This Bachelor thesis is an interpretive study, where the material has mainly been gathered through ethnographic methods, with thematically opened interviews and observations providing the primary data. A field study was conducted in Bolivia during the months of November and December of 2009; in La Paz in the Western highlands, including some interviews in the fast growing suburb El Alto, as well as in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the Eastern lowlands. Bolivia is one of the poorest and most unequal countries in Latin America and the world, and the purpose of the study is to re-contextualise and re-interpret how inequality is created and maintained in the Bolivian society by doing a case study on gender inequality. In addition, an intersectional analysis is used that takes into account the diversity of the Bolivian society in terms of ethnicity and class. The study aims at exploring the mechanisms that create and maintain inequality in a Bolivian context as well as looking at the prospects for potential change in the unequal relations between groups of people within the new context of indigenous president Evo Morales and a new inclusive constitution. Using an abductive method, the empirical material has been re-interpreted with the help of American sociologist Charles Tilly’s framework of durable inequality. He identifies two mechanisms that create inequality, exploitation and opportunity hoarding, and two mechanisms that reinforce inequality; emulation and adaptation. Together with the concept of intersectionality, recognising women’s different experiences depending on, for instance, ethnic background or social class, these two frameworks are framing the study. Jointly they generate a new analytical tool that can deepen the understanding inequality mechanisms: the Intersecting Inequality Framework. The content of the interviews when analysed show that inequalities in Bolivia have long historical roots, and that the processes of exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation and adaptation that Tilly describes all take place in creating and maintaining an unequal position for Bolivian women. The Intersecting Inequality Framework reveals that the inequality mechanisms in the three dimensions of gender, ethnicity and class sometimes work autonomously and other times intersectionally. Changing durable inequality is a slow process; nevertheless there are signs of changed relations between categorical bounded groups in the Bolivian society. Although, in the context of Morales the main political focus at the time lays not on attaining gender equality, but rather to continue the empowerment of the indigenous populations.

The 19th century is seen by many as a crucial turning point in the history of protest in Britain and across the global north. In Charles Tilly's famous history of the period, the first few decades of the 19th century mark the transition from the violent, direct action of the premodern era to our modern, respectable, social movements (Tilly 1995, 2004). A study of rioting in Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow from 1800 to 1939, therefore, allows for a unique window onto that momentous period of upheaval. But it also has a sociological aim. The last decade has seen a resurgence of rioting in Europe and the USA, prompting many to suggest that riots will be the dominant mode of protest in the coming years (e.g. Badiou 2012, Mayer et al 2016, Clover 2016). But, as I will show, our existing sociological theories of riots tend to be overly narrow, to focus exclusively on one or two master variables without paying due attention to the variety of forms and behaviours that make up rioting. These are the two challenges I take up in this thesis. My main empirical contribution is a catalogue of four hundred riots across the three cities. This was produced by searching through national and local newspaper archives, Home Office documents, local police reports and secondary literature. The catalogue is presented in the Appendix. Using the rich, narrative accounts provided by these sources, I try to analyse the riots on their own terms, as a set of interactions and behaviours, as well as to embed them in the local history of each city. This reveals that riots are not the chaotic, unpredictable moments of madness that we so often think of them as. Riots are rather patterned by people's everyday use of time and space - they expand to fill the growing urban landscape of each city and their timing follows gradual changes to the working week. Riots are also embedded in culture and society more broadly. In fact, as those roots in local society were eroded in the last few decades of the 19th century, this led to a decline in the number of riots in Manchester, Liverpool and most of the rest of the country. Meanwhile, the actual way in which people riot also evolves over time. Riots changed from an autonomous form of protest, to one that was subordinated to the strike and the demonstration. Rioters also move away from targeting specific (often powerful) individuals to targeting people because of their identity as, for example, scabs, Irish Catholics or fascists. This history undermines the orthodox account of protest presented by Charles Tilly. Violent direct action continued to be a key part of urban life until far later than his account suggests. And those later riots are not accidental hangovers from a previous era, but in fact adapted to changing conditions. My catalogue also suggests that existing theories of riots can be synthesised and broadened by concentrating on the way that individual riots unfold over hours, weeks or months, on what I think of as their career through time. This sets up a flexible framework for analysing riots which I hope can be applied to other riots around the world. Finally, and more abstractly, this study suggests that riots have a particular relationship with time, that they are of the present but face the past, drawing on its traditions as well as their own history. This has implications for our vision of history itself, suggesting that time is not punctuated by spontaneous, era-defining events, but rather evolves gradually over the longue duree.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Este trabalho tem como tema a formação histórica dos estados modernos, analisando a literatura sobre o fenômeno na Europa e na América Latina. Seu argumento principal é que podemos, tomando a sociologia histórica como teoria política, desenvolver ferramentas metodológicas e teóricas mais acuradas para entender as organizações estatais e a explicação histórica em ciências sociais. O argumento secundário é que a discussão contemporânea sobre construção de estados vem carregada de um viés modernizador na forma como articula o conceito de estado com o processo de seu desenvolvimento. Refinando essa ideia, o trabalho especifica o viés modernizador em termos de distorções na visão de estado e de história, transpondo-o como parâmetro de crítica a determinadas narrativas sobre os estados latino-americanos e sua formação. Como contraponto, recorre aos marcos da crítica substantiva e formal às teorias da modernização feita pela sociologia histórico-comparativa nas décadas de 1970 e 1980. Como resultado, propõe a convergência entre uma teoria crítica do estado e uma noção de processo histórico aberta à variação, à contingência e à contextualidade. Ao final, o trabalho enquadra uma nova onda de estudos histórico-comparativos sobre os estados latino-americanos, percebendo nela caminhos promissores para a superação do viés modernizador. / This dissertation focuses on the historical formation of modern states, analyzing the literature about such phenomenon in Europe and Latin America. Its main argument is that it is possible to, by assuming historical sociology as political theory, to develop more accurate theoretical and methodological tools to understand state organizations and the historical explanation in social sciences. The secondary argument is that the ongoing discussion on state building is embedded in a modernizing bias in the way it articulates a concept of state with the process of its development. Exploring this insight, the dissertation specifies the modernizing bias in terms of distortions in the comprehension of state and history, converting it into a yardstick for the critique of certain narratives on the Latin American states and its formation. As reply, it traces back the substantive and methodological criticism of modernization theories made by comparative-historical sociology in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, it proposes a convergence between a critical theory of the state with a notion of historical process open to variation, contingency and contextuality. By the end, the dissertation explores a new wave of historical-comparative studies on Latin American states, emphasizing promising pathways for the transcendence of the modernizing bias.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Este trabalho tem como tema a formação histórica dos estados modernos, analisando a literatura sobre o fenômeno na Europa e na América Latina. Seu argumento principal é que podemos, tomando a sociologia histórica como teoria política, desenvolver ferramentas metodológicas e teóricas mais acuradas para entender as organizações estatais e a explicação histórica em ciências sociais. O argumento secundário é que a discussão contemporânea sobre construção de estados vem carregada de um viés modernizador na forma como articula o conceito de estado com o processo de seu desenvolvimento. Refinando essa ideia, o trabalho especifica o viés modernizador em termos de distorções na visão de estado e de história, transpondo-o como parâmetro de crítica a determinadas narrativas sobre os estados latino-americanos e sua formação. Como contraponto, recorre aos marcos da crítica substantiva e formal às teorias da modernização feita pela sociologia histórico-comparativa nas décadas de 1970 e 1980. Como resultado, propõe a convergência entre uma teoria crítica do estado e uma noção de processo histórico aberta à variação, à contingência e à contextualidade. Ao final, o trabalho enquadra uma nova onda de estudos histórico-comparativos sobre os estados latino-americanos, percebendo nela caminhos promissores para a superação do viés modernizador. / This dissertation focuses on the historical formation of modern states, analyzing the literature about such phenomenon in Europe and Latin America. Its main argument is that it is possible to, by assuming historical sociology as political theory, to develop more accurate theoretical and methodological tools to understand state organizations and the historical explanation in social sciences. The secondary argument is that the ongoing discussion on state building is embedded in a modernizing bias in the way it articulates a concept of state with the process of its development. Exploring this insight, the dissertation specifies the modernizing bias in terms of distortions in the comprehension of state and history, converting it into a yardstick for the critique of certain narratives on the Latin American states and its formation. As reply, it traces back the substantive and methodological criticism of modernization theories made by comparative-historical sociology in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, it proposes a convergence between a critical theory of the state with a notion of historical process open to variation, contingency and contextuality. By the end, the dissertation explores a new wave of historical-comparative studies on Latin American states, emphasizing promising pathways for the transcendence of the modernizing bias.

Wie gehen die städtischen Armen mit Wohnraumverdrängung um? Welche Strategien entwickeln sie? Und welche Elemente bestimmen, welche Strategien die städtischen Armen einsetzen? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, entpacke ich die Idee von ‚Strategien zur Bewältigung von Bedrohung durch Verdrängung‘, um zu soziologischen Konzeptualisierungen eben dieser Strategien zu gelangen. Dazu nutze ich einige der Konzepte in Bourdieus [1986] Kapitalbegriff sowie die Anwendung von Tillys [1999] Theorie der dauerhaften Ungleichheit als Rahmenkonzept. Empirisch identifiziere und analysiere ich die Anti-Verdrängungs-Strategien der städtischen Armen in den komplexen Wohnsituationen von São Paulo und Istanbul. Der Analyse zufolge wirken sich die ermittelten Strategien zur Vermeidung von Verdrängung oder zur Verbesserung der Wohnsituation langfristig auf die Betroffenen oder den Wohnungsmarkt nicht positiv aus. Im zweiten Schritt der Analyse argumentiere ich, dass die Mehrheit der Strategien mit den Ursachen und Verstärkungsmechanismen der dauerhaften Ungleichheiten übereinstimmt, welche Tilly identifiziert hat. Dadurch entsteht, wie ich in der Arbeit darlege, zwangsläufig der Prozess der andauernden Wohnungsungleichheit, der trotz der Bemühungen der städtischen Armen wenig Aussicht auf Veränderung zeigt. Das heißt nicht, dass die städtischen Armen keine Kämpfe gewonnen haben oder dass sich nicht individuell ihre Situationen verbessert haben, sondern, dass das größere Bild der Ungleichheiten in der Wohnungswirtschaft wenig erfolgsversprechend ist. Selbst wenn einige Menschen beispielsweise Vermögenswerte in Form von ökonomischem Kapital schaffen, scheinen die städtischen Armen dem zukünftigen Verdrängungsdruck nicht zu entkommen. Obwohl die Anti-Verdrängungs-Strategien somit den Verdrängungsdruck teilweise vorübergehend mildern können, untergraben die dauerhaften Ungleichheiten auf dem Wohnungsmarkt eine substanzielle und nachhaltige Veränderung im Interesse der städtischen Armen. / How do the urban poor cope with housing displacement? What kinds of strategies do the urban poor develop? And what elements shape which strategies they deploy? To answer these questions, I unpack the idea of strategies for “coping” with the threat or uncertainty of displacement to arrive at sociological conceptualizations of these strategies – ones anchored in Bourdieu’s [1986] concept of capital as well as the application of Tilly’s [1999] theory of durable inequalities to housing. Empirically, I identify and analyze the anti-displacement strategies of the urban poor within the complex housing contexts of São Paulo and Istanbul by breaking down the housing market into sub-housing markets (housing forms) as they are used by the urban poor in each local context. Combining existing analytic frameworks with my original data, I also speculate about the effects of the identified strategies for the urban poor in terms of durable housing inequalities. According to the analysis, the identified strategies to avoid displacement or improve housing are not positively impacting the urban poor or the housing environment in the long run. To account for this, in the second step of the analysis I argue that the majority of strategies align with the causes and reinforcement mechanisms of durable inequalities that Tilly identified. This is not to say no battles have been won or that no individual situations have improved, but to say that the larger picture of housing inequalities warrants little optimism. Even when some new housing forms create assets in form of economic capital (e.g., land titles), the urban poor don’t seem to escape future displacement pressures. Therefore, although the anti-displacement strategies may temporarily ease displacement pressure, the durable inequalities of the housing market undermine substantial and sustainable change in the interest of the urban poor.

This study intends to analyze the importance of institutional trust in the process of democratization. In this particular case, the period from 494 to 88 BC in the Roman republic is examined. The theories of Charles Tilly and Robert Putnam are utilized to more deeply examine the concepts and manifestations of trust and democratization. Using the ideas and theories of these authors together provides a unique insight into the means by which a population comes to trust that government is responsive, and further comes to expect increased responsiveness in the future. Institutional trust as an element of mutually binding consultation will be explored via proposed and successful plebeian legislation in the Roman republic. This study examines legislative actions, defined as proposed legislation (rogationes) alongside successful legislation (plebiscita and leges), which originated in the plebeian assembly, the concilium plebis, under the guidance of the tribunes of the plebs, the elected officials of the plebeian population at Rome. In all, 236 legislative actions between 494 and 88 BC are divided into four themes of democratizing action, termed equality, broadening of participation, protection and mutually binding consultation, and then further organized into one of nine sub-categories for each theme. Findings suggest that the final period of 192 to 88 BC, which is period of frenzied plebeian political activity through the concilium plebis and the tribunes of the plebs, is made possible by a marked increase in legislative actions related to mutually binding consultation in the pervious period (292 to 193 BC). These findings support the claim by Tilly and Putnam that democratization can occur only with increases in institutional trust.