Charles Tilly (May 27, 1929 – April 29, 2008[1]) was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.

Sidney Tarrow (PhD, Berkeley, 1965) is the Emeritus Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government at Cornell University. Tarrow has his BA from Syracuse, his MA from Columbia, and his PhD from Berkeley. His work has covered a variety of interests, beginning with Italian communism (his first book was Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (Yale, 1967), then shifting to comparative communism in Communism in Italy and France (Princeton 1972, ed., with Donald L.M. Blackmer. In the 1970s he made a long foray into comparative local politics (Between Center and Periphery, Yale 1978), before, in the 1980s, turning to a quantitative and qualitative reconstruction of Italian protest cycle of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, in Democracy and Disorder (Oxford, 1989), which received the prize for the best book in Collective Behavior and Social Movements from the American Sociological Association. His most recent books are Power in Movement (Cambridge, 1994, 1998), Dynamics of Contention (with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly, Cambridge, 2001), Contentious Europeans (with Doug Imig, Rowman and Littlefield 2001), Transnational Protest and Global Activism (with Donatella della Porta, Rowman and Littlefield 2004), The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge 2005) and Contentious Politics (with Charles Tilly, Paradigm, 2006).

Revolutions, social movements, religious and ethnic conflict, nationalism and civil rights, and transnational movements: these forms of contentious politics combine in Charles Tilly's and Sidney Tarrow's Contentious Politics. The book presents a set of analytical tools and procedures for study, comparison, and explanation of these very different sorts of contention. Drawing on many historical and contemporary cases, the book shows that similar principles describe and explain a wide variety of struggles as well as many more routine forms of politics. Tilly and Tarrow have written the book to introduce readers to an exciting new program of political and sociological analysis.