Anatomies of Revolution

Lawson, George

doi:10.1017/9781108697385

Cited by 124 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 301 publications

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“…by reference to intentional actions” (1993:10), and Goldstone's (:139) argument that, in addition to structure, revolutionary theory should “incorporate leadership, ideology, and processes of identification with revolutionary movements as key elements in the production of revolution.” A similar challenge can be made to Allinson's (: 143) suggestion that his new generation of theorists are distinguished by no longer considering revolution to be “a discrete event, capable of being situated on a continuum between social and political change and correlated with the presence or absence of other pre‐existing factor[s].” Allinson instead claims that they have opted for a relational approach to the phenomenon. This is quite a peculiar claim, as the relational approach to which Allinson alludes was considered the defining leap made by “a new fourth generation of scholarship on revolutions and collective action,” (Emirbayer & Goodwin, : 374) and it has proven to be an agenda to which fourth‐generation theorists have consistently returned to over the past three decades (Emirbayer & Goodwin, ; Parsa, ; Goodwin, ; Goldstone, ; Lawson, , , ).…”

Section: No Fifth Generation Yetmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Fifth Generation of Revolutionary Theory is Yet to Come

Abrams¹

2019

J Historical Sociology

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Despite revolution's recent return to the world stage, the progress of revolutionary theory has markedly stalled. While some have argued that recent work on the 2011 Arab Spring constitutes a new, misguided 'fifth generation' of theory, I show this claim to be misplaced, demonstrating the remarkable continuity between foundational fourth-generation scholarship and present-day analyses.Furthermore, I critically analyse the theoretical, methodological and professional obstacles which fourth-generation theory has encountered, concluding that scholars must move beyond the fourth generation if we are to surmount them. Finally, I consider the theoretical, methodological and ethical prospects of a true fifth generation of revolutionary theory. ***** It would be hard to call oneself a revolutionary theorist without acknowledging the importance of overturning old paradigms. It is in this regard that Jaime Allinson (2019) most certainly carried forward some revolutionary energy in his recent endeavour to prove that a fifth generation of revolutionary theory has come and passed. † In his article for the Journal of Historical Sociology, Allinson engages with three books which he claims belong to a new generation of theory: Asef Bayat's, (2017) Revolution without Revolutionaries; Donatella Della Porta's (2016) Where did the Revolution Go?; and Daniel Ritter's (2015) The Iron Cage of Liberalism. He uses these books as core evidentiary markers for his proposed new generation, and deploys a series of insightful critiques to build a case for rejecting it altogether.In what follows, I advance an alternative hypothesis, contending that our problems instead lie with an overly-long fourth generation of theory, from which the field has so-far failed to evolve. I show Allinson's central claim to be ultimately misplaced, and that his critiques more readily apply to the tail-end of fourth-generation revolutionary theory. I then move to consider why this generation of revolutionary theory has encountered so much trouble since its inception in the early 1990s (Foran, 1993), and argue that we are currently experiencing its death throes. Finally, in light of the anticipated downturn of the fourth generation of revolutionary theory, I offer some ambitions and speculative suggestions for a true fifth generation of revolutionary theory, one that is yet to come. suite of fleeting revolutionaries who neither knew who their 'leaders' were, nor, in fact, whether they had any?Many of today's revolutions neither resemble the classical revolutions of the past, nor those of the non-violent post-Soviet wave. They are, as Allinson, (2019:148) rightly notes, often "restricted to the momentary," easily crushed, and particularly vulnerable to counter-revolution. This, in many ways, is their identifying feature: while the past generation of revolutions were characterised by their non-violence, newer revolutions have been characterised by their fragility (we could even collectively call them the 'fragile revolutions'). Some scholars have even deemed them so ...

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Section: No Fifth Generation Yetmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Fifth Generation of Revolutionary Theory is Yet to Come

Abrams¹

2019

J Historical Sociology

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“…This cultural turn in the study of revolutions has been balanced by other new perspectives which aim to go beyond structuralism and culturalism. Hence, Lawson (2016Lawson ( , 2019 develops a relational approach which shows that revolutions are not standardized phenomena with stable and immutable features but are highly contingent, erratic, and historically framed "entities in motion." This approach moves away from the conventional, mostly essentialist and substantialist, views and advocates a process-oriented analysis that views revolutions as intersocietal phenomena shaped by external geopolitical forces, internal politics, social inequalities, and status disparities.…”

Section: Revolutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the more recent revolutions rely less on clandestine movements, they also forge emotional and social ties between revolutionaries that are later used as a springboard for building strong political alliances and even new political parties. This has been the experience of the color revolutions on the early 2000s, the Tunisian Jasmine Spring of 2011, and the Ukrainian Euromaidan of 2014 (Lawson 2019;Foran 2005).…”

Section: Revolutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wars, revolutions, genocides, uprisings, rebellions, riots, clandestine political violence, and many other forms of organized violent action have been the defining drivers of social change and have ultimately created the contemporary world. Wars have played a decisive role in transforming empires and patrimonial kingdoms into nation-states (Wimmer 2013), revolutions have inaugurated variety of modern social orders and have contributed to the development of democracy (Lawson 2019, Moore 1966, and genocides have impacted on the global institutionalization and standardization of human right regimes (David 2020), while the proliferation of the clandestine political violence has transformed security systems and has increased coercive capacities of modern states (Mann 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Organized Violence and Historical Sociology

Olsson

Malešević

2022

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences

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This chapter briefly reviews and analyzes the key contributions on organized violence within historical sociology. It explores both the macro-and micro-level studies that have influenced recent debates within the field. The first section looks at war and warfare, the second section analyzes the clandestine political violence, the third section explores the revolutions, and the final section engages with the scholarship on genocides.

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“…2 The question arose again for western powers after the French Revolution. 3 During the twentieth century, Russian Red Army leaders debated how best to support revolutions abroad in what Lenin regarded as a global civil war against supporters of the anticommunist White Army. 4 And Cold-War western interference abroad prompted Michael Walzer's return to Mill in response to US involvement in Vietnam's civil war.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assisting Rebels Abroad: The Ethics of Violence at the Limits of the Defensive Paradigm

Finlay

2020

J Applied Philosophy

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In this article, I analyse the theory and practice of interventions in foreign civil wars to assist rebels fighting against violently oppressive government. I argue that the indirect nature of this kind of intervention gives rise to political complications that are either absent from or less obvious in humanitarian interventions aimed chiefly at defending human rights from imminent threats. An adequate theory must therefore accommodate three additional components. First, it requires a theory of indirect warfare accounting for how the ends of the interveners’ added violence relate to those of the rebels’ violence. Second, it requires a theory of indirect political leadership, paying careful attention both to the political status of the rebel leaders vis‐à‐vis the people on whose behalf they fight and to the relationship between those leaders and the interveners. Third, the peculiarities of indirect military intervention mean that the violence it introduces isn’t easily explained purely in terms of defensive goals. An adequate account needs additionally to pay attention to the role of violence in shaping new political movements and institutions. The value of such goals is less easily quantified than those of humanitarian intervention, making it harder to set upper limits on permissible ‘proportionate’ harm.

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Anatomies of Revolution

Cited by 124 publications

References 301 publications

A Fifth Generation of Revolutionary Theory is Yet to Come

A Fifth Generation of Revolutionary Theory is Yet to Come

Organized Violence and Historical Sociology

Assisting Rebels Abroad: The Ethics of Violence at the Limits of the Defensive Paradigm

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