EMOTIONS AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICS
In all fields of study, dominant theoretical perspectives tend to obscure as much as they reveal. By highlighting specific dimensions of complex empirical phenomena, leading paradigms render other aspects of these same phenomena more or less invisible to scholars. This is no less true of the study of contentious politics than it is of other fields of inquiry. Focusing only on the more narrow literature on social movements, we find that the recent dominance of what might be termed "structural environmental" perspectives (for example, resource mobilization, political process, and so on) has tended to focus attention on the environmental facilitation or suppression of movement activity rather than on internal characteristics or dynamics of the movements themselves.