between the alliesfollowing Madero’s ascent to power and his subsequent attempts to stamp down onnascent zapatismo.41. By demands for worse equality, I am referring to elite (and international

creditor) demands for policies that increment the degree of inequality. One examplethereof are the neoliberal restructuring and stabilization policies and regressive socialreforms carried out throughout the 1990s in Latin America and other peripheralsocieties, which concentrated wealth in fewer hands and incremented the level ofpoverty and unemployment in these regions. Naturally, such demands are disguisedas demands for ‘‘better’’ economic, and even ‘‘better’’ social conditions, so that myqualification of them as ‘‘worse’’ in terms of equality is interpretive, based on a largeaccumulation of evidence of their consequences.42. The term transhistorical as it is used here does not imply ‘‘outside of history,’’

but a benchmark to compare different historical periods. In that sense, ‘‘statemaking’’ surely does differ in early seventeenth-century Prussia as compared to earlyeighteenth-century France or early ninneteenth-century Mexico or, to take a moreextreme comparison, fifth century-BCE Athens. But we can recognize in each case ageneral model of ‘‘state making’’ that encompasses all of those historically specificformations. So, the relation of general to particular in the notion of state makingdoes not lose its thoroughly historical standing for being analytic, as it provides onlya general framework with which to examine historical periods.43. The contentious episode in Mexico summarily represented on Table 2 took

place in 1909, when the Hacienda del Hospital whose owners had sequestered fieldsbelonging to the village of Anenecuilco refused to let the latter sow in time for thespring crop, and the state government refused to intervene. Emiliano Zapata, still anunknown young village chief, proceeded to occupy said fields with 80 armed men to


protect village people while they did their work. The state government subsequentlyabstained from responding to hacienda demands for their expulsion.

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Documents

[Current Perspectives in Social Theory] Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes Volume 27 || Domination, contention, and the negotiation of inequality: A theoretical proposal