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Until the 1970s, the study of social movements was firmly within a diverse sociological tradition that explored the relationship between social structure and political behavior, and was preoccupied with explaining variation in the political orientation of movements: their ideologies, aims, motivations, or propensities for violence. Subsequently, a breakaway tradition redefined the central problem, radically narrowing the scope of interest to the process of mobilization—how social groups, whoever they are and whatever their aims, marshal resources, recruit adherents, and navigate political environments in order to grow and succeed. Critics would later insist that the construction of meaning, the formation of collective identities, and the stimulation and amplification of emotions play vital and neglected roles in mobilization, but these alternatives did not challenge the narrowed construction of the problem itself. The resulting subfield has largely abandoned the quest to explain variation in the political orientation of movements. Researchers in related fields—on revolution, unions, and ethnic mobilization—have retained an interest in explaining political orientation, although they often view it primarily as a by-product of mobilization. Reviving theories about the impact of social structure on movement political orientation will require integrating insights from research on related but widely scattered subjects.

Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline. Conversely, sociology plays a very limited role in IR, particularly in the large, mostly US-based mainstream. Even when IR scholars take ideas and theories from sociology, they are neither particularly interested in this fact nor capable of recognizing the significance of sociology for the history of the discipline as a whole, being as they are generally uninterested in intellectual history, as discussed in the first section. Despite the difficulty that the scarcity of relevant literature represents, in section two we identify some occasionally important traces of social theory on the IR mainstream, which encompasses both a neorealist and a neoliberal paradigm. By contrast, sociology is intrinsic to most IR scholarship outside the mainstream, which is considered here to be part of a third " reflectivist " paradigm, examined in the third section. Here the focus is set on the sociological elements identifiable in IR constructivism, Marxism, and critical theory, as well as in some European national traditions of inquiry. The conclusion buttresses these arguments with some empirical evidence and makes suggestions for further research. Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline 1. A small, but telling piece of evidence on sociologists' lack of interest in IR is the absence of an article on this subject in the fifteen-volume International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (Sills 1968). The successor edition, extended to twenty-six volumes, included only two entries on IR and a few more on area studies (Smelser and Balter 2001); the most recent edition ignored IR altogether, containing not a single entry on the discipline, but included area studies (Wright 2015). This evidence suggests not only that sociologists' ignorance of IR is widespread but also that it has remained fairly constant across time. At least some IR scholars ...