CIS - Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas

With clear, engaging, and accessible language, the work of Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani remains, to this day, a required reference for researchers, as well as an essential study for those seeking to approach for the first time the vertiginous, complex, and multidimensional reality of social movements: from the protests of the 1960s to the most recent feminist, pacifist, environmental, and anti-globalization movements. Its authors present not only the "state of the art" but also the systematization of an entire field of knowledge around four sets of questions that respond, in turn, to four levels of analysis in the internal structure of the work: can we conceive of social movements as expressions of conflict? How are social problems transformed into potential targets of collective action? And how do we achieve mobilization, facing the risks and costs of protest? Finally, the authors ask how certain cultural, social and/or political contexts affect the form that a social movement takes and its corresponding possibilities of success. Social movements undoubtedly constitute a classic in the approach to the phenomenon of collective action from an integrative perspective.

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