We are delighted to introduce the five excellent pieces in this article, which represent a broad cross section of contentious political cases and objects of study. We have in this issue studies from cases on three different continents, and two remarkable theoretical interventions of wide-ranging relevance.

The first article in this issue “Peaceful or Disciplined? Perceived efficiency and legitimacy of nonviolent protest by novices and repeaters in South Korean candlelight protests,” by Joohyun Park, turns to a subject of immense contemporary relevance: the sources of differential participation in violent and nonviolent protest. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Uprising in the United States, the 2022–3 Masha Amini protests in Iran, and the recent mass protests in Israel against the Netanyahu government, this object of study remains highly important. Park shows how experience in prior protests, and experiences of failed nonviolent action in the past may increase the propensity of repeat protesters to participate in more violent instances of contention in the future.

The second piece in this issue, Benjamin Farrer's “Goals, Strategies, and Tactics: Continuity and Change in Extinction Rebellion in the UK,” uses novel survey evidence to illustrate how Extinction Rebellion differs from past environmental movements. Farrer's convincingly argued piece contends that Extinction Rebellion's primary difference with other groups revolves around how members of the group conceive of disruption's strategic purpose. Rather than using disruption for purely tactical purposes, the group's members envision disruption as a means through which they can generate persistent “logistical, social and economic pressure” on their opponents.

The third article in this issue, “The Political Economy of Learning in Agrarian Contention: Transnational Networks and Inter-Racial Alliance Formation” by Anthony Robert Pahnke, explains how an inter-racial alliance, spanning African American smallholders, farmers of Euro-American descent, Latino farmworkers, and Indigenous people, has come into existence in the United States. Pahnke convincingly argues that this coalition was made possible by transnational activism galvanized by international political-economic pressures, something he evidences in qualitative interviews with a broad spectrum of actors across these social positions.

This issue closes with two articles that pay homage to a regular practice found in Nikki Keddie's Contention journal, a homonymous forerunner to the publication you read today. Quite some time before the foundation of Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, Keddie's Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science (1991–1996) played host to an array of important social scientific debates that went on to shape the direction of manifold fields. Some of these debates provided the foundations for new books on their subject matter which remain touchstone texts for scholars today. Celebrated social theorist Loïc Wacquant has kindly offered to play host to a renewed Keddie-era Contention-style debate, on the subject of ‘ethnoracial violence’. In this issue, Wacquant proposes a ’checkerboard’ model for disaggregating the phenomenon, making rich reference to a tapestry of social theory and empirical evidence to demonstrate the utility of his heuristic. Responding to Wacquant's provocation is Ali Meghji—a renowned scholar of race and coloniality—whose rejoinder proposes that we may use Du Boisian sociology to provide further resolution on Wacquant's object of study. This debate will continue in issues to come.