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Combines network analysis and historical sociology to chart significant changes in patterns of social conflict (in particular, relationships of attack and claim making) among different social groups, including royalty, parliament, local and national officials, trade, and workers, in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Building block models based on the intersection of actors and events, the authors map networks of contention in national politics before and after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, which increased the centrality of parliament in British politics. They highlight the process by which people, through collective action, not only create new forms of political repertoires but also forge relations to other actors, both at the local and the national level.

This chapter explores different instances of African claim making. It first looks at the effort of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) in the Sudan and especially the Côte d'Ivoire to build up its political apparatus across the territory and the efforts of the government to combat what it saw as a countergovernment. The chapter then turns to ways in which African political leaders sought to change the very terms in which future politics was discussed—to rethink the meaning of nation and sovereignty. They were thinking about different levels of political belonging and political action. And as France entered into discussion of creating a European community, they were thinking of expanding the idea of a “Franco-African” political ensemble into something even wider, into “Eurafrica.”

This chapter investigates the modes of claim-making that Gogo Breeze broadcast. While popular, his radio personality was not based on the populist sentiment that ordinary people were always right. The chapter describes in detail verbal exchanges between him and those whose self-identification as poor and hapless victims he attacked with wit and humor. At the same time, his moral authority was not restricted small-scale, face-to-face encounters. The chapter presents case studies of his confrontations with exploitation in commercial agriculture and retail trade bolstered by Chinese investment. Yet in Gogo Breeze's view of exploitation, the way forward lay not in charity but in the market. It was the morality of the market that he policed through investigative journalism and Chinyanja idioms.

Drawing inspiration from the likes of Frederick Cooper and Lisa Lindsay, this article focuses on the case of Sudan, which is often marginalised in African studies. Challenging this exceptionalism, the article makes three inter-related arguments. Firstly, it demonstrates that the Sudan Government’s response to the emergence of organised labour activism in the 1940s was comparable to other colonial administrations in British Africa, as the colonial authorities sought to reshape Sudanese workers according to an idealised image of their metropolitan counterparts. Secondly, the article examines how Sudanese trade unions transformed this universalism into a ‘claim making’ device, demanding improved socio-economic entitlements in exchange for industrial stability and increased productivity. Finally, the article concludes by arguing that the claim making power of Sudanese trade unions diminished during the transition to independence as Sudanese political elites denounced labour activism in the name of nation-building – a dynamic that was observable across Africa during the period of decolonisation.

This Introduction provides an overview of the events that came to be known as the 'Peterloo Massacre' and of assessments that try to account for the violent reaction it received. Drawing on theories by Chandler, Tilly, Butler, Žižek and Nixon, it categorizes the attitudes toward physical force and toward the claims of 'the people' on government evident in the historical record into narratives of 'diminishing' and 'dispersing' violence. Looking at how these narratives were developed in Romantic-era literature, it offers a new interpretation of the conflict in St Peter's Field as indicative of a change in attitudes toward violence as a 'normal' occurrence. It finds that a decreasing pattern of direct confrontation facilitated the Parliamentary Reform that Peterloo protesters sought while a pattern of subtle repression limited the extent to which popular claim-making would be heard.

Drawing on the global debates over biofuels and fracking, this chapter develops the core theoretical approach of the book, bringing together insights from contentious politics and political economy scholarship. The chapter details three central mechanisms of mobilization: scale shifts, identity activation, and brokerage. It specifies how key elements of political economy—that is, the conditions of finance and investment, ownership and control, and trade and patterns of exchange across global and local levels—can catalyze those mechanisms of contention. This theory-building chapter brings attention to how competing narratives and strategic discourses around biofuels and fracking were constructed at the global level, through issue linkages, scientific uncertainty, and the role of key symbols in these debates. The chapter thus establishes the basis for analyzing contestation over proposals for biofuels in sub-Saharan Africa and fracking in northern North America in the chapters that follow.

The task of this chapter is to trace how and why human rights law has come to be such an integral and sustained feature of the PSNI’s official narrative. The reason, this chapter argues, lies in the apparent power of human rights discourse to cool down, even if not quite neutralize, political tensions, debates and controversies that still animate ‘high-level policing’ (Brodeur, 1983) in the country. To frame this chapter’s analysis of the PSNI’s official vernacular of human rights, a ‘dialogic’ model of legitimacy is drawn upon to better account for the conditional nature of power and legitimation. Doing so enables us to better identify and account for the dynamic struggles in which rights-based claims are deployed as part of efforts to frame, or even resolve, contemporary political and public debates. By closely examining chief officers’ forewords and speeches, as well as their public responses to questions at the Policing Board’s public session, three central properties are identified that define this official vernacular. These are: human rights as legality; as an ethics of power; and as accountability. Each of these major strands of the police voice, it is argued, contribute to a purported vision of the PSNI as worthy of endorsement by elite audiences.

This chapter begins by posing the question, how did the Indian state classify refugees as poor, displaced, and lower caste and how did it create the material infrastructure of identifying welfare beneficiaries? The Partition, which brought in its wake a sea of displaced populations that deluged both countries, threw up conundrums of identification that straddled the philosophical and the feasible, the material and the intangible. Given that there were no pre-existing genres of recognizing the refugee figure so alien to the memory of the colonial state, civic and rehabilitation authorities had no choice but to accept and privilege alternative or ‘collateral evidence’ that emerged from the makeshift documents and narrated itineraries of refugees and refugee associations. While focusing its inquiries on a smaller universe of those disparagingly termed ‘refugee squatters’ in post-Partition Delhi and their housing claims, the present chapter seeks to show how refugee knowledge and popular practices of self-recognition were salient to the fashioning of identification documents.