Politics is not only about who governs but about how the governed push back. Protest, agitation, social movements and revolution form a continuum of contentious politics — organised, collective challenges to authority that operate outside routine institutional channels. Sociology asks why such challenges arise, how they are sustained, what forms they take and when they succeed in transforming the social order. The answers have evolved dramatically, from theories that treated protest as irrational eruption to those that see it as strategic, purposive and world-making.
Collective behaviour
The earliest tradition analysed crowds, panics, fads and movements together as collective behaviour — action arising outside established norms. Gustave Le Bon's crowd psychology portrayed the crowd as suggestible and irrational, submerging the individual. Herbert Blumer and later the value-added model of Neil Smelser gave the field a more sociological cast: Smelser specified six conditions — structural conduciveness, strain, a generalised belief, precipitating factors, mobilisation and the operation of social control — that must combine for collective behaviour to occur. The shared assumption, later much criticised, was that movements express breakdown, tension or grievance rather than ordinary organised interest.
Theories of social movements
A social movement is a sustained, organised collective effort to promote or resist change. Three influential frameworks dominate the modern literature.
Relative deprivation
The relative deprivation approach holds that people rebel not when they are absolutely worst off but when they perceive a gap between what they get and what they feel entitled to. Ted Gurr's Why Men Rebel and James Davies's J-curve — which locates revolt where a period of rising expectations is suddenly reversed — exemplify this grievance-based reasoning. Its limitation is that deprivation is nearly universal while movements are not; grievance alone cannot explain mobilisation.
Resource mobilisation
The resource mobilisation theory of John McCarthy and Mayer Zald shifted the question from why people are aggrieved to how they organise. Movements succeed when they can marshal resources — money, members, leadership, networks and organisation. Charles Tilly added the political process variant, stressing shifting political opportunity structures and repertoires of contention. This tradition treats activists as rational strategists, though critics say it underplays grievance, emotion and meaning.
New social movements
European theorists — Alain Touraine, Alberto Melucci and Jürgen Habermas — argued that movements in post-industrial society differ in kind. New social movements — feminist, ecological, peace and identity movements — are concerned less with material redistribution than with autonomy, identity, quality of life and the defence of the lifeworld against system colonisation. Their constituencies are typically the new middle class, their organisation decentralised, their tactics cultural and expressive. Critics note that identity and materiality are rarely so cleanly separated.
Revolution
Revolution is the most radical form of contention — a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's state and class structures, usually accompanied by mass mobilisation and violence.
The Marxist theory remains the classic account. For Karl Marx, revolution is the motor of history: as the forces of production outgrow existing relations of production, class contradictions sharpen until the oppressed class overthrows the ruling one. The proletarian revolution would abolish class itself. History complicated the model — revolutions triumphed in agrarian rather than advanced-capitalist societies — prompting revisions by Lenin, Gramsci and others.
Non-Marxist accounts widened the lens. Crane Brinton's anatomy of revolution charted a common natural history through moderate and radical phases to a Thermidorian reaction. Barrington Moore linked divergent political outcomes — democracy, fascism, communism — to the class alliances of landlords, peasants and bourgeoisie. Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions offered a decisively structural explanation: social revolutions arise not from conscious vanguards but from the conjuncture of state breakdown under international and fiscal pressure with agrarian structures that permit peasant revolt. Later scholarship on the 1989 and colour revolutions has stressed networks, framing and non-violent mobilisation.
How to use this in the exam
Organise answers developmentally, showing the paradigm shift from breakdown and irrationality (collective behaviour, relative deprivation) to organisation and strategy (resource mobilisation, political process) to identity and meaning (new social movements). For revolution, contrast the agency-centred Marxist model with Skocpol's structural, state-centred correction — a comparison examiners reward highly. Wherever possible, illustrate with movements you know well, including Indian examples such as environmental, farmers' and identity-based mobilisations, to convert theory into applied, high-scoring analysis.