Revolutions are a perennial preoccupation of the social sciences, and this state of affairs is unlikely to change. The character of revolutionary movements has evolved since the end of the Cold War, however. They now demand regime change and civil liberties instead of pursuing the broad social transformations wrought by the French, Russian, or Chinese revolutions. Mark R. Beissinger argues that this evolution is due to a relocation of revolutionary movements from the countryside to the city. Urban civic revolutions like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution seek to mobilize as many people as possible in central urban spaces, draw on coalitions of diverse interests, are predominantly nonviolent, and generally press for democratizing reform. Such revolutions are increasingly frequent and salient, comprising around 40% of global revolutionary episodes since 1985. They will be of deep interest to political scientists, economists, sociologists, and other social scientists for the foreseeable future—as will Beissinger’s book.
Revolutions’ relocation from the countryside to cities demands a spatial explanation. All revolutionary movements face a “proximity dilemma” (p. 39). The closer they move to urban centers, the greater their ability to mobilize large numbers of supporters, and the greater their potential to disrupt political and economic activity. Proximity to city centers simultaneously brings revolutionaries closer to the nexus of state power and repressive capacity, however. Revolutionaries must navigate this trade-off. They might choose to remain in major cities, as German Social Democrats did in the late nineteenth century, only to be easily targeted and expelled from their homes under the repressive Antisocialist Laws of the 1870s. Sensing this danger, revolutionaries might relocate to rural areas to avoid government crackdowns. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) followed this strategy in the early 1930s after violent repression at the hands of the Kuomintang. But by doing so, they sacrificed direct influence on the incumbent regime.
Beissinger argues that “[o]ver the past century … concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities has altered the repression-disruption function” (p. 43). The trade-off between proximity to power and the danger of repression has shifted in favor of urban revolutionaries. Essentially, the marginal increase in repression associated with a move closer to urban centers has declined. Revolutionaries can still hide from government forces in rural or mountainous areas. The CCP did so in the remote Jiangxi-Fujian Soviet from 1931 until their encirclement by Kuomintang forces and escape on the Long March in 1934. But rural–urban migration has rendered this strategy less advantageous—or less necessary—than it was in the past, when Social Democrats held secret meetings in forests outside Berlin to avoid police spies in the nineteenth century.
On Beissinger’s account, the exact mechanisms driving the shift in the repression-disruption function are diverse. They range from the physical characteristics of cities and their communications networks, through the types of social networks and organizations that exist in cities, to the repressive tactics available to governments in cities, and others. Urban civic revolutions are distinctive in their large size, short duration, broad coalitions, and high frequency of success. As Beissinger argues, these features all result from the shift from rural to urban mobilization.
Alongside this theoretical intervention, Beissinger makes major empirical contributions. The most significant are based on an original global dataset of 345 revolutionary episodes from 1900–2014. Analogous to Tilly’s “revolutionary situations,” these episodes are “instances in which demands for regime displacement become the basis for a mass siege of government” (p. 46). These new data are fruitfully explored in analyses spread across five chapters. It is impossible to summarize the numerous important findings here, but they include the frequency of revolution growing steadily since 1900 and more quickly since 1990, especially urban civic revolution; that urban civic revolutions’ causes are more political than those of social revolutions; that urban revolutions are significantly more likely to lead to regime change; and that revolutions have become less lethal since the mid-twentieth century. Beissinger’s empirical analyses do not end there. Further chapters explore the role of contingency in urban revolution; how the physical space of cities can be a significant enabler of revolution; and an analysis of individual participants in urban civic revolutions in Ukraine, Tunisia, and Egypt.
The Revolutionary City is an impressive and important book. Urbanization is one of the most important contemporary trends having profound effects on global politics. This transformation has not escaped the attention of political scientists. Jeremy Wallace has drawn attention to how the Chinese regime managed the growth of cities to maintain social order, for example through restrictions on internal migration and food subsidies (Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China, 2014). Noah Nathan has explored how ethnic competition and clientelism persist in rapidly growing African cities (Electoral Politics and Africa’s Urban Transition: Class and Ethnicity in Ghana, 2019). Novel empirical evidence suggests that urban political violence and contention have accompanied city population growth globally since 1960 (see Thomson et al., “Urban Social Disorder 3.0: A Global, City-Level Event Dataset of Political Mobilization and Disorder,” Journal of Peace Research 60 [2022]: 521–31).
Fourth-generation revolutionary theory emerged after the end of the Cold War (see Jack Goldstone, “Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 4 [2001]: 139–87). It is eclectic, incorporating a mix of explanatory factors at the individual, domestic, and international levels. It is best known for a greater emphasis on agency over its predecessor’s structural causes, however. Beissinger’s work to reintegrate structural transformations like global urbanization into the core of fourth-generation revolutionary scholarship is very welcome. We are likely to see many elaborations and expansions of his path-breaking study in the future.
One especially promising avenue for further research is to explore how urbanization is shaping authoritarian regimes’ coercive institution design and strategies of repression. As Beissinger notes, the repression-disruption function is not only shaped by opportunities and constraints facing revolutionaries. Technologies of surveillance and repression also determine the marginal cost of proximity to urban centers of state power. Moreover, the rise of urban civic revolutions—which are far larger and more likely to be successful than revolutions of the past—has not gone unnoticed by regimes determined to prevent social disorder and political instability. Authoritarian governments will learn from their counterparts’ successes and failures in preventing and combating urban civic revolutions when designing their own repressive apparatus. For example, since the Tiananmen Square massacre the Chinese government has rapidly expanded the People’s Armed Police (PAP), a paramilitary force first established in the early 1980s. When urban protests broke out against the government’s COVID-19 policies in late 2022, they were rapidly suppressed by PAP and regular police units—a response that was not possible in 1989. This kind of learning and adaptation by repressive regimes will have important effects on the shape of urban contention in the future.
Social scientists’ interest in revolution is unlikely to ebb in the foreseeable future. In The Revolutionary City, Mark R. Beissinger points us to a major transformation in the location and nature of revolutionary movements that is likely to increase in salience in the coming decades. Scholars would do well to take note, and focus their attention on the distinct dynamics of urban revolutions.
