“Taking the State at Its Word”: The Arts of Consentful Contention in the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

Following the popular uprisings of 1989–91 in Eastern Europe, subsequent research on contention in state socialism has typically focused on transgressive repertoires implicated in the system's collapse. In contrast, this article investigates certain alternative, more “consentful” forms of contention, in which citizens openly contested official directives by appealing to the state's own dominant ideology. Drawing on evidence from the German Democratic Republic, as well as other cases, the article develops a dramaturgical framework that classifies contentious repertoires along three dimensions: behavior, standpoint, and stance. This framework is then used to analyze two types of data: a retrospective “resistance” narrative by an ordinary citizen and a secret transcript from the well‐known Biermann protest. The conclusion proposes an explanatory model, as well as a regime typology to aid future research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 70 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.