Institutionalized Participation and Contentious Collective Action

Introducing this issue of the RIPC, the paper underlines the recent inflation of scientific work on participation, as well as its tendency to be influenced by the normative force an the “participative imperative”. In a first part, the paper presents the focus defined for this issue, which aims at embedding the study of participation into society. This comparative sociology of participation aims at observing various participation practices and their continuities; at reconstituting the frontiers of the “participative milieux”, in which civil society and states often straddle; paying attention to the social and militant profile of “participants” through their trajectories. In the second part, the paper discusses central issues for the analysis of participation: the control of participation, the marginalization of conflict, the reproduction of social inequalities, the opening of public spaces and democratization processes.