The Generations of Revolutionary Theory Revisited: New Works and the Evolution of Theory

The Critique of the Third Generation

I mark the emergence of a new generation of theories of revolution by being able to point to a set of works that embody a clearly different approach to the study of revolutions, with a different focus, definition, and analytical approach than the prior generation. But that does not mean that these are the most important works in the study of revolutions, nor that other works—specifically those providing critiques, new elements, or new cases—are not major, fundamental contributions. For example, in the identification of Third-Generation theories of revolution, I pointed to books by Theda Skocpol (1979), Kay Ellen Trimberger (1978), S.N. Eisenstadt (1978), and Jeffrey Paige (1975). Today, only Skocpol’s book is widely regarded as a major classic in the field. Moreover, the First-Generation work of Crane Brinton is still regarded as a classic, fundamental contribution and continues to guide and inspire current works. I hope that my own major book on revolutions, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (2016) made significant contributions, noting that early modern revolutions and rebellions occurred in global waves in the 17th and 19th centuries, using demographic change as a causal feature, and pointing to ideological differences to explain different outcomes. But that book did not arrive as part of a cluster of works laying out a clearly different focus and analytical approach, so I would not classify it as marking a new ‘generation’.

Rather, the period from 1980 to 2020 was marked by the emergence of a large number of books and articles that suggested alternative approaches, showed attention to different kinds of cases, and argued for the incorporation of additional elements in the explanation of revolutions. At the mid-point of this period, I had suggested that this critical work pointed ‘Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory’ (Goldstone, 2001); but, as Lawson (2016: 110) also suggested more recently, this catalog of flaws and desirable additions and new directions to revolutionary theory was less a new generation per se than ‘an agenda [for Fourth Generation theory] to be fulfilled’.

Perhaps more importantly, this period was also marked by events that called for substantially new approaches. First, the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 marked the return of a type of revolution that was not paid much attention in the Second- or Third-Generation theories, namely, the religious revolution. Indeed, initially some commentators were reluctant to call the overthrow of the Shah’s regime and its replacement with a theocratic republic a ‘revolution’ at all, because ‘revolutions’ had come to be seen as secular and progressive, while the displacement of a modernizing dictatorship by regime of religiously conservative clerics was dismissed as a return to a ‘medieval’ framework, reminiscent of the Mahdist and millennial movements a thousand years earlier. However, religious revolutions have long been a part of the modern revolutionary tradition, including the Protestant Netherlands revolt against Catholic Spain, the Calvinist revolutions in Scotland and Geneva, the Puritan Revolution in England (with its antecedent Presbyterian revolt in Scotland), the religious wars in France, the Bohemian revolt, and the many Irish Catholic revolts leading to the Irish War of Independence in 1916–1921. Moreover, the Islamic Revolution in Iran did not remain an isolate; instead, conservative Islamist revolutionary movements and regimes arose across the Middle East and North Africa, including the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Within the Third-Generation works, Eisenstadt had given revolutionary ideology a major role; but Skocpol, whose work became the dominant face of the Third-Generation theories, explicitly denied such a role for ideology, arguing that relations among states, elites, and economic classes (e.g. claiming that the Russian Revolution had a working-class base, and the Chinese Revolution had a peasant base) determined the onset and outcomes of major social revolutions. The spread of explicitly religious revolutions and revolutionary movements in the late 20th and early 21st centuries thus posed a challenge.

Second, there was a proliferation of non-violent, pro-democratic ‘color’ revolutions, from the Yellow Revolution in the Philippines in 1986 to the revolutions that overthrew communism in Eastern Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1989–1991 and created over a dozen new states, followed by similar revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia from 2003 to 2018. These events posed a problem for analysts who had focused on major social revolutions and peasant wars; some even argued that they should not be called revolutions at all, because they were mainly non-violent. Yet again, if one looked at history clearly, urban-centered non-violent revolutions were also a major part of the revolutionary tradition, from the French Revolution of 1830 and several of the Revolutions of 1848 to the Russian November Revolution of 1917, in which the Bolsheviks seized power from the Provisional Government through a middle-of-the-night seizure of key government, rail, and postal offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Timothy Garten Ash (1990), Adam Roberts (1991), and myself (Goldstone, 1993) were among those who began to refer to the anti-communist uprisings as the ‘Revolutions of 1989–1991 in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe’. The distinguished Russian economists Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya (2001) were perhaps the first to explicitly argue that these events should be viewed as part of the same lineage as the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. In 2006, leading scholars of communism contributed to a special issue of Communist and Post-Communist Studies on ‘Democratic Revolutions in Post-Communist States’ (e.g. Bunce and Wolchik, 2006; D’Anieri, 2006; Hale, 2006). By 2010, there was hardly any dissent from labeling the Iranian and Afghan and Eastern European and Soviet abrupt regime changes as ‘revolutions’. This meant dozens of new cases had arisen that were largely outside the attention and explanatory framework of the Third-Generation theories.

Third, in the years 2010–2011 a series of revolts erupted across North Africa and the Middle East. Starting with the non-violent overthrow of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt, revolutions spread to Libya, Syria, and Yemen, where they gave rise to classic revolutionary civil wars. These events showed that despite the spread of color revolutions, violent revolutions with brutal military conflicts between regimes and their opponents still occurred. In addition, both the nonviolent and violent Arab uprisings involved Islamist groups as major contenders for power, reinforcing the importance of religious ideology. Finally, these events powerfully reminded scholars that revolutions have historically arisen in waves of spreading ideas and tactics against regimes with similar vulnerabilities (Beck, 2011). These included the Calvinist revolutions of the 16th century, the ‘global crisis’ of the 17th century with revolutions across Europe from 1640 to 1660; the ‘Atlantic Revolutions’ of the 18th century; and the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The first three generations had regarded this characteristic of revolutions as incidental, generally treating each revolution as a separate ‘case’, even if impacted by international events. Yet the Arab Spring unfolding before their eyes forced scholars to see that revolutions are usually linked, cross-national events. For example, historians now usually treat the revolutions in America, Haiti and France as inextricably linked, with ideas and events from each flowing to and shaping politics in each other (Popkin, 2019).

Trends in the scholarship of revolutions reacted somewhat slowly to these events (Abrams, 2019; Beck, 2017). However, many significant works challenged the adequacy of Third-Generation theories to explain the variety and complexity of revolutions. To list only a few (with my apologies to those scholars whose work, for reasons of space, is not mentioned here):

The Emergence of a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory

From roughly 2011 to 2022, building on these critiques and driven by events, a truly distinct approach to the theory of revolutions emerged. This view had the following tenets:

The books listed at the outset of this essay exemplify one or more of these points in their comparative approaches to revolutions. In my view, they mark a crest in what is now clearly a new generation of revolutionary theory.

I would argue that the Fourth Generation began with a cluster of books that explicitly treated the non-violent regime changes through mass mobilization in Eastern Europe and elsewhere (the ‘color revolutions’) as true revolutions. These were books by Sharon Erickson Nepstad (2011), Daniel P. Ritter (2014) and Donatella Della Porta (2016). All used the traditional comparative case study method, but turned it to the study of nonviolent revolutions. Nepstad paired successful cases (the collapse of communism in East Germany, the ousting of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile and the Philippines’ ‘People’s Revolution’ that drove Marcos from power) with failures (the Tiananmen Square revolt against the Communist Party in China, the revolts against Panama’s military dictator Noriega, and the Kenyan mass protests against President Moi). These were selected from 35 cases of identified nonviolent revolutionary movements from 1978 to 2011, to illustrate both success and failure in movements targeting party, military, and personalist regimes. In her analysis, Nepstad argues that the causes of nonviolent revolutions, and their success or failure, were much the same as in violent revolutions, namely that a combination of structural grievances and a culture of rebellion underlay the outbreak of revolution, and whether or not there were military defections and international intervention determined their success. What was novel in Nepstad’s book was thus not a new theory of revolutions, but rather demonstrating that the theory of revolutions, with attention to the culture of rebellion and the role of international intervention, also applied to non-violent efforts at regime change; thus the latter should surely be included in the scope of ‘revolutions’.

Ritter examined efforts at regime change in the Middle East, from the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 to the Arab uprisings of 2010–2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Calling them ‘unarmed revolutions’, Ritter’s book was novel in treating international relationships as the central and decisive factor in such revolutions’ success. He argued that unarmed revolution could only succeed against a dictatorial regime if the latter’s hands were tied in regard to how it could use its repressive forces against the protestors. What most effectively tied the dictators’ hands was a heavy reliance on the support of a powerful democratic regime. Thus, the Shah of Iran, Ben Ali in Tunisia, and Mubarak in Egypt had their hand stayed by the influence of their patrons in the West; while Iran in 2009, Ghaddafi in Libya, and Assad in Syria had no such reliance on Western patrons and could marshal their forces to crush the opposition. Of those three, only Ghaddafi lost power, because after he had sent his forces to slaughter the opposition in Benghazi, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervened to avoid a massacre and provided air support to the opposition. In Syria and Bahrain, by contrast, the intervention of non-democratic allies (Russia and Saudi Arabia, respectively) was critical to helping the targeted regimes survive.

Della Porta’s book was important for dealing with the revolutions against communism and the Arab Spring together, treating them all as cases of revolutions that were distinct from the ‘Great Revolutions’ but nonetheless crucial in changing the nature of regimes. As Allinson (2019: 146) observes, her book ‘blurr[s] the boundaries between revolution, social movement, and democratic transition . . . disaggregating revolution-as-entity into revolution-as-process, and unsettling the line between a “failed” and “successful” revolution’.

If these books cemented the importance of non-violent revolutions as indeed revolutionary events, another three books took other lessons of the critique of Third-Generation theory to heart and crafted new treatments of revolutions: those listed at the head of this essay by Lawson, Bailey Stone, and Goldstone.

Lawson presents an eclectic set of cases, both violent and nonviolent: England in the 17th century, Chile, Cuba, South Africa and Iran in the 20th century, and Ukraine in the 21st. He points to three common elements in the emergence of a revolutionary situation: changes in inter-social relations (similar to the structural elements of Third-Generation theories), the vulnerability of personalist rulers, and a conjuncture of disruptive economic, political and symbolic forces impinging from the international arena. Lawson examines the shifting relations among all these elements as shaping revolutionary emergence, fully adopting the ‘relational’ approach and applying it to the explanation of revolutions. Lawson also powerfully makes the argument that international forces are not ‘additional’ to other factors but interwoven with the causes, trajectories, and outcomes of revolutions ‘all the way down’. He further argues that revolutionary trajectories and outcomes have to be treated separately from the onset of revolutionary situations, as both trajectories and outcomes are contingent, driven by leadership, the mobilization of varied groups, and the always critical international milieu. Lawson had pioneered the analysis of ‘negotiated’ outcomes of revolutions (Lawson, 2017), which feature here in South Africa and Chile; but this book shows how a wide variety of possible revolutionary outcomes, from democracy to dictatorship, can develop.

Stone, alone among Fourth-Generation theorists, focuses exclusively on events in the Great Social Revolutions in England, France and Russia. However, he makes their treatment seem new by forging a ‘neostructuralist’ approach. Historians had made a rather Manichean shift in their studies of revolutions, lurching from a highly materialist, structuralist approach rooted in Marxism, to a ‘cultural turn’ that was dismissive of materialist analysis and focused almost entirely on the role of ideas, cultures, and symbols in revolutionary discourse. Stone brilliantly works to overcome this dichotomy and creates an approach to key elements of the revolutionary process in Europe—the attack on feudal institutions, the role of urban and business interests, the execution of kings, episodes of revolutionary terror, and the consolidation of post-revolutionary regimes—in a way that balances the role of structural and cultural/symbolic forces. Stone moves theories of revolution firmly beyond the ‘either/or’ of structural versus cultural explanations, and shows that a full explanation of the origins, course, and outcomes of revolutions requires both.

Finally, my brief survey of revolutions has many sharp divergences from the Third Generation. First, I break sharply from the Third Generation by incorporating an ideological element directly within the definition of revolution (p. 4):

We can therefore best define revolution in terms of both observed mass mobilization and institutional change, and a driving ideology carrying a vision of social justice. Revolution is the forcible overthrow of a government through mass mobilization (whether military or civilian or both) in the name of social justice, to create new political institutions.

Second, I treat revolutions as brought on by a combination of structural, ideological, and contingent elements, and devote a chapter to the role of revolutionary processes, leaders, and diverse outcomes. Third, I include as revolutions a broad range of events, grouped not as ‘Great’ or social versus political revolutions, but by broad characteristics and temporality. Thus, the cases examined include the overthrow of the Roman Republic, the medieval Italian city-state revolutions, the constitutional revolutions in colonial America and Meiji Japan, the communist revolutions in Russia, China, and Cuba, color revolutions in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and the Arab Revolutions as examples of ‘revolutions’.

This brings us to the discussion of the other recent books listed at the head of this essay. If any one book incorporates all the key tenets of the Fourth Generation into a single, powerful new approach, it is Mark Beissinger’s The Revolutionary City. This remarkable book is based on statistical analysis of a new data set of revolutionary episodes, both successes and failures, from 1900 to 2014. These events are classified by their location (mainly urban or rural), their goals (independence, social revolution, constitutional revolution, Islamist, or changing ethnic group status), tactics (armed uprisings, coups, strikes, demonstrations, civil resistance) and outcomes (success or failure in changing the regime). Beissinger clearly shows that while rural-based, social revolutions dominated the middle of the 20th century, in recent decades these have declined in frequency, while the number of urban revolutions, where the primary tactic is nonviolent protests in cities, often involving the occupation of central public squares or other symbolic urban spaces, has dramatically increased, becoming by far the most prevalent form of revolutionary episode. Moreover, he shows how this transition reflects changes not only in the domestic but also the international sphere, so that ‘the international and the transnational have been deeply implicated in the fabric of revolutionary practice’ (p. 57). Beissinger’s model of the onset of urban revolutionary episodes mainly confirms the findings of political scientists and scholars who had pointed out the vulnerability of personalist regimes. He writes: ‘Middle income non-democracies with repressive, highly corrupt regimes whose leaders had been in power for a long time were particularly vulnerable to urban civic revolt’ (p. 115). More interesting is that, like Chenoweth and Stephan and Nepstad, he also finds that non-violent urban civic revolts were more successful—in fact they were twice as likely to succeed, with a 59% success rate for urban civic revolutionary episodes versus 29% for rural social revolutionary episodes (p. 157).

Beissinger also pays attention to the importance of revolutionary waves, even quantifying it: revolutions that occurred within a transnational wave of revolutions had a success rate of 51%, compared with 31% for those outside of such waves (p. 167). Nonetheless, Beissinger also grants considerable sway to contingency, noting that ‘Despite the strengths and weaknesses that both sides bring with them into revolutionary contention, the directions in which these intensified periods of interaction evolve are fundamentally unpredictable’ (p. 2014). Beissinger affirms a number of insights of prior work on revolutions as he probes multiple cases, arguing that elite defections are critical to success, that growing momentum is more important than the number or size of demonstrations, and that the symbolic and ideological themes crucial for mobilization are usually targeted at the flaws and failures of the existing regime, rather than focused on a shared ideal future.

Beissinger further examines the outcomes of revolutions, and finds that (1) successful social revolutions often achieve improvements in societal inequality and provide stability, but they do so at a steep cost: they tend to implant strong dictatorships that use a high degree of violence in social control. By contrast (2) successful civic revolutions tend to bring improvements in rule of law and civil liberties, but often do no better at improving the economy and are more prone to subsequent political instability (2022: 414–415).

The first finding is explored at great length by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, who develop a detailed theory of the durability of post-revolutionary regimes. Their book is rich in case studies, yet about half is in an appendix that conducts a statistical analysis to test their conclusions. Reviewing survival data for 355 autocracies since 1900, and controlling for a variety of other factors, they find a substantial and significant reduction in the risk of regime failure for regimes that came to power in social revolutions. They show that radical regimes that sought major social revolutionary changes and thus faced powerful counter-revolutionary challenges but survived them to consolidate power become ‘durable authoritarian’ regimes that survive for many decades. What is striking about Levitsky and Way’s book, and marks it as a Fourth-Generation contribution, is its treatment of revolutionary outcomes as contingent on events within the process of revolution, rather than on the class or other structuralist basis. Moreover, their approach, combining case studies with large-N statistical analysis, departs from the Third Generation as well.

Megan Stewart also examines revolutionary state-building, but with a wholly different approach than Skocpol’s Third-Generation analysis. Whereas Skocpol treated revolutionary state-building as structurally determined by the class base of the revolution’s leaders, Stewart treats it as a contingent choice by those leaders, often influenced by imitation and diffusion of revolutionary models from other states, particularly the social transformation model promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. Like Levitsky and Way, Stewart backs her argument by combining case studies with large-N statistical analysis. Most striking is that her cases are not revolutions per se; rather they are revolutionary movements in Eritrea, Sudan, Lebanon and East Timor. The case studies and statistical analysis show that revolutionary state-building is neither governed by existing social structures nor by group ideologies; rather what matters are the goals of a revolutionary movement. When those goals aim at social transformation, the movement adopts actions and lessons to implement those goals, even from movements with varying ideologies (i.e. jihadist or communist).

Since so many of the color revolutions occurred in the Soviet Union, its former Warsaw Pact partners, and its post-Soviet successor states, it is interesting to see a Russian perspective on modern revolutions. The Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century is a product of a collaboration between myself and Andrey Korotayev and Leonid Grinin, two of the leading scholars of revolutions working in Russia today. The Handbook provides 18 case studies of revolutions of the 21st century, written by both Russian and Western experts, and includes a number of cases not usually covered, such as the Armenian revolution of 2018, civic protest movements in sub-Saharan Africa, the Gülen movement in Turkey, the revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, the ‘Moldovan Spring’ and Iranian Green Movement of 2009, and the Arab Spring in Yemen. In addition, it has over a dozen essays comparing aspects of revolutions across history. In particular, this volume gives in-depth coverage to many of the themes critical to the Fourth Generation of revolutionary theory: Several chapters by the editors examine the typology and evolution of revolutions, embracing a wide variety of types of contentious events (listing 87 revolutionary episodes of various types from 2000 to 2021). A chapter by Dmitriy Karasev examines the problem of structure and agency; and five chapters by Nikolai S. Rozov, Vladislav Tsygankov, and Leonid and Anton Grinin offer studies of revolutionary waves from the 16th through the 19th century, while chapters by Eric Selbin, Lincoln Mitchell, and the editors examine the post-communist and Arab Spring revolutions as dynamic waves. There are also chapters by Christopher Chase-Dunn and collaborators on the web of transnational social movements and world revolutions. In sum, in addition to providing by far the most comprehensive guide to the revolutions of the last 20 years, the volume makes clear that revolutions are linked transnationally and, in turn, transform the international system. Whereas, following the Second- and Third-Generation theories of revolution, which tied revolutions to modernization or to social and political conflicts in agrarian systems, there was serious speculation that the era of revolutions was over (Goodwin, 2001), Beissinger’s volume and this Handbook make it clear that in fact revolutions have become even more frequent in the 21st century; they have just changed. In the words of Beissinger, ‘Revolution has not died. It has evolved’ (p. 418).

Many of those changes were made manifest by the revolutions that swept that Arab world in 2010–2011 and that today, a dozen years later, have given rise to varied outcomes including a counter-revolutionary military coup (Egypt), an anti-democratic self-coup (Tunisia), successful defense of the old regime in a civil war (Syria), and post-revolutionary civil wars among regional ethno-religious groups after the old regime was toppled (Libya, Yemen). Conspicuously absent among these outcomes is the goal many of the revolutionary actors originally professed: a stable, pluralist, democratic regime.

The Arab Revolutions have become one of the most studied sets of revolutionary events, with considerable debate over the reasons for their eruption and their outcomes. Contributing factors that have been identified include population growth, an overproduction of underemployed college graduates, the onerous burdens of food subsidies, and guaranteed government jobs undertaken in the name of Arab socialism, and even climate, with the drought in north-central Syria driving thousands of peasants to the cities where they were more readily recruited to emerging social conflict. In addition, a global spike in food prices in 2009, the global diffusion of democratic aspirations and ideals, increasing evidence of regime corruption, the diffusion of revolutionary imagery from Tunisia and then Egypt on cable television, and elite alienation from increasingly narrow-family-based ruling cliques also played a role. In addition, long-standing structural and regional divisions based on ethnicity and/or religion exacerbated conflicts once the continuity of the existing regime came into question (e.g. the partly suppressed Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, East/West regional differences in Libya, Alawite/Sunni differences in Syria, and Houthi/Sunni divisions in Yemen) (Grinin and Korotayev, 2022).

The richness of these accounts is no doubt partly influenced by their nearness to us in time, so that it is hard to look at them with dispassion and perspective and determine which factors were primary and which incidental. But that nearness provides advantages as well, as scholars have provided thoughtful, sociologically informed accounts that draw on firsthand engagement and analysis of social media. In particular, these accounts show that lacking dominant leaders or revolutionary organizations, with a plethora of labor, professional, popular, and political actors each seeking to shape events, there was potential for diverse outcomes, and choices made by various actors had unanticipated consequences (Bayat, 2017; Gunning and Baron, 2014; Said, 2024).

The books on Middle East uprisings by Shamiran Mako and Valentine M. Moghadam and by Leonid Issaev and Andrey Korotayev build on these accounts but go further. Mako and Moghadam examine seven regime crises in the Arab Spring of 2010–2011: Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Their book utilizes all the key elements of the Fourth-Generation approach: they start by clearly distinguishing these events from the great social revolutions, noting they have a different logic; they note that they are political revolutions that have a great deal in common with social movements. They focus not only on the structural characteristics of the old regime but also on the agency of specific groups that were organized to resist and replace the regime. They situate their cases firmly within waves of events, noting how they compare/contrast with the third and fourth waves of democratization, and of course how each of these events was influenced by the others in the 2010–2011 wave of Arab revolts. They treat the divergence of outcomes as their main explanatory problem, and address it through a combination of factors: old regime state structures, the organizations and actions of civil society actors, and the extent and coerciveness of foreign intervention. Specifically, countries with more bureaucratic administrations that could survive the toppling of a personalist leaders, and better organized labor, professional, and women’s organizations (civil society organizations or CSOs) were better placed to establish post-revolutionary democracy. However, these leanings could be undone by foreign intervention, whether by tacit support for a post-revolutionary coup (as with the United States in Egypt), or over military intervention that fractured society (as with the NATO in Libya and US/Saudi intervention in Yemen). Indeed, they treat foreign involvement as one of the critical factors shaping the entire trajectory of these revolutions, with economic and military aid to the former and/or new regimes, as well as overt military interventions, often being determinative of whether democracy can emerge from these conflicts.

Mako and Moghadam also offer a novel finding of great importance: while in most of the West, women’s rights only emerged late in the process of democratization—for example, in the US women gained the right to vote only 132 years after the Constitution was ratified, and almost two generations later than Black men—today women’s rights are constitutive of democratization. This is true in two senses: First, they argue that democracy can only be sustained in emerging from modern dictatorships if there is a society-wide commitment to citizenship rights, which will obviously be lacking if women are not granted full civil rights. Second, they find that the mobilization of women in effective CSOs played a vital role in overturning dictatorships and implementing democratic reforms. Thus the countries where women’s rights had made the most progress, notably Tunisia, and to a lesser extent Morocco and Egypt, showed significant (if not lasting) progress toward democracy, while countries with weak or absent women’s rights (Bahrain, Libya, Syria and Yemen) showed none. Mako and Moghadam also show that this pattern characterized the emergence of democracy in southeast and East Asia, making it clear that in today’s world, democracy is unlikely to arise without women’s rights being part of its foundation.

Issaev and Korotayev add to our understanding that the incidence of revolutions is not diminishing, but increasing, albeit with changes in character. Also explicitly focusing on a revolutionary wave, their volume examines the second wave of Arab revolutions in 2019–2021. This involved the fall of regimes after massive popular demonstrations in Sudan, Algeria and Mali, sustained protests demanding government changes in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, and large but suppressed protests in Egypt and Iran. It also included protests in Tunisia that led to the seizure of power by President Saied. The volume has chapters on each of these cases, plus one on the absence of revolutions in this wave in Kuwait and Bahrain, contrasting pacification by shifting conflict to the legislature in Kuwait with the suppression of conflict by coercion in Bahrain. A concluding chapter places all these events in the context of the prior wave of Arab uprisings in 2010–2011 and the shifting international context of the region. The volume’s authors observe that the new wave of revolutions is in part due to the earlier wave, despite bringing a large number of regime changes, not having resolved the fundamental problems of societies in the region, namely, corruption, political exclusion, highly unequal economic growth and opportunities, and rapidly expanding urban and youth populations looking for change, so that the entire ruling elite—not just individual rulers—have become targets of protests. In addition, following the revolutions of 2010–2011, the United States became less invested in the region while Islamists have continued to seek opportunities, so that political flashpoints have grown while US efforts to reinforce regimes have diminished.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of a clear Fourth-Generation perspective having emerged is the publication of a book jointly authored by six of the most important recent scholars of revolutions: Colin J. Beck, Mlada Bukovansky, Erica Chenoweth, George Lawson, Sharon Erickson Nepstad, and Daniel P. Ritter. Their work, having moved on from addressing the faults of the Third Generation, fully embraces the Fourth-Generation principles and asks what they mean for understanding revolutions and the conduct of contemporary scholarship.

The first five chapters begin by observing that the dichotomies that bedeviled the Third Generation are now obsolete and look for ways to transcend them. Thus, Chapter 1 dismisses the Social Revolution–Political Revolution dichotomy and argues for a richer typology of political transformations that embraces non-linear revolutionary dynamics in a way that echoes Beissinger’s typology of rural/social, urban/social, urban/civic, and other types, and Goldstone et al.’s inclusion of dozens of partial and unsuccessful revolutionary ‘episodes’. Chapter 2 dismisses the agency–structure dichotomy, building on Chenoweth and Stephan’s (2011) work on civil resistance to argue that strategic action is best understood as agency in the context of favorable or unfavorable structural settings, and that agency and structure are both inevitably engaged in explaining revolutionary dynamics. Chapter 3 dismisses the violent–nonviolent dichotomy, not only in the sense that revolutions can be either one, but more powerfully arguing that many revolutionary movements have shifted between nonviolent to violent tactics, or combined them. Chapter 4 dismisses the success–failure dichotomy, demonstrating the ambiguity of ‘success’ and giving explicit attention to the role of counter-revolutions. They amplify the Levitsky and Way and Beissinger arguments that moderate, less violent revolutions are often more successful in achieving regime change and progress toward democracy, but less successful in creating stable post-revolutionary regimes, while violent revolutions are usually the reverse. Chapter 5 dismisses the international–domestic dichotomy, building on the insights of many Fourth-Generation scholars to argue that since so many revolutions occur in transnational waves, while revolutionary ideology and tactics are shared and communicated across borders, and international interventions are pivotal in shaping revolutionary dynamics, it makes no sense to treat revolutions as events within nations that are influenced by external factors. Rather, revolutions should be seen as the product of both domestic and international factors intertwined and influencing revolutions from their inception through all moments of conflict to and beyond their outcomes.

These brush-clearing chapters are then followed by four far more challenging chapters addressing revolutions normatively. These ask whether revolutions can be seriously regarded not just as objective types of political events, but, echoing Hanna Arendt, as vehicles for liberation and progress. Thus, Chapter 6 asks scholars of revolutions to ‘value revolutions and to decry their co-optation, derailment, or violent suppression [and] to struggle against the odds to recover revolution’s emancipatory ethos’ (p. 158). Chapter 7 focuses on the consequences of choices in the methods used to study revolutions. Using isolated countries as cases leads to many of the structural biases and dichotomies of the Third Generation; so better to have a far more flexible approach in which ‘cases’ can be revolutionary events, movements, or waves—only then are the factors of agency, contingency, transnational influences, certain to emerge and receive their due. Chapter 8 turns on researchers themselves and asks, in an age of frequent and recurring revolutions as we now have in the 21st century, what is the moral responsibility of revolution scholars? Should they seek to use their knowledge to help revolutionary actors? Should they worry that scientific knowledge of revolutionary dynamics might be used by authoritarian regimes to suppress them? The authors do not offer answers, but urge researchers to think carefully about what they publish and whether it has potential for harm. Finally, Chapter 9 highlights the differences between liberal and illiberal revolutions, and the false promises of presenting revolutions as bringers of a utopian future, whether through restoring a lost but valued past or giving life to an only-imagined social design.

Whither Revolutions and Theories of Revolution?

Beck et al.’s most indisputable statement is that ‘There is no reason . . . that revolutions will not go on evolving’ (p. 190). One of the most striking differences between Fourth-Generation theory and what preceded it is the Fourth-Generation contention that revolutions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are not the same kinds of events as revolutions in earlier times (Ritter, 2019). While the great social revolutions were arguably similar in key aspects, featuring a combination of peasant and worker uprisings against agrarian monarchies or empires with hereditary, legally privileged elites, the revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries were often quite different. They included anti-colonial revolutions against foreign-instituted regimes, anti-dictatorial revolutions targeting personalist modernizing regimes with patronage cronies rather than hereditary elites, and urban civic revolutions in which rural peasant revolts played a minor or non-existent role. The success of this view of revolutions as necessarily including a wide range of events is evident in the recently published, excellent surveys of revolutions (Kamrava, 2020; Motadel, 2021) that make a point of treating diverse cases, with diverse trajectories and outcomes, from the 17^th to the 21^st centuries, as all valid examples of revolution.

Where do we go from here? It is clear that some things are already changing. Beissinger notes that

In the second half of the 2010s, there was a palpable decline in successful revolutions, with the probability of success for urban revolts dipping to .25 . . . This compares with a success rate of .54 for urban revolts . . . during the 1985–2014 period. (p. 426)

For confirmation, Chenoweth (2020) reports that ‘even as civil resistance reached a new peak of popularity during the 2010s, its effectiveness had begun to decline’ (p. 70). She found that while non-violent mass campaigns continued to be more successful in attaining regime change than violent campaigns, the success rate of both types of revolutionary movements has drastically fallen: where in 1990–1999 65% of non-violent campaigns succeeded and only 28% of non-violent campaigns did so, in 2010–2019 only 34% of non-violent campaigns and only 8% of violent campaigns achieved success. Chenoweth argues that while states may be somewhat better at identifying and suppressing opposition movements than before, what really has changed is the character of opposition movements. That is, rather than multi-pronged protests that involve strikes and mass civil disobedience that is truly disruptive, recent protests have relied mainly on mass demonstrations and street protests that do not really inflict costs on regimes. She suggests this may be due in part to opposition campaigns being organized more through on-line digital links than through workplace or community organizing. Mobilization through social media lends itself to ‘leaderless’ protests not led by formal organizations, and such protests lack the systemic training, planning and coalition-building to stand up to state repression. At the same time, Ritter (2014) notes that the diminishing influence of the United States and Western Europe over regimes elsewhere has reduced the external constraints on rulers, allowing them to crush democratic oppositions with less concern for the optics of repression.

While protests have become less successful, they have nonetheless grown more numerous. While the number of violent mass campaigns has fallen from about 35 per decade to 20 between 1980–1999 and 2000–2019, the number of non-violent campaigns has increased from about 42 per decade in 1980–1999 to 60 in 2000–2009 and over 90 in 2010–2019. That certainly suggests that the underlying grievances motivating people to seek a change in regime have not diminished.

What then is the future of revolutions? That will largely be written by future revolutionaries themselves. Will we see a return to more professionally organized revolutionary parties and movements to cope with more repressive states? Will we see a wholly new phenomenon of cyber-revolution, where regime opponents paralyze governments and seek to take power by a series of cyber-attacks on key institutions? Will the authoritarian regimes of Russia and China succeed in promoting support for authoritarian regimes? Will ethno-nationalist populism, now reviving in Europe and the United States, lead to electoral revolutions that bring to power regimes that take former democracies into authoritarianism, as with the Fascist and Nazi movements in Europe in the 1930s? Or will we see a new wave of ‘color’ or urban civic revolutions in current authoritarian states, perhaps reaching even Russia and China, as those regimes become more personalist and heavily indebted, while their populations grow more desirous of enjoying personal freedoms?

Posing these questions—for which current theories of revolution have no certain answers—shows there is still much we do not know. At best, we can say that Fourth-Generation theory suggests that revolutions will continue, will develop into new forms, and have diverse and often unexpected trajectories.

We should probably also temper what we expect of theories of revolution. A new ‘generation’ of revolutionary theory—in the sense of a clearly new set of guiding principles driven by new kinds of cases—only seems to arise every 20–40 years. But a new generation is not necessary to making progress in theory. The Fourth Generation only arrived by standing on the shoulders of outstanding works that critiqued the Third Generation and added new cases, new elements of explanation, and new approaches. We should expect that the next several decades will produce important work that makes similar progress. Indeed, we already see some promising directions. The volume by Issaev and Korotayev focuses on events that even a dozen years ago would not have been considered revolutions or merited study in their light; these would instead have been classed as mass demonstrations, or revolutionary coups, or social protests. Yet this volume expands the range of revolutionary events and succeeds in treating them as a revolutionary wave and places them in the context of other such waves. The book by Mako and Moghadam adds an important new element to the causal explanation of revolutions, namely, the critical role of women’s rights and women’s civil society participation as drivers of democratizing revolutionary movements. A recent article of my own (Goldstone, 2023) changes the whole treatment of structure and agency by breaking down revolutionary dynamics into a series of 11 discrete steps or points of divergence; at each step a combination of structures and actors’ choices at that moment determine the movement of the revolution onto one or another pathway. This creates a kind of Markov chain in which the structures that exist prior to the revolution, or at prior steps, are of no significance; rather the combination of structures and choices at each step that moves the revolution forward to the next step are all that matter. I use this model to trace out 14 different revolutionary pathways that can develop; and showing that only 2 of the 14 produce stable democracy suggests why democratic outcomes for revolutions are so rare. Other promising directions are the recent work classifying types of international interventions, and identifying the conditions under which they are likely to occur (Hirst, 2022; Nelson, 2022); books that combine treatment of revolutions and other kinds of mass uprisings (Abrams, 2023), or revolutions and coups (Holmes, 2019); and new work on counterrevolution (Allinson, 2022; Clarke, 2023; Koehler and Albrecht, 2021; Slater and Smith, 2016), taking it seriously not just as an incidental feature of revolutions, but as worthy of study in its own right for how it can redirect and reshape revolutions. All these expand our understanding of revolutions by placing them in a richer context of varying dynamics and directions that revolutionary action can take.

In sum, theories of revolution have made enormous progress in the years since the Third Generation. I think it is clear that we now have a well-formed Fourth Generation with distinct features. This has changed our very concept of what revolutions are, and given us a far more varied and open-ended view of how they arise, develop, and resolve. At the same time, these works have opened the door to even further progress, as change in our theories of revolution is inevitable as revolutions themselves evolve.