Abstract

Why are analysts so surprised by cross-national waves of popular mobilizations against authoritarian rulers? This chapter compares three such waves – the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the colour revolutions in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia, and the Arab uprisings – and develops two complementary lines of explanation. One is the inherent difficulty of making such predictions because of the ability of some short-term events to convert individualized private anger into large-scale public actions. While compelling, this explanation needs to be supplanted with a second one: the tendency of analysts to exaggerate the strength and the durability of authoritarian regimes and rulers.

Waves of Popular Upheavals

Over the last quarter of a century, there have been three cross-national waves of popular mobilizations against authoritarian rulers. The first was in 1989 (more strictly speaking, 1987–1991), when citizens in one regime after another in what was then called the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe rose up in large numbers to demand that their communist rulers leave power. The second was the colour revolutions in post-communist Europe and Eurasia from 1998–2008. In this wave, citizens in collaboration with civil society groups and opposition parties in nine competitive authoritarian regimes in the region – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Croatia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine – carried out unprecedented and extraordinarily ambitious electoral challenges to authoritarian incumbents or their anointed successors. When the losers in most of these contests refused to admit defeat, citizens mounted large-scale post-election demonstrations that in many instances forced a transfer of political power to the opposition. The final wave, which is ongoing, is the subject of this volume. Once again, large-scale demonstrations broke out in a series of countries within the same region – in this case, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Like the other waves, these popular uprisings settled quickly on the radical goal of removing authoritarian incumbents from power.