Domination, Contention,

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DOMINATION, CONTENTION,

AND THE NEGOTIATION OF

INEQUALITY: A THEORETICAL

PROPOSAL

Viviane Brachet-Ma rquez

ABSTRACT

I propose a theoretical framework that specifies dynamic principles

involving the generalized and ubiquitous everyday interaction of society

and state actors alternately in upholding and undermining the rules that

spell 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 the

distributive rules the creation, renegotiation, and occasional destruction

of a generally durable yet continuously contested pact of domination.

Inequality represents simultaneously a central organizing principle of

social life and a recurring source of conflict over rights and rules, the

latter being the practical rules that govern interaction in specific cases of

contention, giving governing agencies the necessary flexibility to act

casuistically, giving in here, and throwing its weight there, with new

formal rules sometimes following that process, or old ones falling in

disuse.

Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes

Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 27, 123161

Copyright r 2010 by Emerald Group Publishing LimitedAll rights of reproduction in any form reserved

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

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In this scheme, the state is a historically created organizational andcoercive agent embodying and enforcing the currently valid pact, mostly

through legal/coercive, but also ideological power over its territory of

jurisdiction. State forms are specific to each historically constructed pact

of domination, so that there is no such thing as a state in general, but a

series of historically constructed states, each with its rules of who should

get what and peculiar ways of maintaining inequality between dominant

and dominated.

Why do people comply unquestioningly, most of the time, with rules that

define an unequal distribution of access to power and resources? Inequality

is omnipresent and justified in a variety of institutional arenas, from

kinship to religion to work environments, so that we are literally trained and

retrained every day of our lives, to accept that we will take our places, and

take 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 rules

on kin and subalterns, while bowing to the authority of our hierarchical

superiors. Yet we do not always comply. We often bicker, temporize,protest, and drag our feet, and sometimes we simulate compliance while

quietly sabotaging rules and inventing alternative ones tacitly shared by

select groups. We also get into disputes over who owns what or should get

what. In such cases, higher authorities are often called in to help settle the

dispute: in premodern times, the priests and local lords; today, the police

and 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 set

of interactions taking place between agents

1

over time in other words, aprocess.2 Inequality is embedded in macro-historical processes, as different

regions and nations have acquired, through their history, widely different

levels of inequality, and institutional systems maintaining it.3 But it is also

present in everyday micro-processes whereby individuals, groups, and

collectivities either confirm or question one or another aspect of inequality

through their transactions and, in doing so, alternately validate or transgress

some 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 from

above, and courts and cases vary in their interpretation of the law.

VIVIANE BRACHET-MA RQUEZ124


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To understand theoretically how inequality is instituted, reproduced, andtransformed, we must therefore be able to grasp how these everyday

dynamic processes shape their respective societies historical trajectories.

To express the workings of these dynamic processes, I propose a

theoretical framework that brings together contention, a concept designating

interactive conflictive micro-/meso-processes, with a general transhistorical

process4 of the renegotiation and occasional destruction of a broad set of

rules over who should get what or pact of domination. In this framework,

states5 are continuously engaged in engineering and enforcing rules that

spell inequality, but these attempts are also continuously being resisted andrenegotiated through contention by societal actors (elite as well as

subaltern). In short, inequality is seen as representing simultaneously a

central organizing principle of social life and a perennial source of change

within society.

In order to bring together these two conceptions of conflictive interaction,

I draw from two distinct intellectual traditions with no connecting doors

between them, and no specific interest in the problem of inequality. One

views inequality as generated from above as states conquer territories and

dominate their population, whereas the other focuses on everydayconflictive interactive nexi through which people confront each other in

the pursuit of what they perceive as their interests. I will briefly review both

so as to make clear what aspects will be incorporated in the model proposed.

1. STATE MAKING6 AS CREATING AND ENFORCING

INEQUALITY FROM ABOVE

Although the 1960s saw the birth of crucial pioneering work in the historical

study of state making (Hintze, 1975; Hobsbawm, 1962; Moore, 1967),

enduring interest in the subject would take roots from the 1970s on, with

such landmarks as Perry Andersons Lineages of the Absolutist State

(1974a), Tillys Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975), and

Michael Manns (1986, 1993) monumental study of the historical birth and

shaping of particular civilizations, empires, and nation-states.7 These works,

which emphasized such activities as war making, taxation, policing, control

of 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 state

building in Europe. In many of these studies, Western states were seen to

Domination, Contention, and the Negotiation of Inequality 125


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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 military

conception of state making centered on the impact of war making on the

rationalization of state coercive, fiscal, and organizational capacities (Finer,

1975). Enduring domination over a conquered territory by a victorious elite

was therefore seen as inseparable from the creation of an extractive/

administrative apparatus the state dedicated to securing and enhancing

the power of the conqueror become sovereign, along with that of his close

followers, or polity members (Tilly, 2000). In other words, to reap thefruits of conquest, inequality had to be created and enforced via extracting

resources from the local population. As Tilly later put it, some conquerors

managed to exert stable control over the populations in substantial

territories, and to gain routine access to part of the goods and services

produced in the territory; they became rulers (1990, pp. 1415). States also

harnessed preconquest inequalities to their own ends by coopting the local

elite, or simply destroy it, as did Spanish and Portuguese conquerors.

The thrust of state making (also called state formation) studies that

flourished from the 1980s onwards was in tracing the growth of statesapparatuses and power over their territories in different periods and

locations. In antiquity, conquest was said to have generated fiscal revenues

by producing enough crops to maintain conquering armies through the slave

labor acquired with conquest, so that battle fields provided the manpower

for cornfields, and vice-versa (Anderson, 1974b, p. 28).8 In medieval

Europe, rulers initially extracted surplus resources from agricultural

laborers on their own (initially appropriated) land, as did their vassals who

would cofinance the costs of war. In Spanish America, extracting tribute

from 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 be

raised and trade routes protected, so that fiscal capacity fed into military

power and military power into fiscal expansion of the state. In our

contemporary world, Hitlers attempt to conquer Europe or Russias success

in keeping her colonial conquests until the end of the short twentieth century

are unthinkable without formidable coercive/extractive capacities supple-

mented, at given junctures, by slave labor.9 More than a mere conceptual

definition of states, coercive and extractive control over a given territory wastherefore found to be a requirement for the stabilization of any kind of

domination, hence the creation of specialized bodies states to ensure a

continuous flow of resources and military manpower via forced



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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 of

European states offer a rich pageant displaying the ways in which these

requirements were fulfilled in early states,10 with important variations in the

degree to which they were achieved, and in the role of representative

assemblies in limiting royal power of taxation (and hence war-making

propensity). On the other side of the debate, however, it has been pointed

out that not all states were born through war (Mann, 1986, 1988), and that

Europe was engaged in wars for very long periods without new states beingproduced (Centeno, 2002, p. 104). England also figured as a prime

counterexample to the war-making/state-making thesis by remaining

uninvolved in European wars from the end of the Hundred Years war to

168811 (Brewer, 1988). So, the military view was mostly based on Spain and

France, typical cases of early involvement in European wars, although also

of entrenched inefficient administrative practices that drove them to fiscal

bankruptcy at the close of the eighteenth century, crowned by revolution for

France 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 unreplicated

phenomenon (Centeno, 1997, p. 1569).12

Interest in Latin American state formation13 is less developed than studies

of European states for a number of reasons, mostly the enduring

preponderance in scholarship on this region of the development paradigm

that dominated academia until dependence replaced it, following the

publication in 1966 of Cardoso and Falettos path-breaking study.14 Yet,

as attention shifted to class structure and to transnational relations of

exploitation between core and periphery, the state remained in the shadowof class processes. With ODonnell, however, the state made a forceful

comeback as the political component of domination in a territorially

delimited society, and as an organizationalinstitutional complex endowed

with administrative and coercive capacities (1984, p. 200). The importance

of this conception lies in its being grounded in the principle of inequality

arising out of the differential control of given resources, according to

which it is usually possible to obtain that the dominated adjust or control

their behavior to fit the express, tacit or presumed will of the dominant

(1984, pp. 200201).The same dual conception of the state is expressed synthetically by Oscar

Oszlak who defines state formation as implying simultaneously the

formation of a political instance articulating domination in society and



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the materialization of this instance in a set of interdependent institutionsallowing for the exercise of domination. The state is, in this way, social

relation and institutional apparatus (1997, p. 16). Here, state making is not

only the acquisition and exercise by states of specific capacities over a

territory but also a relational historical process between state and society

that 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 which

states achieved domination over their territories during given periods but in

showing that peasants do engage in national political struggles, althoughtheir participation is often subsequently submerged, and their demands left

unmet.15 Following the liberal revolution of the 1850s in Mexico in which

peasants in Morelos, Guerrero, and Puebla allied with the liberals against

the French/conservative coalition, the Mexican state is said to have

incorporated some demands from below as part of its popular agenda, in

contrast with the Peruvian state that has repeatedly repressed popular

demands and participation in national struggles (Mallon, 1995, p. 311),

although that might be debatable, judging from the despoiling effect of

Mexicos liberal laws (18571910) on peasant access to land.At stake was not merely to establish that peasants were in fact involved in

specifically national political struggles (as opposed to the local defense of

land and community), but to demonstrate that the cross-class alliances

formed between disaffected elites and peasants (often in addition to other

lower class groups) shaped the trajectory and marked the turning points of

state making in the nineteenth century (Guardino, 1996) and beyond

(Mallon, 1995; Knight, 1986). Mallon (1995), for example, asserts that

Mexicos peasants were participating in a democratic revolution, whereas

Zeitlin (1984) adduces that Chilean peasants who joined in the elite uprisingof the 1850s were taking part in a bourgeois revolution that failed. Yet it is

equally possible that these peasant soldiers were primarily defending their

communities,16 and that rebelling elites were more inspired by the prospect

of consolidating their regional power and local autonomy than by such lofty

goals as democracy and equal citizenship (Sinkin, 1979; Bazant, 1985).

In any case, victorious liberals in Mexico did little (beyond official

discourse and the never implemented 1857 Constitution) to incorporate

their lower class allies into a set of democratic rules of domination, adopting

instead 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 autocratic

system into a parliamentary oligarchic one, which soon incorporated the



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

Focusing our attention on regional interelite and popular struggles that

marked state making in Latin America also destroys the myth of a united

capitalist class and the instrumentalist view of the capitalist state as

exclusively protecting capitalist interests. To consolidate state power under

their hegemony, the victors in coups de tats turned to repress mainly

members of their own class: stopping the losers from plotting to unseat

their government (or inviting a foreign power to do so), ensuring that taxes

were not hoarded in provincial/state treasuries, and that no local armieswere raised in preparation for a coup. To keep the passive cooperation of

the masses, they also had to limit the exactions imposed by elites on the

populations under their jurisdiction, not unlike premodern state elites in

Europe had done centuries earlier.

In a way, European and Latin American studies of state making can be

considered complementary in their views of the relation between state and

society. The first have concentrated on the conditions for the acquisition by

incipient state apparatuses of administrative, fiscal, and coercive capacities

while 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 agents

articulating and enforcing the principles of domination that structure

society, yet have shown relatively little interest (excepting Centeno, 2002) in

the processes whereby state capacities grow and wane. At the same time,

both camps have tended to make evolutionist assumptions, either by

defining the acquisition of key capacities as the process toward fully

developed statehood, implicitly understood as the finishing line, or by

insisting on a historical endpoint in the capitalist bourgeois state (Oszlak,1997; Torres Rivas, 2006). Therefore, both views predefine the direction in

which states in formation will progress, implicitly pronouncing the end of

history (or assuming an entirely different postformation process) when

relatively stable state institutions have been established.

From the perspective taken in this chapter, both traditions have also

failed to emphasize the processes whereby states are engaged through their

institutional apparatuses in reinforcing the power and economic hegemony

of dominant (classes, large corporations, elite corps, etc.) over dominated

groups in society, thereby enforcing these relations of inequality. Althoughthe Latin American scholars cited above opened the door for this

conceptualization, they fell short of defining the arenas within which these

interactions between states and society could be observed and researched.



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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 state

and society that generated, modified, or nullified these decisions. In such

accounts, we rarely know how various elites reacted to specific state actions,

and even less how ordinary people dealt with them. Although relatively

recent work on everyday state making has aimed at filling this gap (Scott,

1985, 1990; Knight, 1994; Gilbert & Nugent, 1994), it has usually presented

the dominated as intent on blunting state actions through resistance and

quiet sabotaging rather than conflictively engaged in opposing them.In sum, what is needed in order to turn the study of state making into a

lens making visible, the dynamics of inequality is the definition of a process

whereby state and society actors engage each other, either peacefully in the

sense of taking for granted the ways in which power and resources are

distributed, or conflictively when states or nonstate actors trigger violent

collective responses when attempting to increase the level of exactions that

shape 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 to

define a process taking place in empirically observable arenas. We are

therefore 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 variably

legitimate legal and coercive power.

A crucial contribution in that direction is the model for the process of

contentious 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 rights

or property in which the state is involved. Interest focuses not on ordinary

contention that designates making claims that bear on someone elsesinterests (Tilly & Tarrow, 2007, p. 4) but on political contention (hereafter,

contention or contentious politics) defined as episodic, public, collective

interaction among makers of claim and their objects when (a) at least one



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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 the

claimants (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 5). This definition excludes conflict

taking place privately, or public conflict to which the state is not party. It also

excludes conflictive interaction in which one party submits to the others

power, as in public flogging or other forms of inflicting punishment when its

object does not (or more likely cannot) resist, and is therefore in no position

to dispute who is entitled to what. Furthermore, it excludes spontaneous

conflictive encounters in which violence may be used, but no particular claims

are 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 cited

as illustration that the state includes legislative and judicial functions.

A further distinction is drawn between contained and transgressive political

contention, where the first refers to contention in which all parties to the

conflict were previously established as constituted political actors (McAdam

et al., 2001, p. 7) and the second to contention in which at least some parties

to the conflict are newly self-identified political actors, and/or at least some

parties 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 most

frequently grow out of each other and interact, so that the distinction

between institutionalized and uninstitutionalized politics is said to be an

artificial one. In transgressive contention, however, we are unlikely to find

contention over bankruptcy or breach of contract, but wage disputes may

occasionally go beyond institutionalized channels of collective bargaining.

The point of proposing such a broad definition is to bring under the same

conceptual and processual umbrella diverse forms of political contention,

such as strikes, public demonstrations of protest, social movements,rebellions, and revolutions, previously studied with widely separate

theoretical instruments. The whole theoretical thrust of the model proposed

is to show that once divided up into their respective dynamic mechanisms,

or recurrent causes which in different circumstances and sequences

compound into highly variable but nonetheless explicable effects (Tilly,

1995, p. 1610), the most diverse forms of contention will be comparable, as

they will share a number of mechanisms that will produce essentially the

same 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.



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Leaving aside, for the moment, whether contentious politics of all kindsand shapes display various combinations of the same mechanisms, which, in

the end, is an empirical question,21 I would like to draw attention to a

number of aspects of the contention model that are problematic from the

point of view of a theory of inequality: the reasons for which people will

contend; the relationship of contendants claims to the established order and

the role of the state; the nature of mechanisms in relation to agency; and the

problem 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 to

be at stake in the decisions to participate in claim making (the claim, if

realized, would affect the interests of one of the claimants). Yet in the same

work, historically accumulated culture (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 22) is also

singled out as an important element in contention, and so is identity,

repeatedly mentioned as subject to shifting in the course of the process of

contention. 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 the

long nursed grievances of eighteenth-century French peasants in the face of

resurgent feudal rights (Anderson, 1974a)? Or should we think of La Grande

Peur22 as some irrational behavioral manifestation irrelevant to protest

against the French Ancien Regime and unrelated to the demands for equality

inscribed in the Cahiers de Doleances? Or how should Mexican peasants of the

liberal era (18541910) have felt when their land was declared public and sold

to haciendas, or simply confiscated by the latter? Interests are neutral withrespect to feelings of right and wrong, whereas grievances express

sentiments of injustice (Moore, 1978). If, contrary to Tilly & col., we postulate

that grievance is a possible and, indeed, frequent ingredient of contention, its

essence is contestation over who holds the legitimate claim in a dispute and

should therefore, by right, win over the other.

2.2. Based on What Norms and on Whose Authority

Are Contentious Claims Settled

The qualification of claims as legitimate or illegitimate implies the existence

of rules and norms that are known to the contestants, so that the dispute is



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really about what principles (law or custom) should prevail in decidingwhose claim will be recognized as right. But who will be the judge of

which of the claimants is right, and who will apply the sentence?

According to Tilly & col.s definition, the state appears as a claimant, an

object of claim, or a party to the claim; in other words, as a contestant of

the same kind and on the same level as any other, with interests and claims

of its own.23 This definition fails to acknowledge the role of the state as rule

enforcer, so that its presence in a dispute necessarily involves its power to

pronounce legitimate this rather than that claim, and enforce a settlement in

favor of the winner of the best claim. In addition, some claims will bedirected against actions perpetrated by the state, considered illegitimate by

some of the contendants, also with reference to a set of rules, in which case

what is being disputed is the states 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 is

clearly indicated on Fig. 2.1 in McAdam et al. (2001, p. 45) that opposes

challengers or opponents to the regime to polity members, its defenders. The

interactive sequence depicted in the figure is said to involve at least one set of

state 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. 4150) show reflexive actors engaged in strategic

interaction 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 sets

of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations

(p. 24). The notion of mechanism in Tilly & col. rests, therefore, on

contradictory assumptions: either contendants are conscious strategic actors,

and therefore constantly invent new ways of pursuing their objectives, or

they are habitus-bound reproducers of cultural patterns (Bourdieu, 1977), in

which case it is ingrained cultural habits rather than actors that move

contentious interaction. In one case, we have infinitely variable resources

prompting variable strategies and hence far too many mechanisms, whereasin the other, we have a both predictable and limited repertoire of responses

repeating themselves, yet providing no key to the interactive dynamics of

contention. Granted that contenders on the ground will, most usually,



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combine known with new strategies and repertoires, it remains that theinnovative character of transgressive contention a central concern in

Tilly & col. is insufficiently specified theoretically, even though such

specifications have been proposed on both sides of the debate. On the habitus

side, Wacquant (1989, p. 45), unlike Bourdieu (1977), concedes that actors

may consciously carry out strategic cost and benefit calculations, but insists

that such calculations are all determined by habitus. Sewell (1992), on the

other hand, spells out four conditions enabling people engaged in interaction

to 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 in

inequality, as we must then specify what real choices contendants have in

view of their unequal access to power and resources, and to what extent

innovative contention can change such parameters. Participants in conten-

tion will, in principle, be both enabled and limited in their choices of

strategic decisions and repertoires by the rules of access to power and

unequal distribution of resources. But transgressive contention is precisely

the 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 restructuring

some portion of political reality, may effect changes in the value of

conventional 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 recurring

mechanisms by Tilly & col. provides a bridge from micro- to macro-

processes, by stipulating that small and large contentious processes can be

analyzed 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)



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To dispense with large processes, or the problem of specifying how smallcontentious processes become large ones, Tilly & col. divide streams of

contentious politics into event segments to each of which a mechanism is

attached. They then treat these constructed segments as processes, so that

the only difference between micro- and macro-contention will be in the

number of such segments, with large numbers of them being said to

constitute episodes. For example, the July 1789 facet of the French

Revolution is said to be an episode consisting of some combination of

mobilization, identity shift and polarization, three very general but distinct

processes and mechanisms in contentious politics (McAdam et al., 2001,p. 28). Mechanisms, on the contrary, are considered causal insofar as they

repeatedly alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or

closely similar ways (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 24). Yet, taking mobilization

as one such mechanism, can we really say that the mobilization of the

Parisian populace in July 1789 implies the same transformations as, for

example, that of farmers blocking roads with tractors in protest over low

agricultural prices (a typically French contemporary contentious event)?

In one case, the authority of the state is being directly attacked, whereas in

the other, discontent is voiced and change is demanded, publicly andtransgressively, but with no intent to challenge the regime. Although

national conflagrations such as the French Revolution can be described by

concatenations of different abstract elements representing groups of events

(such as mobilization), such descriptions will do little to bring out the

dynamics of institutional transformation, which is what students of

revolution have been trying to do.

Granting that contentious politics must stay grounded in the collective

mobilization of real people interacting in real time and places, it does not

follow that such processes should exclusively be understood from thecollectively defined perspective of the people engaged in that process. We

should be able to make a distinction between such group dynamics and the

place 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 deeds

would tell us what threats were perceived by the contendants (the regiments

encircling the city), the objectives they were pursuing (finding weapons to

defend the city), why they went to the Bastille (to find gun powder to load

their weapons), and also probably why they were angry (they felt betrayedby the Kings failure to hold his promises). But July 1789 must also be

looked at from the perspective of how it links up with various other

contentious nodes openly challenging the bankrupt French state, such as the



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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 they

felt as a result, but a loosely coordinated set of contentious networks

organizing attacks on the established order and proclaiming new rules and

principles of authority: the end of feudalism, of royal absolutism, and of

privileges. In Sewells words, we are looking at a set of events that touch

off a chain of occurrences that durably transform previous structures and

practices (2005a, p. 227). If, by the latter we understand primarily the rules

of domination and inequality that characterize a society at a particularmoment, we can make a claim that contention is the process through which

durable ruptures in structures are created, and that we should therefore

analyze them from the macro-perspective of a process of institutional

change.

By reducing explanations of large processes24 to an enumeration of a

combination of mechanisms extracted from small ones, Tilly & col. offer a

peculiar solution to the problem of aggregation that deserves further

examination. But first we must make some distinctions that will clarify the

discussion. The problem of aggregation from small to large is twofold: first,we must ask under what conditions a small contentious episode may either

link 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 trying

to 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 generic

entity, such as contention or revolution. The latter is a problem of shifting

levels of abstraction25. Table 1 shows the different combinations of the

distinct 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 a

generic entity, for example, revolution, by summing up a set actions situated

on the unit or small societal acts levels of analysis, and of inferring from

there to the large societal level. Instead, they first assert that revolution as a

generic phenomenon is a misnomer, and choose instead contention to

refer generically to either the small or the large societal analytical levels (cells

6 and 9 of Table 1).26 They then break up the process of contention and

this 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 and

8 of Table 1). At this point, however, they implicitly merge the two highest

levels of abstraction by treating mechanism as a generic term in its own right



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(instead of merely a list of typified events), on the strength of the hypothesis

that empirical narratives, once analyzed, will invariably yield a limited list of

variously combined mechanisms.27 Finally, mechanisms are said to explain

causally 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 the

Gda nsk strike among shipyard workers analyzed in Tilly & Tarrow, 2007)

often blossom into large societal ones (in this case, the Polish solidarity

movement), they provide no theoretical rule stating how the shift should

take place. There is no encounter between single dissident groups, no linking

institution (although the Catholic Church loomed large in that particular

contention), and no strategic deliberations by smaller with higher leaders or

coalitions of smaller groups with the incipient national movement: a large

national movement just coalesced.On Table 2, I have removed the assumption that the last two highest levels

of abstraction can be merged, so that contention remains in the intermediate

level 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,

Gda nsk 1980a

Social appropriation,

certification, anddiffusion 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. 115118).bCase analyzed in McAdam et al. (2001, pp. 196207).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.



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analyst. Additionally, I have distinguished between different generic types of

contention, so that the latter term becomes a family of generic concepts

rather 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 of

events, respectively, called dispersed, localized rebellious, and revolutionary

contention.28 The logical link between the first and last level of abstraction

is, therefore, instantiation, as it also is in the cases in Table 1. Aggregation

from small to large units of analysis in Table 2 is achieved by linking the

individual, 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 the

opponents or the state, renege on their promises, etc. This means that we

must 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

Maderos struggle

against Daz regime

Phases a, b, c of Mexicos

revolutionary process:

alliances, alliance

breakups, negotiations,and reneging on

commitments mechanisms

Revolutionary

contention

aCase analyzed in Brachet-Ma rquez and Arteaga Pe rez (2010).



17/39

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 Revolution

started in various parts of the country, particularly in the village of

Anenecuilco, whose land had been stolen by a neighboring hacienda and

whose members collectively decided to occupy it by force. Subsequently,

they allied with other villages through a political club, and collectively

decided to offer their services to a much larger contentious process led by

Francisco Madero who had declared his decision to start an armed rebellion

against Dictator Porfirio Daz,

29

on the strength of an article in the Plan deSan Luis Potosi electoral platform stipulating that illegally appropriated

land should be returned to its rightful owners. Between the two contentious

sets of events, there is no necessary link, except a very risky collective

decision to use force (probably very much influenced by Zapata, the de facto

chief 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 own

sequestered land, as had happened in countless other villages (Womack,

1969). The links between cells 2, 5, and 8 follow the same rule: step one is

represented by the individual facts that land has been confiscated byhacienda owners in various parts of the state of Morelos, Guerrero, and

Puebla; in step two are the mechanisms of contentious politics used to fight

back despite the threat of repression; and step three categorizes the previous

steps as rebellious contention. On this last level, there is progression in the

intensity and spread of the generic phenomenon of contention from

scattered to localized and to revolutionary contention, which summarizes in

more abstract generic terms the upward shift in unit of analysis that has

taken place in cells 1-4-7 and 2-5-8, respectively. In sum, in both tables, the

concatenation of mechanisms of contention is the general process takingplace at intermediate levels of abstraction on any of the three analytical

levels identified. The main difference between the two tables lies in the rule

of aggregation from small to large units of analysis, and the qualification of

contention (respectively, as dispersed, localized and revolutionary) at the

highest abstraction level in Table 2. Of course, identifying agency as the

condition making possible the passage from small to large in contention

processes leads us to open a new Pandoras box, as it leaves unanswered the

question of what impels contendants to act this rather than that way in any

given situation, leaving contingency as the last resort solution. But agency,at least, points us in the right direction: internal deliberation, internal

dissentions, and frequent splits within the contending collectives, debates,

and changes in the group discourses elaborated in defense of the claims,



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changes in membership, and/or leadership, etc. It also conforms to thepostulate, implicit in both the contention and state making perspectives

presented, that things happen because actors make strategic choices,

whatever their interpretation of the situation, as when French peasants

burn castles rather than join the Parisian contentious crowds, or when

Morelos villagers erroneously believe that Madero will return their land

once elected.

Based on the critical considerations and suggested changes presented in

sections 1 and 2 of the chapter, we can now turn to the task of building a

theoretical bridge between state making and contention, two initiallyincommensurate perspectives, and theorize the process by which the

relations between state and society can be seen to generate and reproduce

inequality.

3. STATE MAKING AND CONTENTION

AS COMPONENTS OF AN INTERACTIVE

VIEW OF INEQUALITY: THE PACTOF DOMINATION APPROACH

State making, although it takes place over centuries, represents a

discontinuous process with unforeseen stops, regressions, and many

transformations taking place by fits and starts. To encompass this wide

variety of movements therefore requires a longue duree time framework.

Contention, on the contrary, erupts at particular moments and develops in

the courte duree. To make compatible these two time frameworks, I will

recast the interactions between state and society that state making representsas the historical structuring of complex and differentiated sets of rules, or

pacts of domination designating who should get what in the exercise of

power and the apportionment of economic surplus (Table 3). Contention,

on the other hand, will be defined as the dynamic process driving the change

taking place 3 in the pact of domination take place.

The notion of pact and domination juxtaposes compliance to known

rules (pact) and the possible use of coercion (domination), both jointly

present in historical arrangements, to express the idea that a given

distribution 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 accepted

and taken for granted as normal.



19/39

Given that distributive arrangements are never final, any currently

undisputed level of inequality therefore represents, in a longue duree

perspective, a momentary pause or stalemate between the parties fighting for

a bigger share of power, privileges, and economic surplus, during which

contention is low, and mostly restricted to resistance.In keeping with a view of state making as the alternation between the

creation, reproduction, and destruction of pacts of domination, the

authority exercised by states is conceived as both legitimate and contested

at all times, so that hegemony in the sense of an endpoint is never finally

achieved. Yet, state rule does stabilize for variably long periods in the sense

of being taken for granted by the majority, although never in any final

manner. In addition to dominating their population through the threat of

coercion, states must therefore also acquire skills at building legitimating

discourses that make domination more palatable and inequality lessvisible.30

An interactive view of state making also directs us to see the

incorporation 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 propertyMakes or proposes laws



20/39

and the powerful, but also of deeply ingrained popular cultural transcripts(including discrimination toward minority groups), of demands from below

for improvements in social and economic conditions, and of the legitimacy

of protests against the abuses of specific officials or elites. The most extreme

example is the populist state31 that dignifies the people by professing to

rule in its name and do its biddings while ruling in a paternalistic and

authoritarian fashion, especially when backed by military power (as fascist

Italy or peronist Argentina) or by a powerful one-party state (as Mexico for

most 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 top

and bottom will take place.32

Nationalism,33 invented during the American and French Revolutions

and perfected in the twentieth century through two world wars, is, however,

the quintessential example of the engineering from above of a political

culture, based on the promise of emancipation from contested conditions of

domination. Nationalism may rally the people against the external enemy

threatening the community of free citizens, or mobilize against the

colonizer with the promise of forming an independent nation. As withpopulism, the nationalist discourse must deliver on some of its promises, so

that nationalisms, will, willy-nilly, breed nations (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm,

1992). Yet, it is to be understood as a continuously contested and negotiated

discourse, the outcome of transactions between dominant and dominated.

Given that states are only variably successful at establishing a legitimating

discourse while controlling their subject populations, the history of

territories under their jurisdiction can be seen as a succession of variably

long periods during which compliance is generally assured, followed by

episodes of intensifying contention in response to the states attempts to gainmore power, increase fiscal exactions, or tolerate more despotic/exploitative

exactions on subaltern groups by its elites, in other words, redefine the pact

of domination in ways that negatively affect the share of power and surplus

to 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 is

used here, may be misunderstood. Pact is to be taken heuristically rather

than literally, in the sense that everything looks as if there were an

agreement between members of a society not to fight over the disposition of

power 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



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explicitly, defined rules. Far from constituting undisputed and sharedknowledge (as a contract would), pacts of domination are continuously

subject to strategic redefinitions and manipulations by state or societal

actors of opposed interests. The discrepancy between the public transcript of

domination and that culturally elaborated by various groups will alternately

foment hegemony, accumulate private rage, or provoke collectively voiced

feelings of injustice (Moore, 1978).

Neither should we think of a pact of domination as a unique set of clear

rules neatly dividing society between the dominant and the dominated, or

applying uniformly to all within each of these social categories, but as amultiplicity of smaller overlapping sets of rules, so that there is not one

single mode of power and exploitation but a large collection of crisscrossing

legal and normative principles connecting the dominated to the dominant

through rights and obligations: workers to capitalist employers, share-

croppers to landowners, domestic servants to household heads, women to

their fathers or husbands, etc.

Finally, it is important to note that although democratic pacts of

domination generally put an end to radical forms of contention and hence

sudden political change, the same general mechanisms of contention overrules operate in them, although they take on more gradual institutionalized

forms. Democracies are therefore distinguished not only by the list of

attributes that identify them as such, but by the historically specific

interrelations and mutual expectations they establish between state and

society, by their distinct political cultures, their widely shared standards of

legitimate rules of the game, and so on. We may therefore speak of

qualitatively different families of democracy, as for example corporatist,

liberal, and social democracy, none of which is, in principle, more

democratic 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 of

power and resources, democracies, especially emergent ones, publicize

equalizing discourses while often preserving stark economic differences.34

Rather than exceptions to the general contentious dynamics of permanence

and change, democracies can therefore be regarded as a family of pacts of

domination 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 the

victors, followed by the coercive institution of rules stabilizing the distribution

of power and resources. Thereafter follows the institutionalization of these



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rules during PD1, which gradually becomes natural and taken for granted

throughout T4, with mostly everyday forms of resistance and nonviolentcontention. But at T5, the system returns, under changed historical

circumstances, to a situation of increased contentious politics between new

(or old) sets of contendents, opening a new cycle of confrontations and

negotiations over the distribution of power and resources (T5T6), which

creates a new set of rules of domination under PD2, in turn followed by their

institutionalization throughout T7. History is not frozen at this point, so that

we must represent the continuation of these recurring cycles of power

reconfigurations 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 a

set of agencies enforcing it (Oszlak, 1978, 1997; ODonnell, 1984).

Therefore, there is no such thing, empirically, as a general state form, not

even a general capitalist or a socialist state form, but instead a large

collection of historically constructed states, each with its rules of who

should get what and peculiar ways of maintaining order through a

combination of the carrot and the stick. The military state in Argentina, for

example, literally collapsed under defeat in the Malvinas War with GreatBritain35, and this very breakdown made possible the resurgence, in 1983, of

democratic rule. The set of state institutions that were then created anew, far

from being final, subsequently went through a crisis of elite contention

T1T2

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 orderT5 Challenge and state response = critical juncture

T6 PD2 imposed = new order established coercively

T7 PD2 institutionalized = return to orderEtc.

Apprenticeship

PD3PD2PD1

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



23/39

triggering galloping inflation that spelt the collapse of the economy andmost state functions in the late 1980s, followed by the restabilization of a

restricted democracy (ODonnell, 1994; Alonso, 1998). States are therefore

never 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 between

state and society is that of a succession of temporary (although often very

long) pacts marked, at turning points, by tightly concatenated clusters of

structure-changing contentious episodes when these pacts are renegotiated

either 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 need

to rely on extraordinary or unusual macro-processes. I propose to base the

dynamics in pacts of domination on contentious politics, regarded as an

everyday omnipresent process of interaction within society and between

state and society, which normally only reproduces the rules of domination,

but periodically transforms them. In this perspective, the historical

trajectory of societies can be seen as periodically punctuated by moments

of 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 limited

demands that can be accommodated within the status quo, they acquire,

at such critical junctures, the capacity to bring about pact changing events

by multiplying and variously combining their forces. The Cuban revolution,

for example, was an event that marked the history of Latin America as a

critical juncture triggering in other countries demands from below for less

unequal resource distribution in the form of contentious politics that rangedfrom peaceful (yet severely repressed) student protest to extended guerilla

warfare. The event also stood as a landmark for conservative forces all over

Latin 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 not

always clearly visible (except retrospectively), as, for example, the 1974

Managua earthquake that showed to all, including elites, how Nicaraguas

dictator Somoza chose not to distribute international aid to a devastatedpopulation. But even an apparently subdued population, violently purged of

opponents for almost two decades, such as Chiles under Pinochet, could

suddenly join in contentious street demonstrations of protest in the late



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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, but

more than other forms of contention, they are the process by which pacts of

domination are swept away and replaced. But most of the time, when we

think of contention as potentially event-creating interaction between state

and society, we are not referring to a single all encompassing process, but

either to regionalized or to sector-specific contentious movements that

challenge only partially the established order (e.g., a strike, an emancipatory

religious movement, or an independent party in an authoritarian regime), orto a myriad of mostly unconnected small or intermediate processes of

contention, all different in timing, kind, and intensity. Such minor tremors

are usually absorbed by the system with only casuistic solutions applied,38

or institutionally nested (in factories, small towns, and large complex

organizations), so that the rules being contested and transformed bring

changes that are relatively insulated between one sector and another.

African-Americans, for example, may have achieved lower degrees of

inequality in comparison to white Americans with respect to education and

jobs, while remaining largely segregated socially and residentially. Womenhave obtained increased access to education since World War II, but they

are still paid less for the same job levels and must still face many forms of

culturally entrenched inequality in their homes.

Bringing contention to bear on institutional change also poses the

problem of aggregation with contention understood now as part and parcel

of the process of interaction between state and society. To understand how

units of contention go from small to large remains an empirical question, as

indicated 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 form

larger contentious networks, or fail to connect either as a result of strategic

decisions by the collectives engaged in the contentious struggles or by divide

and rule manipulations by the state.39 Tilly & col.s methodology of

analyzing contentious episodes is particularly helpful in this respect, as it

forces us to go step by step through each contentious process and register

when it connects with or disconnects from other such processes. But in order

to do this kind of analysis, we must also turn our lens to the processes

internal to contention collectives insofar as these lead us to understand theircapacity for gaining popular appeal and obtaining powerful allies, and

hence to spread territorially and provoke class coalitions, something that is

absent in but not incompatible with Tilly & col.s perspective.



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The problem of aggregation also leads us to ask what difference any singleor group of contentious nodes represents for potential changes in the pact of

domination. This is probably where the most intractable problem of

aggregation lies. We could try to hypothesize that the more local the context

in which a contentious episode emerges, the less likely it is of expressing

demands and grievances directly relevant to shifts in the pact of domination,

and vice versa that contentious episodes of national scope would be more

likely to have constructed a discourse addressing the validity or legitimacy

of central aspects of the pact of domination. But I suspect we would find

many counterexamples of initially insignificant local contentious episodesgrowing in appeal and impact due to their very radicalism, whereas some

widely diffused national ones may remain light on challenging the pact of

domination.40 Yet it stands to reason that although aggregation along the

unit of analysis dimension is not logically related to impact on rules, small

localized contentious events are less likely than large publicly visible ones to

have much impact on any portion of the pact of domination, unless

contendants can form alliances with other contending groups and either

jointly negotiate changes with the state, or challenge the latter in direct

confrontation. But in any case, the passage from the group dynamics ofcontention to the societal dynamics of inequality is a big leap for which there

is no ready solution except to say that whether the resolutions applied by

state agents to any particular contentious episode (be they concessions or

repression) have any impact outside of and beyond the initial cases of

contention is still an open question that requires further scrutiny.

Finally, when trying to establish a bridge between contention and changes

in the pact of domination, we are under obligation to establish the link

between inequality and the nature of the claims expressed in contentious

processes, which will almost invariably be indirect. Clearly, not all forms ofcontention are about inequality, but many will be, and we will usually be

able to interpret whether the demands voiced are translatable as demands

for more (or less) political equality o for better (or worse) economic

equality.41 The translation is, of course, easier in revolutionary processes in

which mobilizing discourses usually promise more social justice and equality

between citizens. In smaller contentious events, the disputes may more

frequently be about one group claiming rights, property, or electoral victory

over the other, but the outcome will still be about giving more or fewer

resources and power to one subaltern group in relation to a dominant one.In synthesis, the proposed model sees the social ordering of inequality in

the distribution of power and resources simultaneously through the making

and transformation of a pact of domination, a transhistorical macro-lens



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that is conceptually identified across historical periods but assumes differentempirical forms and parameters,42 and through the micro-lens of real-time

and place-bound processes of contention over a variety of issues defined by

each contentious episode. The basic process to be studied is therefore

contention: its dynamics, the creativity of its participants, its visible

immediate outcomes, and its hypothetical long-term repercussions. At the

same time, however, contention is envisioned as the dynamic principle that

makes domination both sustainable and contestable, so that the making

and unmaking of rules of domination through contention is held to be a

central organizing principle of social life: through contention, the rules ofunequal distribution of power and material resources are being alternately

reproduced and challenged, and tacitly or actively sanctioned by state

agents. But although, as Sewell put it, Structures are constructed by

human action, and societiesy are continually shaped and reshaped

by the creativity and stubbornness of their human creators (2005b,

p. 110), the latter rarely envisage or control the long-term consequences of

their contentious actions. The effects of the events of July 1789, for example,

went far beyond anything its participants had anticipated or struggled

for: the king pulled back the troops that had encircled Paris, called backNecker, the popular Swiss finance minister, and could do nothing against

the National Assembly becoming the de facto political authority, soon to

become de jure as well. Yet, as Sewell (1992) also insists, social reality is

fractured, and the structural opportunities for effecting change through

these micro-processes are inherently open-ended, discontinuous, and

contingent (2005b, p. 110).

Finally, and most importantly, there are crucial structuring processes other

than contention primarily market and transnational relations that

compete with and often transform the processes I have delineated. Sometypes of state actions, for example, cannot be achieved via coercion, as the

warring sovereigns of premodern Europe discovered early on, leading them

to coax rather than coerce capital into financing their military adventures.

Todays states also make considerable concessions to capital, in open or

covert violation of the rules that apply to ordinary citizens, and are prone to

dictate regressive social or fiscal distributive policies in response to pressures

from creditor countries. The pressures and policy influence that powerful

foreign powers can exert on small polities, on the other hand, are common

knowledge in our contemporary globalized world. But geopolitics is nonewcomer, so that we can assert that state power has always been limited, to

a variable extent, by external power configurations, especially in the capitalist

periphery. The fact that such processes have not been included in the model



27/39


28/39

in Fig. 2. When they participate in contentious politics, people start from abasic capacity for creative agency, pursuing objectives that relate to

immediate situational pressures that they interpret within the confines of

their local collectively elaborated frames of reference. It is therefore

irrelevant to ask whether such and such a contending group was being

patriotic as opposed to narrowly egoistic in its aims when it launched an

episode of contention: Parisian crowds were moved to attack the Bastille in

July 1789 by what they perceived as an emergency situation requiring

immediate action, while a small group of Mexican peasants unwittingly

started a revolution when occupying forcefully their illegally confiscatedfields, and then only for the express purpose of sowing the corn they needed

for survival.43 In combination with other contentious processes, both of

these contentious episodes were instrumental in profoundly changing the

rules of unequal distribution of power and resources in their respective

societies. In the macro-analytical perspective of the dynamics of change in a

pact of domination, what counts is how individual contentious incidents

multiply and combine their forces, often (but not invariably) constructing in

the process a unifying discourse, such as the nation in danger (in 1792

France) or the Agrarian reform (in 19101920 Mexico).In the theoretical scheme proposed, I have defined three interrelated

analytical levels peoples cognitive capacity for creative agency, group level

contention, and the societal transformation of the pact of domination (Fig. 3).

The processes taking place at each level have been integrated in the following

ways: first, creative agency is linked to the capacity to oppose reflexively

(instead of reproducing practically) the rules of who should get what via

transgressive contention; second, contention is said to be the process through

which people express their discontent and voice their specific demands for

more access to power and a greater share in wealth; and third, changes in thepact of domination are seen as contingently produced through the process of

contention, which itself depends on creative agency. These analytical levels do

not refer to the aggregation from small to large or from concrete to abstract

discussed earlier; the first level represents a postulate on which the second is

dependent; the second, in turn, represents the observable process that we,

social scientists, must examine, analyzing it first on its own level of the

processes that propel people to act out their recriminations and their

grievances or seek their interests; and the third level represents the perspective

of 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 researchable

process, based on the postulate of creative agency, but this process is



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A

State Making

B

Conditions ofcoercion & extraction

resentedas unfair

C

Conditions ofcoercion & extraction

found acceptable

H

Resistance D

Institutionalized ortolerated: march,

charivari, carnival

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

banditism

Non-violentpetitions,

demonstration

heresies

D

Contention

I

Contestation

Institutionalized ortolerated:

pamphlets, clubs,parties, elections

Extra-institutionaltolerated or out-

lawed: social

movements, mobil-izing for rebellion

E

Compliance

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


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interpreted from the perspective of the social ordering of inequality as

featured in the concept of pact of domination. As stipulated by Tilly & col.,

limited collective conflicts are amenable to study with the same theoretical

categories and analytical levels as wider social conflagrations, but only if we

agree to link small to large contention networks via agency and distinguish

the micro-dynamics of contention from their macro-implications for

changes in the pact of domination. Tilly & col.s stipulation that no

macro-processes should be invoked to explain macro-contention has alsobeen incorporated in the proposed model, for indeed, the pact of

domination is no solid entity to be moved through collective human

agency, but an interpretive device that focuses the researchers lens on the

changing division of power and modes of extraction of the economic

surplus, and relates these patterns to the process of contention regarded as

the dynamic principle that shapes the social ordering of inequality in society.

The notion of pact of domination therefore serves to represent analytically

the temporarily crystallized yet ever changing outcome of the continuous

process of interaction between state and society that alternately spellscompliance and contention over who gets what, and in doing so reproduces

and transforms the structure of inequality.

Level I AGENCY

(postulate)

Creative

Agency

Reproductive

Agency

Level II COLLECTIVE

RESPONSE

(social process)

Contention Compliance

Level III PACT OF

DOMINATION

(interpretative

scheme)

Long Waves of

Changes in

Society

Permanence

within Waves of

Changes

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



31/39

NOTES1. I am using Giddens definition: To be an agent is to be able to deployy a

range 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 occurrencesfollowing 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 acrosshistorical 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 thepolitical instance of domination and organizationalinstitutional complex endowedwith administrative and coercive capacities over its territory of jurisdiction(ODonnell, 1984; Oszlak, 1997).

6. In what follows, I would not be assuming that the state is the power supremeindependent of class or elite power, simply that the state is a necessary instrument of

domination 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.Thompsons immensely fruitful contributions from his studies of English culture, inits historical and class variations (1975, 1991, 2001).

8. Manns (1986) study of ancient civilizations suggests, however, that the logisticsof 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 Germanys war preparinglabor 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 Stalins use of Gulag prisoners as slave labor,mainly through Solzhenitsyns 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 XIVths expansionary drive to conquer the countriesadjoining Frances borders. (les frontie res 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



32/39

making: the states 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, seeChiaramonte (1997), Dunkerley (2002), Gootenberg (1989), Lo pez-Alves (2000),ODonnell (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) would

appear 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, Mexicos nineteenth century civic militias pertaining to theNational 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 Tillys Durable Inequality(1998), which represents inequality as generated within organizations through their

incorporation 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 ofclaims, 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-Ma rquez and Arteaga Pe rez (2010).

22. La Grande Peur (or the Great Fear), a peasant movement that developed inMayJuly 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 Re gime). The fear ofthese

Documents

Domination, Contention,