Payne defines uncivil movements in the first chapter and in the second chapter develops her analytical approach. In three following chapters she presents three Latin American “uncivil” right-wing movements: Argentina's promilitary carapintada after the “Dirty War”; the powerful Brazilian landowners' Rural Democratic Union (UDR); and the Contra movement in Nicaragua after the civil war. This ambitious research project, which involved open-ended interviews and secondary research in three countries and three languages, uses carefully crafted structured-focused comparisons to explain the emergence, evolution, and demise of uncivil social movements.

Payne makes six central claims. Uncivil movements are a unique blend of civil-institutional and uncivil-mobilization politics. Political threats are necessary but not sufficient for the emergence and growth of uncivil movements. Leaders “sell” perceived political threats to potential members by using culturally available myths and images. Uncivil movements' inherent contradictions weaken them over time, but not before they have negatively affected the democratic process. Democratic governments can exacerbate or lessen these movements' negative effect. Uncivil movements can emerge in “consolidated” and transitional democracies.

Payne's discussion of the difficult ethical, personal safety, and methodological problems faced by scholars who study secrecy and danger resonate with two recently completed projects of my own. How does one conduct research when groups' activities are either totally or partially clandestine? How does one obtain a satisfactory sample of respondents when informants' names are difficult to uncover? To address these problems, Payne started with each uncivil movement's most visible leaders and used their trust to obtain interviews with others.

Once interviewees were identified, nagging ethical questions emerged: How does one strike a balance among protecting anonymity, disclosing illegal and/or human rights violations, and protecting one's own personal safety? Payne's solution was to disclose only the names of already well-known movement leaders—even though the possible cost was (and is) violence against her—and withhold the names of less powerful voices associated with or outside the movement. Anyone interested in social science research methods, especially the problems associated with interviewing powerful or not-so-powerful violence supporters and perpetrators, should read Payne's fascinating explanation of her research methods.

The author skillfully incorporates into each case analysis a wealth of synthesized political science, sociological, and social-psychological thinking on social movements, and she rigorously weaves social movement variables into each case analysis. Payne astutely incorporates and revises political science institutionalization and social group mobilization theories to bring out their policy implications for a government's handling of uncivil social movements.

Consider, for example, how Payne weaves interview data into social movement theory in her analysis of how uncivil movements develop political power. They grow by leaders “framing” and “cueing up” culturally resonant images to support their activities and by creating “legitimizing myths” and selling these to their publics. How this process unfolds and whether it uses sufficient culturally viable images in part shape the success or failure of an uncivil movement. Payne, for example, illustrates how Argentina's carapintada military officers and Brazil's landowner association successfully promoted their power by drawing both on older autochthonous cultural cues and by developing new ones. In contrast, she argues, the 1990s Nicaraguan Contras were unsuccessful as an uncivil social movement precisely because they were unable to frame their movement as distinct from, superior to, and more legitimate than other political groups.

A particular challenge for the leaders of uncivil social movements is to expand the appeal beyond the hardliners who make up the movement's core. Payne finds that an “entrepreneurial” charismatic figure is required to manage the process. A new framing and operational style develops out of these conflicts and adjustments.

For example, in order to convince “pragmatists,” which uncivil movements need in order to grow, that the movement is legitimate, the charismatic entrepreneur must present himself as different from the movement's earlier authoritarian leaders. The fact that these new leaders—urban, educated, and urbane—are in fact different from their predecessors is not enough. Leaders have to “frame” and “cue up” the movement's new persona: Argentina's carapintada needed to be seen as not self-serving, ruthless military caudillos; Brazil's UDN could not be merely a reincarnation of the older rustic and uneducated landowner coroneis; Nicaragua's new Contra leaders were not merely brutal “Somosista” National Guardsmen. How and to what extent these changes are “sold” to pragmatists and a wider public will shape the course and operational success of each uncivil movement.

Factors inherent to these movements can promote or undermine them. If the goals are highly specific, then achieving success puts the movement out of a job. The original leader's charisma poses a destabilizing succession problem. The personal ambitions of these charismatic leaders often make them easy prey to those in government who subscribe to institution-building theories about democratically shaping and incorporating uncivil movements. Yet, political institution theorists will discover from Payne that incorporating these leaders or their agendas into democratic institutions can backfire: Lending them power and legitimacy disguises their violence, builds membership, and fosters their goals.

Payne recognizes the importance of timing: President Alfonsin of Argentina may have moved too soon and too strongly against the military. “Without the [military] trials the carapintada would not have emerged” (p. 97). This created conditions for the attenuated military coups. Governments may enter into negotiation with carefully selected movement factions, but Payne recommends they investigate uncivil movements and prosecute their violence. Transition governments must build up and reform judiciaries.

Payne's term “uncivil movements” should be discussed and debated. Some will ask why she did not use the more traditional designation “counterrevolutionary” in the usual continuum: “conservative,” “reformist,” and “revolutionary” social movements. Cannot the Contras—“contra” for “counterrevolutionary”—best be described as a counterrevolutionary movement? Is it questionable to define uncivil movements as only right-wing? Have there been uncivil (exclusionist, violent) movements on the Left? Payne would argue that leftist movements struggle for the systemically disadvantaged, whereas uncivil movements protect, foster, or seek to restore the powers of the previously (or currently) advantaged. Every reader will find Payne's definition and designation of uncivil movements theoretically and analytically useful and thought provoking.

Another source of lively debate arises in Payne's last chapter, which compares uncivil movements in Latin America to those in other societies. In particular, she focuses on three consolidated democracies—Le Pen's Front National in France, Meir Kahane's KACH Zionist movement in Israel, and militia movements in the United States—and one in a transitional government, South Africa's AWB Afrikener Resistance Movement. There will be debate and analysis about the movements left out of Payne's “uncivil” categorization.

Payne raises and addresses most questions, however, and just enough in her extraordinary analysis is left unstated to generate new and alternative questions and explanations. The literature on social movements, on politics, and on Latin America is significantly advanced by Payne's careful research and scholarly analysis.