Review
"Resistance and Rebellion is an immensely rewarding and inspiring work." American Political Science Review
"...a good building block in development of a general approach to an important subject and contains a comprehensive bibliography." CHOICE
"...the book's contributions should be of interest to a wide audience of scholars concerned with collective action and comparative methodology." Contemporary Sociology
"This book presents an innovative attempt to examine how and why, at certain times, ordinary people decide to incur grave risks by rebelling against overwhelmingly powerful oppressors. . . . The substantive findings reported in Resistance and Rebellion should be of great relevance both to area specialists and to social movement experts. Petersen's impressive methodology, moreover, will stand as an illuminating example of research design for many researchers in positive political science and sociology across various sub-fields." Social Movement Studies
Book Description
Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe explains how ordinary people become involved in resistance and rebellion against powerful regimes. The book provides a detailed theoretical treatment of the process that pushes and pulls individuals into risk-laden roles. It also reconstructs Lithuanian social networks of the 1940s, through extensive interviews, to illustrate and test the argument. The work conducts comparisons with several other Eastern European nations to show the breadth and depth of the approach. The book contributes to both the general literature on political violence, as well as the theoretical literature on collective action.
Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe explains how ordinary people become involved in resistance and rebellion against powerful regimes. The book shows how a sequence of causal forces - social norms, focal points, rational calculation - operates to drive individuals into roles of passive resistance and, at a second stage, into participation in community-based rebellion organization. By linking the operation of these mechanisms to observable social structures, the work generates predictions about which types of community and society are most likely to form and sustain resistance and rebellion." "The empirical material centers around Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance in both the 1940s and the 1987-1991 period. Using the Lithuanian experience as a base line, comparisons with several other Eastern European countries demonstrate the breadth and depth of the theory." "The book contributes to both the general literature on political violence and protest and the theoretical literature on collective action."--BOOK JACKET.