5. Contention and Construction

In this chapter we delineate a second axis around which the discourse on means tends to revolve: contention and construction. Contentious politics denotes approaches to social change that lie outside conventional political processes and mechanisms. This includes any unconventional collective actions employing adversarial means to resist, confront, disrupt, dismantle, or overthrow established social norms and structures, laws and policies, or governing regimes. Such approaches are often premised on the assumption that powerful elites who control conventional political outcomes will never willingly give up their unjust privileges. Rather, such privileges have to be taken from them against their will, and this requires direct confrontation. In contrast, the concept of a constructive program denotes a collective effort to build the more just society one seeks right in the midst of the old social order, in an effort to supplant the latter. Such constructive agency is closely associated with the concept of prefiguration. Some movements have combined contentious and constructive means, and some people argue that they must be combined to be effective. However, within a complex ecology of movements seeking social justice, it is reasonable to conclude that some movements can make distinctly valuable contributions by adopting exclusively constructive means.