State Building and Social Movements

Abstract

Abstract Since at least 1780, consolidating states have been providing an unusually fertile terrain for the development of social movements. Compared with other states, consolidating states are more contiguous, with better‐defined borders and also more centralized, with an increased monopoly over violence. They are better able to identify their population, to protect it, and to serve it (or exploit it) than other states. But the association between states and social movements was typically more complex. Between 1780 and the present, empires formed the major alternative to consolidating states and while social movements originally developed within consolidating states they spread almost worldwide, to land‐based empires, and to colonial empires. As they spread from consolidated states to empires, the tactics of social movements more or less retained their familiar form but profoundly changed their content. In our discussions of nineteenth and twentieth‐century social movements, analysts often consider consolidating states as independent entities, but many consolidating states in the modern era were also metropoles, capitals of colonial empires. This entry looks at: (1) social movements in consolidating states, (2) land‐based empires, and (3) colonial states and empires.