In recent decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other non-routine politics has flourished. And yet research on the topic remains highly fragmented, reflecting the influence of at least three traditional divisions. The first of these reflects the view that various forms of contention are distinct and should be studied independent of others. Separate literatures have developed around the study of social movements, revolutions and industrial conflict. A second approach to the study of political contention denies the possibility of general theory in deference to a grounding in the temporal and spatial particulars of any given episode of contention. The study of contentious politics are left to 'area specialists' and/or historians with a thorough knowledge of the time and place in question. Finally, overlaid on these two divisions are stylized theoretical traditions - structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist - that have developed largely in isolation from one another. This book was first published in 2001.

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In recent years there has been an outpouring of work at the intersection of social movement studies and organizational theory. While we are generally in sympathy with this work, we think it implies a far more radical rethinking of structure and agency in modern society than has been realized to date. In this article, we offer an over brief sketch of a general theory of strategic action fields (SAF). We begin with a discussion of the main elements of the theory, describe the broader environment of fields in which any given SAF is embedded, consider the dynamics of stability and change in SAFs, and end with an extended example intended to illustrate how adoption of our perspective would fundamentally change the interpretation of one of the more consequential "episodes of contention"-the civil rights revolution-to take place in the U.S. over the past 50 years.

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