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This volume offers a much needed look into the historical, social, and political developments leading up to the Iranian revolution. Bringing together a group of scholars, historians, and social scientists, most of them Iranian in origin, the book documents an extraordinary revolutionary heritage that predates this century.

Presents papers that analyze tactical and strategic innovations in movement organizing. Perhaps the most fertile area of social movement research examines the increasingly complex and busy intersection of collective identity issues with social movement membership and mobilization. This title presents three papers representing this theorizing

Deliberative democrats are committed both to inclusion and to barring coercion in public discourse. Their commitment to democratic inclusion should make them sympathetic to the challenges faced by social movements. An adequate sociology of contentious public discourse, however, shows that social movements must often act coercively in order to be included. For example, they must often alter the terrain of conflict, create a crisis, pressure interlocutors to argue consistently, or compel other parties to enter social arenas of contention that they have avoided. Democratic theorists who are committed to inclusion should approve of such coercion. Under the actual circumstances movements face, there is a tension between non-coercion and democratic inclusion. This tension demonstrates the need for a democratic standard and a mode of democratic social analysis beyond those that deliberative theory offers.

This article discusses the potential contribution to the concept of backlash in social movement studies. If we consider backlash politics as characterised by the convergence of an intensified organisational networking, increased capacity for collective actions and aggressive framing by retrograde actors (including movements), social movement studies might provide (a) theoretical suggestions to embed the analysis in an established sets of concepts and hypotheses on the development of contentious politics, of which backlash politics is a type and (b) empirical knowledge on a specific form of retrograde movements, those related to the radical right. Building upon some established concepts in social movement studies, I will address the identity framing, organisational resources and contextual opportunities for backlash politics.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Clare Saunders' book is an important contribution to the literature on social movements and environmentalism. Using the concept of 'environmental networks', it explores the extent to which social movement theory helps us understand how a broad range of environmental organizations interact. It considers the practicalities of social movement theories and it goes on to relate them to the practices of environmental networks. Theoretically and empirically rich, the book draws on extensive survey material with 144 UK environmental organizations, as diverse as not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) groups, reformists, conservationists and radicals; interviews with more than 40 key campaigners and extensive participant-observation, particularly in London. Focussing particularly on the crucial question of networking dynamics, the book reveals that there are broad ranging network links across the movements' spatial and ideological dimensions. Combined with inevitable ideological clashes and a degree of sectarian rivalry, these links helps produce vibrant environmental networks that together work to protect and/or preserve the environment. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone concerned with environmental issues, politics and movements.

The main premise of political ecology is that environmental change is not a neutral process amenable to technical management. Rather, it has political sources, conditions and ramifications that impinge on socio-economic inequalities and political process. The article seeks to provide an introduction to the rapidly growing research field of Third World political ecology and provides an overview of the historical development of the field since the 1970s. The theoretical tool has been employed to analyse the case study of kudremukh environment movement. The article raises certain questions like weren't the priorities of workers considered upon the closure of mining? Why have the trade unions not been able to dictate the central content of bargaining policy for trade unions? Why do NGOs select a particular issue in terms of environmental degradation and play crucial roles as lobbyist and umpire through judicial activism and well as act as interpreters and mediators through the press?

This article casts new light on the processes of collective claims and identity formation in social movements, with the help of the radical political framework of Laclau and Mouffe (Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, Verso, London, 2001). Polish tenants, classified as "losers" of transition and marginalized in the mainstream discourse, nevertheless act collectively, mobilizing alliances with other democratic struggles and thus challenge the hegemony of neoliberal dogmas in the country. The very fact of mobilization of a socially and economically deprived group demanding the right to the city is provocative in the studied context. The empirical foundations of our study are 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with Polish tenants' activists cross-referenced with media material produced by and about the movement, and previous studies on the topic. The contribution of this article is twofold: it combines social movement theory with radical political framework and fills the empirical gap in the body of literature on social movements in post-socialist Europe.

'Social Movements in Politics: A Comparative Study' by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh is reviewed.