The Revolutionary City

Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion

Mark R. Beissinger

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691224756
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How and why cities have become the predominant sites for revolutionary upheavals in the contemporary world Examining the changing character of revolution around the world, The Revolutionary City focuses on the impact that the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities exercises on revolutionary processes and outcomes. Once predominantly an urban and armed affair, revolutions in the twentieth century migrated to the countryside, as revolutionaries searched for safety from government repression and discovered the peasantry as a revolutionary force. But at the end of the twentieth century, as urban centers grew, revolution returned to the city—accompanied by a new urban civic repertoire espousing the containment of predatory government and relying on visibility and the power of numbers rather than arms.Using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion surveys, and engaging examples from around the world, Mark Beissinger explores the causes and consequences of the urbanization of revolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beissinger examines the compact nature of urban revolutions, as well as their rampant information problems and heightened uncertainty. He investigates the struggle for control over public space, why revolutionary contention has grown more pacified over time, and how revolutions involving the rapid assembly of hundreds of thousands in central urban spaces lead to diverse, ad hoc coalitions that have difficulty producing substantive change. The Revolutionary City provides a new understanding of how revolutions happen and what they might look like in the future.

1

A Spatial Theory of Revolution

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret.

ITALO CALVINO, INVISIBLE CITIES (1972)¹

CONTRARY TO WHAT MANY BELIEVE, most states have experienced a significant episode of revolutionary contention at some point in their modern histories. Much of Europe and the Americas faced major revolutionary challenges from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.² In the twentieth century, revolution spread still farther. Out of a sample of 166 countries, 79 percent (131) underwent at least one episode of revolutionary contention from 1900 to 2014, with 46 percent (76) experiencing more than one. Revolutionary oppositions were brought to power in 49 percent (81) of these countries during this period, and in 19 percent (31 countries) they were brought to power multiple times.

Nevertheless, revolutions remain rare occurrences. On average, only 2.6 revolutionary episodes occurred annually around the world from 1900 to 1985. But while revolutions have always been rare, at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century their frequency increased substantially. As subsequent chapters will show, this growth was closely associated with the proliferation of revolution in cities and with the rise of urban civic forms of revolution (i.e., unarmed revolutions that seek to overthrow abusive governments by mobilizing as many people as possible in central urban spaces).

In this chapter, I outline a theory that helps to explain the urbanization of revolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the consequences of this move back to cities for revolution, and the emergence of the urban civic repertoire. While urban revolt has drawn attention in recent years, the most widely known theories have come not from the fields of history, sociology, or political science, but from geography and urban design. They have emphasized a collective “right to the city”—a popular sovereignty over urbanization and the wealthy interests that control urban development.³ These theories are useful for understanding local conflicts within cities. But they have limited applicability for understanding revolutionary processes focused on national governments and aimed specifically at effecting regime-change.⁴

I lay the foundations for a theory of urban revolution instead on the differences between the spatial context of the countryside and that of the city, and how these spatial differences structure social control and revolutionary forms and processes. As William Sewell noted, “most studies of mobilization bring in spatial considerations only episodically,” treating space as “an assumed and unproblematized background, not as a constituent aspect of contentious politics that must be conceptualized explicitly and probed systematically.”⁵ I focus on the city not only as a locus of high population densities, capitalist development, and elaborate built structures that set it apart from the countryside, but also as a site of the thickened presence of the state. Cities are where the nerve centers of the state are concentrated, and therefore control over the city is the ultimate goal of all revolutionary movements. But paradoxically, cities are where the state is most vulnerable to overthrow and where revolutionaries are most vulnerable to the repressive capacities of the state. I call this trade-off between exposure to regime repression and possibilities for oppositional disruption “the proximity dilemma” in revolution, and I use its implications to analyze how revolution has evolved over time as people, power, and wealth have concentrated in cities.

I begin by defining what revolution is, identifying it as a unique form of regime-change and relating it to other forms of politics. I then turn to how the city has been treated in the vast theoretical literature on revolution. Nineteenth-century theorists such as de Tocqueville and Marx placed the city centrally into their analyses of revolution. But subsequent theories dropped the city from their purview, particularly as social revolution—revolution’s most theorized form—migrated to the countryside in the middle of the twentieth century. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the marked growth in urban revolutions has pushed the city back onto the agenda of scholarly analyses of revolution.

I elaborate a theory of how spatial location influences revolution, outlining the logic of the proximity dilemma and some of its observable implications for revolutionary politics. Due to the proximity dilemma, urban revolutions tend to be extremely compact in time, creating significant information problems for both regimes and oppositions and heightening the impact of interaction, contingency, and error on urban revolutionary processes. I explain why armed rebellion tends to be less effective in cities but more effective in a rural context. I show how unarmed rebellion is more effective in large cities, where oppositions can rely on the power of numbers and regimes fear the potential effects of backlash mobilizations and defections in close proximity to government nerve centers. The repression–disruption trade-off also establishes the features of states and societies associated with revolutions within particular spatial contexts. Urban revolutions, for example, are much more affected by the character of the political regimes that they confront than are rural revolutions. I also illustrate how the nature of the repression–disruption trade-off can be altered through tactical innovation and large-scale structural change. In particular, the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities over the last century rendered regimes more vulnerable to disruption through the power of numbers and helped give rise to the urban civic repertoire. The urban civic tactic of concentrating large numbers in central urban spaces has led in turn to a different type of spatial politics in revolutionary contention revolving around control over public space. It also bears significant consequences for revolutionary processes and outcomes and for what occurs in the aftermath of revolution.

In short, location matters enormously in revolution. It is, of course, not the only thing that matters. The ideologies and substantive goals of revolutionary oppositions, the resources available to governments, and the choices made by regimes and oppositions in interaction with one another are also critically important. But the spatial dimensions of revolution merit far greater attention than they have hitherto attracted.

What Revolution Is, and What It Is Not

Any analysis of revolution must confront what is undoubtedly the most contentious issue within the study of revolution: the definition of revolution itself. Some argue that the concept should be reserved solely for social revolutions—instances of violent, rapid change from below aimed at transforming the class structure of society. According to these accounts, there have only been two dozen or so “real” revolutions throughout history, with revolutions having been characteristic of a particular era stretching from the Enlightenment to the mid-twentieth century, but no longer occurring due to the exhaustion of revolutionary ideologies.⁶ From this perspective, some revolutions have been more “revolutionary” (i.e., more rapid, total, and violent) than others. A handful of paradigmatic cases (the so-called Great Revolutions—the French Revolution of 1789, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the October Revolution of 1917, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949) represent the essence of revolutionary phenomena, constituting a core around which theoretical and empirical inquiry should revolve. Due to the limited number of such upheavals, empirical analyses under this definition have been reduced methodologically to comparative historical studies of paradigmatic cases (usually with significant issues of case selection and sampling on the dependent variable).⁷

But social revolutions always represented only one of the many faces of revolution in the modern world. Indeed, when one looks at the origins of modern revolutions, it is clear that revolution began as a fundamentally political phenomenon. The word initially had an astronomical meaning, referring to the regular motion of the stars in the sky, with the original Latin literally meaning a rolling back, return, or restoration. It was first applied to politics in England in 1688 to describe the overthrow of King James II. After widespread mass disorders over James’s attempts to favor Catholicism and usurp the powers of parliament, a foreign invasion placed William and Mary on the throne. The new monarchs had to sign a Bill of Rights that introduced freedom of speech, limited royal power, and committed them not to suspend laws or levy taxes without parliamentary approval, thus signifying what was viewed as a return to the sovereign rights of parliament vis-à-vis the monarchy.⁸ In its early modern usages (including the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution), “revolution” implied a restoration of what were seen as usurped natural rights (at the time, usually imagined as belonging only to white, male property owners)—not the creation of a completely new society or transformation of society’s class structure. The infusion of the social into revolution was largely the product of the French Revolution. Although the French Revolution was primarily a political revolution that claimed the state on behalf of the Third Estate, it awakened the politics of class in a new way, and goals of transforming society’s class structure became a growing component of revolutionary politics in its wake. This social element increasingly dominated revolutionary discourse over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as industrialization concentrated large numbers of impoverished proletarians into cities and posed the class question more sharply.

Revolutions have occurred for a wide variety of reasons. Social revolutionary contention seeking to transform the class structure of society has constituted less than a quarter (23 percent) of revolutionary episodes since the beginning of the twentieth century. About 8 percent of revolutionary episodes since 1900 have been constitutional revolutions, aiming to transform monarchies into republics. Other revolutionary episodes aspired to liberation from colonial rule (15 percent) or independence from a multinational state (20 percent). Still others have been liberal revolutions, aiming to attain civil liberties, establish a democracy, or contain the abuses of a despotic regime (25 percent), while others have aimed to substitute a religiously based political order in place of a secular one (9 percent), or invert a dominant ethnic or racial order (16 percent). It is quite common for these various purposes to overlap and interpenetrate within particular revolutions. Any attempt to restrict the notion of revolution to social revolutions not only misses this key variation in the purposes to which revolution has been put, but also consigns th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction. Revolution and the City
• 1. A Spatial Theory of Revolution
• 2. The Growth and Urbanization of Revolution
• 3. The Urban Civic Revolutionary Moment
• 4. The Repression–Disruption Trade-off and the Shifting Odds of Success
• 5. Revolutionary Contingency and the City
• 6. Public Space and Urban Revolution
• 7. The Individual and Collective Action in Urban Civic Revolution
• 8. The Pacification of Revolution
• 9. The Evolving Impact of Revolution
• 10. The City and the Future of Revolution
• Appendix 1. Construction of Cross-National Data on Revolutionary Episodes
• Appendix 2. Revolutionary Episodes, 1900–2014
• Appendix 3. Data Sources Used in Statistical Analyses
• Appendix 4. Choices of Statistical Models
• References
• Index