Bringing together over forty established and emerging scholars, this landmark volume is the first to comprehensively examine the evolution and current practice of social movement studies in a specifically European context. While its first half offers comparative approaches to an array of significant issues and movements, its second half assembles focused national studies that include most major European states. Throughout, these contributions are guided by a shared set of historical and social-scientific questions with a particular emphasis on political sociology, thus offering a bold and uncommonly unified survey that will be essential for scholars and students of European social movements.

“Fillieule and Accornero have edited a timely volume for breaking down national silos in social movement research… As a sociology of sociology, the major thrust of the work is that context is of paramount importance: many factors contributed to why social movement theory has largely been more robust in the US than in Europe. Nevertheless, the material here prepares scholars around the globe for detailed, comparative studies of movements… Highly recommended.” · Choice

“[This] volume [is] thoroughly recommended to everyone interested in the presence and history of social movements. An enormous amount of excellent scholarship is assembled here and no one will put this book down without having gained many fresh and productive insights into the development of social movements and their researchers.” · H-Net

“The volume demonstrates that we sorely need contributions by anthropologists and others committed to empirical but theoretically robust research.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“This volume is a significant enterprise that gathers 40 academics together, scholars internationally well-known in the field of social movement studies and new promising researchers…This book can be read by specialists and non-specialists, students, practitioners in the third sector, and any citizen at large who is interested in and concerned about the subject.” · Análise Social

“…anyone interested in the history and presence of social movements will greatly benefit from the volume…An enormous amount of excellent scholarship is assembled here and no one will put this book down without having gained many fresh and productive insights into the development of social movements and their researchers.” · H-Soz-Kult

“This volume fulfills an ambitious objective of covering the ‘state of the art,’ introducing readers to the range of theoretical frameworks and empirical approaches that scholars have deployed in studying European social movements. Taken as a whole, this is a valuable contribution to the domain of social movement studies.” · Lilian Mathieu, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon

Olivier Fillieule is a professor of political sociology at Lausanne University’s Research Centre on Political Action (CRAPUL) and senior researcher at CNRS-CESSP, Paris 1-Sorbonne. Among his recent books is Demonstrations, coauthored with Danielle Tartakowsky.