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This special issue of Mobilization collects five research articles about the Black Lives Movement (BLM) plus two essays by the editors. This introductory essay provides the broad context of the BLM. It shows how the protests and movement demands of 2020 after the horrific murder of George Floyd were tied to the protests and organizing of 2014-16 which, in turn, built on at least two decades of prior organizing. Protests about police violence are central to Black movements because police repression enforces White supremacy.

This article draws on work in the social construction of race and ethnicity to explain why racial/ethnic divisions are so often axes of domination and why these divisions are central to social movements. Racial/ethnic groups are constructed in political processes that are intertwined with state formation and social movements. Processes of state formation and collective action create racial/ethnic groups, define majorities and minorities, and create racial/ethnic structures of domination. Physical and social segregation in tandem with intergenerational inheritance creates network cliquing that reinforces group boundaries, group differences, and group interests. Movements by members of dominant racial/ethnic majorities differ from movements by members of subordinate racial/ethnic minorities in key ways, including access to democratic processes for achieving group goals, experience of repression, need for allies, identity construction, processes of consciousness raising, and bases of mobilization. These "ethnic dimensions" matter for all social movements.

The disciplinary insurgency that created the academic field of social movement studies distinguished dissent from crime. This dichotomy has led the field to ignore the relation between the repression of dissent and the control of "ordinary" crime. There was massive repression in the wake of the Black riots of the 1960s that did not abate when the riots abated. The acceleration of the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States after 1980 suggests the possibility that crime control and especially the drug war have had the consequence of repressing dissent among the poor. Social movement scholars have failed to recognize these trends as repression because of the theoretical turn that built too strong a conceptual wall between crime and dissent. Revisiting this dichotomy is essential for understanding repression today.

Apex games place weak players in the formal equivalent of a multiperson prisoner's dilemma in which each weak player must choose between competing against the other weak players for the opportunity to coalesce with the strong player or cooperating with the other weak players to produce a jointly preferable outcome. Punishments, not rewards, are predicted to be effective for enforcing cooperation by the weak players. Fifty-four groups of four subjects each played the weak role in a five-person apex game with a confederate playing the apex (strong) role in a 3×3 design with factors of low, medium, and high levels of rewards and punishments available as incentives. As predicted, punishments but not rewards had a significant impact on increasing cooperation. Despite this effect, many groups experienced harmful effects of punishment availability that increased the risk of retaliatory spirals. It is concluded that a second-order dilemma may be seen in prisoner's dilemmas, since punishments are both necessary for enforcing cooperation and detrimental to that cooperation.

The effect of a selective incentive system on the likelihood of collective action is tested using an experiment with an Apex Game, a power-imbalanced game in which the weak players choose between competing against each other to form an alliance with the strong player or cooperating with each other in a unanimous alliance of weak players (excluding the strong player). A theoretical introduction analyzes the nature and importance of selective incentives for collective action and demonstrates the relevance of Apex Game experiments for studies of collective action. Results confirm the predictions: Formation of the coalition of weak players rises from 20% in the control condition to 62% when a negative selective incentive system is added.

The disciplinary insurgency that created the academic field of social movement studies distinguished dissent from crime. This dichotomy has led the field to ignore the relation between the repression of dissent and the control of "ordinary" crime. There was massive repression in the wake of the Black riots of the 1960s that did not abate when the riots abated. The acceleration of the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States after 1980 suggests the possibility that crime control and especially the drug war have had the consequence of repressing dissent among the poor. Social movement scholars have failed to recognize these trends as repression because of the theoretical turn that built too strong a conceptual wall between crime and dissent. Revisiting this dichotomy is essential for understanding repression today. Adapted from the source document.

Part of a review symposium on a book by Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, & Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge U Press, 2001). Though initially excited at the dynamic approach taken by McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly to understand contention, the author concludes that their methodological advice is sorely lacking & fails to provide groundwork for future research. Their emphasis on the mechanisms & processes of contention within complex, multievent historical instances of contention is applauded, though they fail to offer a clear methodological guide or research agenda by which to investigate such methods & processes. Their assessment of previous social movement theory is applauded. 1 Reference. K. Hyatt Stewart