Recent works on 'uneven and combined development' (UCD) have focused on its contributions to the study of political economy and geopolitics, but they have yet to systematically address the cultural dimension of social changethe socially shared ideas by which people understand and act upon the world. The present article addresses this lacuna by applying the premises of UCD to the nineteenth-century emergence of Occidentalism: the idea of 'the West' as the dominant site of culture, civilisation and modernity. Against the problems of methodological internalism and Eurocentrism, I argue that the categories of unevenness and combined development provide critical entry points for an examination of the international construction of 'Western' identities and discourses during the late-nineteenth century imperial era. Specifically, I advance a theory of geocultural feedback which locates the constituting terms of those identities and discourses in a specific conjuncture of global unevenness: how the experience of 'relative backwardness' in late-industrialising societies translated into self-consciously 'Westernising' projects of catch-up development which destabilised prevailing conceptions of white European supremacy. In both the British and American empires, this historical dynamic produced a distinct pattern of cultural transformation: a reactive discourse of civilisational closure centred on the defence of 'the West.' I am especially grateful to my supervisor, George Lawson, for his advice and support throughout the PhD from which this article arises. Thanks also to Justin Rosenberg, the editors of CRIA, and three anonymous reviewers for convening this special issue and providing invaluable comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Grace Benton and Lewis Bassett-Yerrell for their insightful comments on an earlier draft.

Are we living in an age of revolution and resistance? Fifty-one years after the global tumult of 1968, and a century since the Russian Revolution, the world-political scene is marked by discussion of resistance movements, revolutionary politics, and new forms of opposition to the status quo. Yet the meanings of revolution and resistance remain ambiguous and undecided-terms that are both everywhere and nowhere in the contemporary world. While a variety of actors, movements and popular cultural phenomena are labelled revolutionary, there is also a sense that 'big-R' revolution is dead, the social, political and economic problems it was meant to solve essentially settled. Resistance, likewise, is all around us yet ambiguous: as Jodi Dean notes in this issue, when the attendance of the Washington establishment at John McCain's funeral is presented as a resistance meeting, the concept is stretched to its limits. The 2018 Millennium Conference 'Revolution and Resistance in World Politics', held 27-28 October 2018 at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), aimed to interrogate the multiple meanings of revolution and resistance in the 21st century and to foster cross-disciplinary conversations and dialogue about the concepts' theoretical, empirical and international dimensions. In selecting the theme, we reflected on the concepts, theories and spaces that have been central to the making and remaking, imagining and reimagining of world politics. Revolution and resistance have been and continue to be pivotal to our understanding and analysis of international relations. From the eponymous revolutions in, inter alia, Haiti, Russia and Cuba to the critical feminist, de/anti-colonial and civil rights movements, they have been central to the formation of international order as we know it. Contemporary movements and moments, from uprisings in Algeria, Sudan and Venezuela to Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the Women's March Global, emphasise the continued relevance of revolution and resistance in the contestation of world politics. Although the theme encompassed a broad range of topics and approaches, we were particularly interested in points of tension within the study of revolution and resistance. What is the role of (non-)violence? Under what conditions may scholarship constitute resistance and how are the roles of scholar-activists constituted? Must revolutions be progressive? We asked participants to confront these and other questions in their papers for the conference and hosted a varied and insightful group of invited speakers to discuss and debate across two roundtables and three keynote sessions. This special issue is

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Recent works on 'uneven and combined development' (UCD) have focused on its contributions to the study of political economy and geopolitics, but they have yet to systematically address the cultural dimension of social changethe socially shared ideas by which people understand and act upon the world. The present article addresses this lacuna by applying the premises of UCD to the nineteenth-century emergence of Occidentalism: the idea of 'the West' as the dominant site of culture, civilisation and modernity. Against the problems of methodological internalism and Eurocentrism, I argue that the categories of unevenness and combined development provide critical entry points for an examination of the international construction of 'Western' identities and discourses during the late-nineteenth century imperial era. Specifically, I advance a theory of geocultural feedback which locates the constituting terms of those identities and discourses in a specific conjuncture of global unevenness: how the experience of 'relative backwardness' in late-industrialising societies translated into self-consciously 'Westernising' projects of catch-up development which destabilised prevailing conceptions of white European supremacy. In both the British and American empires, this historical dynamic produced a distinct pattern of cultural transformation: a reactive discourse of civilisational closure centred on the defence of 'the West.' 1. Introduction: the logic of culture and the logic of the international I am especially grateful to my supervisor, George Lawson, for his advice and support throughout the PhD from which this article arises. Thanks also to Justin Rosenberg, the editors of CRIA, and three anonymous reviewers for convening this special issue and providing invaluable comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Grace Benton and Lewis Bassett-Yerrell for their insightful comments on an earlier draft.

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