Mark Beissinger on Contemporary Urban Civic Revolutions

Mark Beissinger, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Mark Beissinger

Thanks, Justin.

jmk

Well, Mark, I was so impressed with your book. I was anticipating it for months and it did not disappoint. And It’s difficult sometimes in a book like yours that has so much theory and so much information and so much analysis to find a starting point.

But your book does start out with an account of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. And it’s really a part of the world that has drawn a lot of attention lately. Not to disappoint, but I don’t want to get into the current events of the moment. But I do think that your account of Ukraine’s Orange Revelation does bring to life the idea of this urban revolution, this modern revolution, if you will. Can we start there? Can you paint a picture of what exactly happened in Ukraine during the orange revolution and how the dynamics of the city helped to shape its outcome?

Mark Beissinger

Sure. Sure. So, I mean, the Orange Revolution came about, because of electoral fraud. But also because of the pervasive corruption of the Kuchma regime and the repressiveness of the Kuchma regime. So, those are the kinds of regimes that tend to be vulnerable to the contemporary urban revolutions. So, in the Orange Revolution, enormous numbers of people were assembled in a very short period of time. The entire revolution lasted 17 days. Upwards of one million people mobilized in the central square of Kiev, the Maidan, what’s known as independence square. So, that’s fairly typical of the contemporary, what I call urban civic revolutions which have become the dominant form of revolution around the world today. You concentrate very large numbers of people in a very short period of time in a central open space.

That contrasts with urban revolutions of the past where there was barricade fighting and armed rebellion. In fact, most urban revolutions up to 1985 were armed revolutions. It’s really only since 1985 that we’ve seen this power of numbers playing out as a revolutionary strategy. You know, you can look around the world at other revolutions. The Egyptian Revolution in 2011, very similar kind of pattern, you know, it lasted for 18 days. Millions mobilizing in Tahrir Square. Of course, there are other cities which are involved as well. And that was true in the orange revolution.

But one of the things about these kinds of revolutions is that they are very rapidly assembled. They differ from revolutions in the past in that people come together kind of on the spot. They are negative coalitions against the regime and really are fairly highly fragmented. So, it’s not surprising that in the case of the Orange Revolution actually the regime that was brought to power by the revolution fell apart within a relatively short period of time. And in fact, the forces against which the revolution mobilized came back to power. You know, you ended up with another revolution approximately ten years later over somewhat the same issues.

So, you know, you can contrast this kind of revolution also with the rural revolutions that were dominant in the middle of the 20th century. So, you know, contrast the Orange Revolution with say the Chinese Revolution of 1949. I mean, the Chinese Revolution involved revolutionaries going off to the countryside, fighting from inaccessible areas. In cities it was just simply too dangerous to engage in armed rebellion. The state was too strong, too dominant. So, they fought their struggle for 21 years from inaccessible areas and finally were able to capture cities. You know, another example would be the Taliban most recently fighting against the Afghan government. Again, you know, it took 22 years for the Taliban. They fought from the rough terrain of the Afghan countryside. So, there’s a very different pattern, these urban civic revolutions, than the revolutions of the past.

jmk

So, Mark, you made an interesting comment. You said that in the Chinese Revolution that they did not fight in the cities because it was too dangerous. And it’s a point that you echo throughout the book. In fact, you write, “Urban revolutions occur precisely where the coercive capacity of the state is strongest. They do not seek to hide from state power. Rather they confront state power directly.” It sounds exactly like what the Chinese were concerned about. It sounds incredibly dangerous.

Mark Beissinger

Yeah, well ultimately that’s what all revolutionaries want to capture, those nurse centers of power which are located in cities. So, it’s not only the case that revolutionaries are vulnerable to repression because that’s also where the state is strongest, where it has its coercive capacity concentrated. But it’s also the case that regimes are most vulnerable in cities. That’s exactly where their nerve centers are concentrated and what the revolutionaries want to capture. So, this is what I call the proximity dilemma in revolutions. There’s a trade-off that’s involved. The closer you are to the nerve centers of power, the more you’re able to disrupt them. But the more vulnerable you are also to the repressive capacities of the state. So, essentially over time, revolutionaries have had to figure out how to manage this. Regimes have also had to figure out how to manage this.

So, prior to, you know, the late 20th century, most urban revolutions were armed and they had a very low rate of success. Something like one out of every five were successful in these armed urban revolutions. And the reason was that the state had overwhelming coercive power in cities. It was less able to penetrate the countryside. But in cities that’s where, you know, their power really lay.

So, today urban revolutions don’t rely on the power of arms. They rely on the power of numbers. And that was not possible in the early 20th century. It was not possible, because cities were simply too small. In the early 20th century, there was something like nine cities with over a million people around the world. So, a small number of very large cities, whereas today there’s something like 516 cities with over a million people around the world. So, you can generate the kinds of numbers you need today, whereas in the early 20th century, you couldn’t. Arms were the only way really that urban revolutionaries could engage in taking on the state.

jmk

So, Mark, are you saying that the number of people involved in the protest is really more important than the percent of the population that is involved in the revolt?

Mark Beissinger

Yes, to some extent. I mean, if you look at successful revolutions, you look at what proportion of a population really participates in revolution and in successful revolutions it can range from maybe between 7% and 18%. So, it’s always a minority of people who participate in revolutions. Now that doesn’t mean that the revolutionaries didn’t have majority support within the population. In, you know, the cases that I looked at, they all did. But nevertheless, societies can be quite divided over revolutions and I don’t think it’s a matter of the percent of a population that’s involved. However, bringing to bear numbers in close proximity to the nerve centers of power is what’s critical. That kind of leverage that you can gain by concentrating them particularly in proximity to power.

jmk

I found this point really helpful, because Erica Chenowith has done some research that you cite in your book that there’s kind of a 4% rule. That if 4% of the population rises up in non-violent resistance that typically some form of transition to a different type of government occurs. But she found that there’s two clear exceptions to that. One of those two exceptions was actually in a very small island where they had more than 4% of the population rise up in resistance. And yet there wasn’t a regime transition in that scenario. And she’s not quite sure exactly why that didn’t happen, but it’s clear from your analysis that they just didn’t have the number of people.

And that we need to think about this in terms of not just the percentage of the population that rises up in non-violent resistance, but that people power really does depend on the number of people and that space itself matters a lot about where those people are assembling. I found that insight really helpful to better understand the hows and whys of the success of different nonviolent campaigns.

Mark Beissinger

Yeah. I think I want to emphasize, Justin, that it’s not just a matter of numbers. It’s more than just numbers, because how you use numbers is really critical. So, you can mobilize, you know, 4% of your population in a strike and not be able to dislodge a regime. Typically, what matters is using numbers in large open spaces that are visible. So, trying to leverage visibility, leverage visibility to the world, leverage visibility to your own population, and particularly to the sustaining coalition of a regime. So, those are the people that you’re trying to influence to get them to defect.

Space makes a big difference. How you use numbers in space and control over space. The ability to control space by a regime, irrespective of numbers or by the opposition is also really critical. So, there’s a contest that takes place in these revolutions as to who will control the public space. And that seems to be, you know, absolutely central to the outcomes that you find.

jmk

Yeah, I found that that was one of the key insights, if not the key insight in the book. You write in the book that, “Location matters enormously in revolution.” And just to bring that point home, I went through some other articles of some other cases of recent revolutions, civic urban revolutions. And one of the ones that I came across detailed an account of the Armenian revolution that happened not too long ago. And I want to read out a quote from it, because it really brings home the point that you’re making. It’s a little bit long, but I’m going to work my way through it.

The authors write, “It is interesting that when choosing the place for the evening meetings, he selected not the traditional Freedom Square, but Republic Square, again demonstrating that the “velvet revolution” was free from the influence of the Karabakh Movement. Though Freedom Square is located in the center of the city, it is quite isolated and protesters gathered there never hindered transport moving through nearby streets, whereas Republic Square opens onto six streets, which were de facto blocked during the rallies.”

And I read this quote, because I found that this insight that you’ve got really does permeate throughout different parts of the literature. That space really does matter, especially in these more recent revolutions. And we see it in Armenia and we can see it in lots of the other revolutions that have happened. I found that that was really insightful and starts to help explain why some of these revolutions that have massive numbers do succeed while others fail.

Mark Beissinger

Yeah, and one of the strategies that regimes use is controlling public space. So, they try to push revolutionary challenges, these urban civic revolutionary challenges, out of the central spaces of the city and into the suburbs, into the outskirts. They try to regulate space so that it can’t be used. In Putin’s regime, they created certain alternative places where the opposition could hold his rallies, but they were located far from the center of Moscow. It was a purposeful strategy aimed at trying to dislocate revolution. So, space is really central both to the revolutionaries as well as to regimes in terms of countering it.

jmk

Now to bring us back to the example of Ukraine. You mentioned that in the Orange Revolution that the revolt happened, the resistance happened, at the square that’s called the Maidan. And, of course, there was a second revolution that happened in 2014, again at the Maidan. Oftentimes, it seems that these same squares, these same places, start to take on symbolic value that then encourages the same exact revolution to occur at those same places. I’m curious why authoritarian regimes allow those monuments, those public squares to exist when they become symbols for future revolutions.

Mark Beissinger

Sometimes they don’t. There are occasions when authoritarian regimes have obliterated these spaces. The classic example is in Bahrain. The Pearl Revolution where the Pearl Monument was totally destroyed by the regime afterwards and it was fenced off. All images of the Pearl Roundabout were obliterated by the regime. So, there are examples in which regimes have attempted to get rid of them, but, you know, regimes love these monumental spaces. They use these monumental spaces to glorify the grandeur of the state and of the regime and to instruct citizens about their proper role within these regimes. They use them for ceremonies to glorify these regimes. So, in some ways they can’t live without these symbolic spaces. It’s not so easy just to get rid of them.

Some regimes, though they go to fairly large lengths to try to insulate their regime spatially from revolt. So, I mean, in Myanmar, of course, the capital was moved to Naypyidaw. The same in Kazakhstan moving to Astana, you know, attempts to move the nerve centers of government away from places where there’s a higher risk of popular revolt or even where there was popular revolt and it affected the regime in the past. So, that was the story in Myanmar. So, this politics of manipulating space in order to try to revolution proof, it is quite old. And it goes back to mid-19th century Paris, what was known as Haussmannization. In which the winding narrow streets of the working-class neighborhood which had been so propitious for building barricades, those neighborhoods were gotten rid of and broad boulevards and squares were created in their place.

So, the modern visage of Paris is basically the product of Haussmann’s work. So, that got rid of the problem of barricade fighting in Paris. But actually, that kind of politics creates the open spaces into which urban civic revolutions can possibly mobilize and that’s happened around the world. So, the creation of boulevards and parks and all sorts of squares, symbolic spaces for the regime, monuments, all of these have been the places that have attracted these revolts. And I should say the more symbolic the place, the better, because in using that symbolism, you can mobilize greater numbers.

jmk

So, different cities obviously have multiple public spaces that people could assemble in. You mentioned how in Russia, they would try to control which public spaces would have the protests to try to maximize the power of the state, maximize their leverage. What are those public spaces that are the most effective at bringing down an authoritarian regime?

Mark Beissinger

So, large open spaces in close proximity to the nerve centers of power tend to be the most effective. So, statistically the closer one of these urban civic revolts is to the executive’s office, the chief executive’s office, the president or whomever is the ruler of the country, the closer it is, the more likely it is to leverage victory. And it’s not so much, you know, that it has to be a square. It’s not so much that it has to necessarily have symbolism. These are all things that help and they can shape the types of tactics that are available to oppositions. But the most important thing is proximity, because that’s what really kind of leverages power over a regime.

jmk

Why would it matter, especially if the protest is non-violent? I mean, it’s a bunch of people getting together saying something needs to happen. But I would imagine that the leaders of the regime could just wait out the protest until people finally give up and leave. Why is it so effective for the resistance to happen so close to the regime?

Mark Beissinger

Yeah, sometimes they do wait it out. First of all and that’s increasingly one of the strategies that’s being used by regimes. Just wait it out. No matter what. But the issue is that the more people who mobilize, the more there are network connections between those who are out on the square and those who are in government. So, that generates pressure on those who are in the regime to identify with the challengers. So, that’s certainly one of the big things, but it’s also quite disruptive to, you know, a regime’s economy. It paralyzes administration, paralyzes the economy completely. So, you know, regimes can’t go through this indefinitely.

jmk

But you also note that these revolutions are incredibly short. They’re brief moments. They last in a matter of days, rather than the old social revolutions that took years. Why is it that the revolutions are so short and why is it that they can be so effective in such a brief amount of time?

Mark Beissinger

Yeah, they’re short, because neither side can tolerate too long of a revolution in an urban context. So, generally urban revolutions irrespective of whether it relies on the power of numbers or not, they tend to be very short. And historically, that was the case. Even before the rise of, you know, the strategy of using the power of numbers, they tended to be short, because states can’t tolerate this kind of disruption to their economy and administration over a prolonged period of time. And it takes an enormous amount of energy and effort to sustain this kind of rebellion within states, because of the disruption.

So, to give you an example, you know, when you have this kind of disruption, food begins to run out in the supermarkets. You can’t get money from your bank machines. They run out. People aren’t making any money through their businesses. Businesses have to close. They can’t operate in this situation. So, for those people who are involved, sustained mobilization tends to exhaust. That’s why, you know, one of the strategies of dictators increasingly has been just to wait it out, as you said. Wait it out no matter what and see what happens. I think that’s basically what happened in Belarus not too long ago. Just waited it out and eventually the protestors were able to tire. The crowds got smaller and then you can move in and repress.

jmk

So, I’ve largely been taking it for granted that these urban revolutions are non-violent. Why is it that so many of these urban revolutions become non-violent? Why is it that with these massive numbers of people that they don’t take up arms and just challenge the government forcefully? Because they have enormous numbers that are assembling in these places.

Mark Beissinger

Yeah. I like to call them unarmed rather than non-violent because sometimes there’s quite a bit of violence in the so-called non-violent revolutions. But they don’t take up arms, because really the state has the advantage once they take up arms and also taking up arms will reduce the number of people who are participating in the revolution. So, the violence tends to push out participation. And makes it much less likely that you could rely on the power of numbers. So, they’re outgunned and they also lose legitimacy once they do take up, arms. Revolutions generally have been, you know, involving fewer and fewer deaths over time. And that has occurred for, you know, a number of reasons.

But one of the reasons is that revolutionaries haven’t taken up arms and regimes also have been using non-lethal ways of trying to handle crowds, so-called non-lethal weapons for crowd control. You know, that differs enormously from the early 20th century where you had Calvary riding through crowds with their swords and sabers slashing at the crowds, troops shooting directly into crowds. That happens sometimes today. But it’s more the exception than the rule, whereas in the early 20th Century that was the rule.

So, regimes are much less likely to want to use force, because they’re scared about the backlash that can occur from using force in close proximity to the nerve centers of power. They don’t care about this off in the countryside where it’s not visible. Massacres are much more likely to occur off in the countryside where people can’t see what’s going on. But in the centers of cities when regimes shoot into crowds, it becomes much more problematic for them.

jmk

Backlash from whom though? Are we talking about backlash from the international community or are we talking about backlash from the people themselves or even backlash from the elites?

Mark Beissinger

I think they’re most concerned about backlash within their own populations. That is, you know, the shooting into crowds can really anger people and get people involved who might not have thought about being involved before. So, it can multiply participation in a big way. And often, you know, when you look at these episodes in detail, often the ways in which they get started is through regimes applying excessive force against crowds in ways that anger, you know, large numbers of people in the population who then start to mobilize. So, that kind of backlash in close proximity to centers of power is really dangerous for them. That’s been the incentive in some ways to use non-lethal weapons against these kinds of crowds, instead of just shooting into them.

jmk

So, do these urban revolutions, do they depend upon elite defections to be able to succeed in the past? I’ve read a lot of literature that really emphasizes the need for some people within the existing regime to defect to the side of revolutionaries.

Mark Beissinger

Yeah, they do. And certain types of regimes are more vulnerable to those types of defections than others. So, you know, during the post-Cold war period, there was a proliferation of hybrid regimes around the world. And those types of regimes, those hybrid regimes, ones which sort of mix elements of elections, some elements of democracy with dictatorship, they’re the most vulnerable to these urban revolutions. Somewhat less vulnerable are those types of dictatorships which are not hybrid, but more autocratic. But they’re still vulnerable. But at less of a probability of opposition victory. So, yeah. They do rely on defections. And often in some of these successful revolutions, contacts are made between opposition and elements of the regime before the revolution even takes place in order to try to facilitate that kind of defection.

This certainly happened in Serbia during the Bulldozer Revolution. It happened to some extent in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution. So, Yushchenko was in contact with the head of the secret police. In fact, at one of the meetings that he met with the head of the secret police that was the occasion for his infamous dioxide poisoning that left his face, so pockmarked. So, those kinds of strategies can often help to bring elements of the regime over and regimes that are a little more divided, less coherent are particularly vulnerable to those kinds of defections.

jmk

So, something that we haven’t touched on yet is the fact that revolutions today are much more successful than they have been in the past. In the book you write “In the early twentieth century, one would have expected to find a successful revolution approximately once every two years; by the early twenty-first century, successful revolutions occurred at a rate of two every year.” So, that’s a fourfold increase of successful revolutions. Why are revolutions more successful today than they were in the past?

Mark Beissinger

Well, I think there were a number of reasons why particularly in the Post-Cold War era, revolutions were successful. One is geopolitical. That is the United States played a critical role in providing support for oppositions against autocratic regimes. So, that’s certainly one aspect of it. Another is, I would say, the globalized character of the world today. That is it’s easier in some ways to bring leverage down upon a regime from outside than it was in the past and for revolutionaries to leverage external support. But, you know, I think also you have to credit to some extent the use of these tactics in the context of very large populations that are located close to the nerve centers of power.

So, one of the things I show in the book, for instance, is the growing concentration of a state’s population that lives in the capital city. I mean, it’s risen from something like 7% in 1900 to 19% today. I mean, more people are directly affected by the state, directly exposed to the state. And in repressive regimes and corrupt regimes these are the ones that are most vulnerable to disturbance. This urban civic pattern of revolution in those types of regimes bringing to bear numbers has become much easier and using numbers to defend against the repressive aspects of the regime. So, I think that explains to a large extent why revolutions today are more successful. However, most recently there’s been a decline in success. And I think this goes back to the point that we were talking about earlier.

Regimes are figuring out ways to try to counter the urban civic pattern of revolt. One is to wait them out. But they’re also now more and more using electronics to help support them. There was a period in time when the digital revolution was highly disruptive to regimes particularly in the early 2000s through, you know, I would say about 2015 or so. I think now things have begun to shift. States have been able to harness it much more to their own purposes, to be able to identify dissenters, to be able to prevent revolution. And you have, you know, this trend of smart cities which potentially could be an ominous sign for the ability to control out of control elites in authoritarian regimes.

jmk

But at the same time, democracy has really been in decline for a lot longer than just 2015. I mean, Freedom House tracks it back to 2006, 2007 when it started to find a noticeable decline in democracy. If revolutions have been so prevalent in the early 21st Century and it still remains more prevalent than they were in the 20th century, why hasn’t democracy seen some kind of rebound yet from what Larry Diamond calls the democratic recession?

Mark Beissinger

Well, part of it is that democratic revolutions haven’t proved necessarily to be so effective for democracy. You know, as I was mentioning before the regimes that come to power through urban civic revolutions, they don’t often last that long. Their durability is relatively weak. In addition, they tend to experience some significant problems. They inherit the state pretty much intact from the old regime rather than in, you know, Leninist terms, smashing it. And as a result of that, they end up having high levels of corruption. Actually, their levels of political and civil freedoms and rule of law and so on, they improve after revolution, but they’re still relatively far behind the average level of an electoral democracy minimally defined. So, you can’t put too much on revolution as the solution to the democracy problem.

There’s more to achieving a democracy than just carrying out a revolution. And, you know, these regimes come to power with enormous expectations, with the hopes raised of everyone, and invariably they’re bound to disappoint. So, achieving a democracy is a long-term process. I mean, revolution could be a step towards that, but the hard work comes after revolution and that’s really been the problem. So, yes, there’s been this decline. These urban civic revolutions have been becoming less effective over time. Also, as regimes have become much more repressive towards them and as technological change has happened and geopolitical change. So, the decline of American power, the rise of authoritarian powers, has also affected this process enormously.

jmk

Do you feel that these revolutions are really about democratization to begin with or are they about something else?

Mark Beissinger

They’re not about democratization per se as about containing corrupt predatory regimes. So, when you look, you know, at public opinion surveys of participants, which I do in the book, of participants in these revolutions, you see that actually, you know, the level of adherence to democratic values is pretty thin. But what people cite over and over again in terms of their desire to rid themselves of these regimes, the people who participate in these revolutions, what they cite is that they’re incensed. They’re incensed by the corruption, by the repression and so on. So, essentially what you have in these revolutions is what I call a negative coalition of people against repressive government, not for democracy.

That’s why what happens after revolution is so critical. That is, you have to build a democracy after revolution. You’ve pulled together these people in a very short period of time and they’re highly diverse in their public policy attitudes. They’re not socialized in any way to democracy. And I think one of the big mistakes that we’ve made about these revolutions is that we’ve tended to view the crowd through the lens of democracy rather than understanding that the crowd is quite varied and is there for varied reasons. And is there largely because it can’t tolerate this regime anymore. But it’s not necessarily there because of democracy.

jmk

Yeah, so many of these recent revolutions that have arose seem to be very much odd coalitions that are very much opposed to the leader for a variety of reasons. One great example is the opposition to Lukashenko over in Belarus. I mean, there was an article in the Journal of Democracy recently writing about the uprising and it emphasized that if the revolution had gone on for too long, the coalition was going to inevitably split, because they had so many disagreements. The one thing that they were able to agree on was the fact that Lukashenko, they wanted to see him go.

Mark Beissinger

Yeah, and, you know, in the digital age, this fragmentation of the opposition is accentuated. So, it’s very easy in the digital age to pull together diverse people in a negative coalition against a regime. I shouldn’t say easy, but it’s much easier, without any leadership sometimes, entirely without leadership. So, there’s relatively little coherence to these coalitions and it’s gotten worse over time. And that also tends to create an absence of strategizing, because there is nobody in control. More recently, it’s also created a tendency for some violence within the crowd, because established politicians within the opposition have no control over leaderless crowds. So, when you look at something like Euromaidan, a lot of the violence occurred from people who couldn’t be contained by opposition politicians. They viewed traditional opposition politicians as suspect.

So, there is a trend, as I was mentioning, you know, towards somewhat more violent, sort of riotous revolutions, a little bit away from the urban civic revolution or in combination with the urban civic revolution. And a lot of that has to do with, you know, these digitally led crowds or with increased repressiveness on the part of regimes.

jmk

I’d imagine that sometimes different factions within the elites can also manipulate the situation. The Idea that there’s so much going on that they can take advantage of opportunities in these moments. In Kazakhstan there’s been a little bit of talk that some of the violence that happened might’ve actually been manipulated by the current President. The revolt itself, the protest itself, was spontaneous, but some of the actions that have happened surrounding it might’ve somewhat been manipulated and become somewhat conflicts between the elites. So, there’s a lot of dynamics that I imagine are going on in some of these revolutions.

Mark Beissinger

Yeah, I think, that’s true. You know, it’s also the case that regimes are not unhappy when things turn in a violent direction, because it justifies their ability to repress in whatever way is necessary. So, once crowds start to move in a violent way, regimes can start to think about shooting into crowds in ways that they might not, if it were non-violent. So, there is this sort of elite competition that can play into it. But I think it’s also the case that regimes are looking for ways, particularly in a case like Kazakhstan, where there had been so much mobilization taking place, they’re looking for ways to try to demobilize people. And violence is one of the ways which justifies it.

jmk

So, you mentioned earlier that rural rebellions, rural revolutions, do still exist. One example you brought up was the Taliban that has recently retaken Afghanistan and was fighting from the countryside before they moved into the cities. But at the same time, we’ve been emphasizing how these urban civic revolutions are much more successful more often. Are there any advantages that a rural rebellion, rural revolution, has over an urban revolution?

Mark Beissinger

Sure. They hide from state power. Particularly in states that can’t penetrate their own territory or have rough terrain that allows them to escape the coercive capacities of the state and live to fight another day. But at the same time, they lack the ability to leverage, you know, the disruption directly on cities. So often in civil war, life in cities can go on normally for years and years and years during a civil war without the violence that’s taking place in the countryside affecting it. And yet, you know, the rural rebels, ultimately their goal, is to capture cities. It’s not to hang out in the countryside.

Rural rebellions unfold over a very long period of time. In urban revolutions, they occur so quickly. That the likelihood of mistakes is quite high. When you look at accounts of urban revolutions, you see both regimes and oppositions making mistake after mistake. Because things move so fast in those revolutions and people can’t keep up with what’s going on. Now in rural revolutions, you know, rural revolutionaries make mistakes too.

The classic example that I like to give is Castro’s Granma invasion of Cuba in which, you know, the boat leaked and so he had to abandon it like 15 kilometers away from where it was intended to be landed. And one of the people was an informer. And so, he was immediately attacked and they lost most of their weapons. The group was largely wiped out with the exception of, you know, a handful of people. They tried to make their way to the mountains, but Che Guevara guided them by the wrong star. He thought he was looking at the North Star, but he wasn’t. But they eventually made it to the mountains and they eventually won.

So, rural revolutions are forgiving. The distance that’s there provides a buffer for revolution as it does for regimes. That’s why these revolutions last so long. That’s one of the advantages, I guess you could say, you know, of rural revolution is that you can make mistakes and you can get away with it.

jmk

So, Mark, one of the hallmarks though of a social revolution is that they’re usually extremely resilient. They have a clear map of what it is that they want to accomplish. And so, they typically last a long time and are successful in accomplishing the objectives that they set for themselves. We look at the Russian Revolution, the Soviet’s stayed in power for an incredibly long time. The Cubans have stayed in power far longer than we expected. Yet these urban civic revolutions, even though that they’re more successful, don’t seem to last as long. Has something been lost as we’ve moved revolutions from the countryside into the cities?

Mark Beissinger

Yeah, I think the revolutionary process has become somewhat less consequential in some ways. The ability to bring about substantive change in the wake of revolution has deteriorated for one thing. We’ve gained certain things as well. I mean, revolutions are no longer as violent as they once were. They’re more frequent than they once were, almost more normal in terms of being part of the political landscape in a way that they were not in the past. But they also are not able to bring about the kind of substantive change that people are hoping for out of revolution. And, you know, the post-revolutionary situation for governance is one of the most complicated that any government can face, because the hopes of people are raised to a pitch fever.

Economies almost invariably suffer after revolutions. There’s very little that you can do about that. In these urban civic revolutions, the direct impact on the economy is relatively minimal, but over time you get a kind of stagnating economic growth that occurs largely because of persistent corruption within the economy. And, you know, the inability to deal with the problems that brought about revolution in the first place. So, there are definite costs to the urban civic model which is, you know, one of the themes that I try to bring out in the book.

jmk

So, in western democracies we’ve seen a real tension between urban communities and rural communities. We see it most obviously in the United States where the electoral model really pits cities against the countryside. A recent book by Jonathan Rodden really emphasized that, his book, Why Cities Lose. But we also see it in authoritarian regimes where in Russia, the urban civic centers have a bigger demand for change than the countryside. Like Vladimir Putin’s strongest support is purportedly in the countryside today. When we have these urban civic revolutions, is there still a tension that exists between the urban communities and the countryside or is the countryside sympathetic to the revolutionary aspirations of the people in the urban civic centers?

Mark Beissinger

Well, the countryside tends to be much less actively involved in these revolutions and more likely to be apathetic or if they do sympathize, they tend not to participate or aid. So, after these revolutions, you know, that’s a little harder to say that there’s a single pattern. But, you know, if we take a case like Egypt, you know, the rural population was more likely to support Mubarak than it was likely to support the opposition. And so, how that played into the Egyptian counter revolution, I can’t say because there were a lot of other things that were taking place. But yeah, that urban-rural divide doesn’t go away necessarily because of revolution.

You know, one of the things about these revolutions is that I call them urban civic, but they do kind of mobilize a kind of civic nationalism that’s meant to pull as many people together as possible. And that’s not just oriented toward urban people. It’s oriented towards anyone who would participate, including rural people. In the case of Ukraine, for instance, there was a definite regional dimension to participation and rural people did participate in the revolution, because of that regional divide. But not in the numbers that you found for urban participants. You know, democracies are, as we know, under challenge today and traditionally democracies have not been vulnerable to revolutions. That’s been one of the basic propositions of the field of revolutions. Democracies don’t experience revolutions. But that could be changing gradually as democracies become mired in polarization as right-wing populism continues to grow.

We just don’t know to what extent revolution is going to be changing and the types of states that will be vulnerable to it. Democracies traditionally haven’t experienced revolutions. Because why engage in revolution, if you can wait to throw out the opposition at the ballot box? So, democracies depend on patience. If you don’t have patience to wait for the next election, then this immunity to revolution will erode.

jmk

You know, Mark, there’s a brilliant line in your book where you write, “When it comes to revolution, the future is never the past.” And a real takeaway that I took from your book was not that revolution has become a civic urban phenomenon, but that revolution is always changing. That authoritarian leaders are learning from past failures. That revolutionaries are learning from both successes and failures. And it’s a game that constantly changes and transforms. And like you said, democracy may not be immune from it one day. And it’s possible maybe we have revolutions where democracy becomes more democratic or becomes less democratic. We don’t know what that might become. It’s a fascinating question for us to think about. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been an excellent conversation. I loved the book.

Mark Beissinger

Great. Well, I’m glad. And it’s been a pleasure.

Key Links

The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion by Mark Beissinger

Learn more about Mark Beissinger at Princeton University

Learn more about Mark Beissinger at Wikipedia

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Erica Chenoweth on Civil Resistance

George Lawson on Revolution

More Episodes from the Podcast

More Information

Democracy Group

Apes of the State created all Music

Email the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.com

Follow on Twitter @DemParadox

100 Books on Democracy