Introduction

This special issue consists of selected papers presented at a workshop held at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam in August, 2025, called “Assembling Revolutions: Bridging Theories of Revolutions and Theories of Social Movements.” Both fields were dominated from the 1970s through the 1990s by structuralist perspectives that downplayed agency, culture, emotions, and the interactions among strategic actors. In Dynamics of Contention in 2001, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly – in an effort to move past their own structuralism – challenged social scientists to study revolutions, social movements, and other processes together under the rubric of “contentious politics,” using concepts common to all. We wanted to know, how far have we gotten? What are some causal processes found in both revolutionary and nonrevolutionary contention?