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Meaningful Resistance explores the origins and dynamics of resistance to markets through an examination of two social movements that emerged to voice and channel opposition to market reforms. Protests against water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and rising corn prices in Mexico City, Mexico, offer a lens to analyze the mechanisms by which perceived, market-driven threats to material livelihood can prompt resistance. By exploring connections among marketization, local practices, and political protest, the book shows how the material and the ideational are inextricably linked in resistance to subsistence threats. When people perceive that markets have put subsistence at risk, material and symbolic worlds are both at stake; citizens take to the streets not only to defend their pocketbooks, but also their conceptions of community. The book advances contemporary scholarship by showing how attention to grievances in general, and subsistence resources in particular, can add explanatory leverage to analyses of contentious politics

Why do targets of social movement activities respond to movements in the ways they do? Many factors play a role in shaping targets' responses to social movement activities. This article focuses on one particular factor: targets' perceptions of social movement claims. The article argues that a target's understanding of a social movement's claims helps shape its response, which, in turn, shapes the evolution of the social movement. Two cases of social mobilization, one in response to water privatization in Bolivia and the other in response to rising corn prices in Mexico, serve as a lens through which to explore these issues. In each case, differences in how public authorities understood the movements' claims help explain why they reacted in starkly different ways to the emerging movements. Where officials appreciated the symbolic value of the good at stake, they acted quickly to curtail resistance. Where officials failed to grasp those meanings, they dismissed the potential for widespread mobilization and inadvertently accelerated movement growth.

Responses to the imposition of market-oriented economic policies have varied. This article asks two questions: (1) How can we better understand when marketization will or will not prompt resistance? And (2) when people do mobilize, why are some movements broad-based while others draw on particular segments of society? The author argues that these questions can best be answered by focusing not only on the political contexts and resources available to potential social movements, but also on what is perceived to be at stake during marketization. These perceptions influence mobilization processes and the kinds of groups available for mobilization. When people understand markets as threatening to material wellbeing, as well as to widely shared community relationships, understandings, and commitments, heightened feelings of group belonging can contribute to broad-based mobilization. The author develops this argument through analysis of the broad-based, widespread movement that emerged to protest water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1999 and 2000. In the context of a history of agriculture, irrigation, drought, and conflict, water helped to produce and reproduce imagined communities of nation, region, and ethnic group, as well as quotidian communities revolving around the routine production and consumption of water. These meanings help to explain the dynamics of the resistance that emerged.

How should we study contentious politics in an era rife with new forms of contention, both in the United States and abroad? The introduction to this special issue draws attention to one particularly crucial methodological tool in the study of contention: political ethnography. It showcases the ways in which ethnographic approaches can contribute to the study of contentious politics. Specifically, it argues that "what," "how," and "why" questions are central to the study of contention and that ethnographic methods are particularly well-suited to answering them. It also demonstrates how ethnographic methods push scholars to both expand the objects of inquiry and rethink what the relevant units of analysis might be. By uncovering hidden processes, exploring social meanings, and giving voice to unheard stories, ethnography and "ethnography-plus" approaches contribute to the study of contention and to comparative politics, writ large.

Rethinking comparison : an introduction / Erica S. Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith -- Beyond mill : why cross-case qualitative causal inference is weak, and why we should still compare / Jason Seawright -- Two ways to compare / Frederic Charles Schaffer -- Unbound comparison / Nick Cheesman -- On casing a study versus studying a case / Joe Soss -- From cases to sites : studying global processes in comparative politics / Thea Riofrancos -- Comparing complex cases using archival research / Jonathan Obert -- Composing comparisons : studying configurations of relations in social network research / Sarah E. Parkinson -- Against methodological nationalism : seeing comparisons as encompassing through the Arab uprisings / Jillian Schwedler -- Comparative analysis for theory development / Mala Htun and Francesca R. Jensenius -- Problems and possibilities of comparison across regime types : examples involving China / Benjamin L. Read -- Comparisons with an ethnographic sensibility : studies of protest and vigilantism / Erica S. Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith -- Theory and imagination in comparative politics : an interview with Lisa Wedeen / Erica S. Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith with Lisa Wedeen.

To what extent can comparative methods and ethnographic inquiry combine to advance knowledge in political science? Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular method within political science. Yet both proponents and detractors often see it as a technique best suited for producing
in-depth knowledge about a particular case or for explicating the meaning of a particular political behavior. This article argues that comparative ethnography—ethnographic research that explicitly and intentionally builds an argument through the analysis of two or more cases—can
be of particular value to political scientists, and to scholars of comparative politics in particular. The approach can hone our theoretical models, challenge existing conceptual categories, and help develop portable political insights. This article has two goals: (1) to show that comparative
ethnographic research deserves a prominent place in the repertoire of qualitative methods and (2) to elaborate the logics of inquiry behind such comparisons so that scholars will be better equipped to use them more frequently. Two or more cases are not always better than one, but comparative
ethnography can yield new and different insights with important implications for our understandings of politics.