Scholarship on the revolutions of 1989 has failed to take into account the role social movements played in civic mobilization in the late communist period. This is in part due to shortcomings in the theory of political opportunities as applied to repressive regimes. Through a case study of the Freedom and Peace movement, prominent in Poland between 1985 and 1989, this article shows how such a movement needed to create its own opportunities. Its emergence and ability to mobilize cannot be explained within the widely accepted model of political opportunity structures. Attention is directed instead to three movement strategies: exploiting opportunities within the underground opposition; reframing state repression as a motivation for activism; and choosing issues, such as resistance to the draft and environmental protest, which exposed weaknesses in the communist regime and thus lowered the perceived risks of participation.
The political prisoner is a creation of the modern era, in which states deploy police, courts, and prisons against organized opposition movements. Dance in Chains traces the history of political imprisonment from the 1860s through the present day, using the struggles of opponents from a wide variety of regimes. They range from colonial South Africa through the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and from the right-wing dictatorship in 1930s Poland through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The book asks why regimes incarcerate opponents, and why political prisoners are important to opposition movements. It examines the contest in the cells themselves, as political prisoners organize themselves and engage in acts of protest and resistance, and how prisoner assistance movements like Amnesty International help to make the political prisoner a recognizable figure in global history.
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