Offers an innovative model for understanding how social movements occur in repressive societies

After a series of failed attempts at mobilizing society, Poland’s opposition sprang to surprising—and newly effective—life with the formation of the Solidarity trade union in 1980. If not for those past failures, this book suggests, Solidarity might never have succeeded. Solidarity and Contention deftly reconstructs the networks of protest in Communist Poland to show how waves of dissent during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s left an organizational residue that both instructed and enabled Solidarity and, ultimately, the Polish revolution.