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This class provides students with an in-depth exploration of the motivations behind, strategies of, and societal changes produced by various instances of collective mobilization across Europe. Some of the main questions we seek to answer throughout this course are: Along what lines of grievance do social movements form? Why do people choose to protest collectively given threats of reprisal? What explains the rise in support for populist outreaches by far-right parties in Europe’s most democratic countries? By examining a wide variety of movements, from labor mobilizations such as Poland's Solidarity to ethnic nationalist campaigns by groups such as the Basques and the Kurds, we use comparative analysis to identify points of convergence and divergence across cases. We explore how mobilization strategies spill across borders in “waves” of protest, such as those prefacing the collapse of the Soviet Union. We also investigate how developments in media and technology affect protest outcomes – and when they don’t, such as the “Twitter Revolution” that failed in Moldova. Students will gain both empirical insights into particular cases across Europe as well as the conceptual tools used by scholars of comparative politics to analyze the puzzling but highly topical questions above.