The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Stop War, July 7, 2011. Flickr/ Liam Kearney. Some rights reserved.In his vast body of social scientific work, Charles Tilly made two fundamental contributions to our understanding of the development of modern states and social movements. In the first body of work, Tilly argued that war and preparations for war were the origin of the modern state. In the second, he polemicized against social movement scholarship for focusing narrowly on Northern reformist movements, ignoring more violent forms of what he called contentious politics. But Tilly made little attempt to bring together his “top-down” approach to war and state-building with his “bottom-up” research on contentious politics. With the growth of non-state violent movements in the twenty-first century, especially in the global South, this is a lacuna that we must work to close.
Tilly argued that war played an indirect role in the creation of modern citizenship rights. Because war makers require resources with which to fight their wars, war making triggers a cascade of other processes. First, rulers build states to fight wars and manage them; second, they need to extract resources from their citizens to pay for them; third, they must protect the citizen groups who provide those resources; fourth, in order to maintain social cohesion, they must develop mechanisms to reconcile conflicts within their societies. These are sometimes despotic mechanisms, but increasingly, they take the form of what Michael Mann called infrastructural power – power exercised within civil society. Protection and reconciliation lead to the creation of the rights of citizens and thence to social movements. This chain of processes starts with the desire to make war but ends with citizen rights and contentious politics.
