The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements Edited by David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule & Hanspeter Kriesi The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements is a compilation of original, state-of-the-art essays by internationally recognized scholars. Covering a diverse range of topics in the field of social movement studies, this volume is an illuminating guide to understanding the dynamics and operation of social movements within the modern, global world. The abundance of social movement activity throughout the world, both violent and nonviolent, has made the study of social movements a valuable resource that will help students and scholars to engage with and understand their own social world. Issues covered in this volume include: historical, political, and cultural contexts; leadership; organizational dynamics; social networks and participation; consequences and outcomes; and synthetic overviews of major social movements, including labor, anti-war, women's, religious, ethnic and national, and environmental movements. David A. Snow is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is widely published in the field of social movements, and the author of, among other books, the award-winning Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People (with Leon Anderson, 1993). He is a former President of both the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and the Pacific Sociological Association, and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Sarah A. Soule Is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. Her main areas of research are social movements and political sociology. She has published several articles on social movements with a focus on diffusion processes in social movements. Hanspeter Kriesi Professor of Political Science at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is an internationally renowned scholar and has published numerous journal articles on social movements. He is the author of Political Mobilization and Social Change (1993).