The
relocation to the city presupposes the proximity of revolutions to the nerve
centres of state power, a situation that has impacted—even sometimes
dictated—not only the tactics but their scope. Fueled by the power of numbers
or the capacity to mobilise huge crowds more than well-defined ideological
convictions, urban revolutions are revolutions against corrupt and wasteful
elites within the state. This logic of negativity specifies that, unlike social
revolutions, urban revolutions are more likely to lead to less enduring
achievements and legacies. Because they tend to unfold in relatively shorter stretches:
over weeks, when compared with social revolutions, which usually take years,
activists have to build consensuses and forge coalitions. The problem with
coalitions is how they cause urban revolts to fail even when they succeed in
ousting incumbent regimes eventually. It is precisely when they oust their
nemeses that urban revolutions become less likely to survive post-revolutionary
scenarios (upheavals for which they have inherited: marred living conditions
that convinced people to revolt in the first place). Beissinger reminds us that
with social revolutions, coalitions and compromises are significantly less
common, often unthinkable.
Unlike
social revolutions, urban civic revolutions remain, more often than not, unable
to bypass the societal cleavages animating urban revolutionaries and activists.
Such cleavages translate into an inherent inability to stabilise society and
smoothly lead it to meet its aspirations: good services and a functional
economy. Urban civic revolutions are at heart geared toward anti-political
movements, and they display a deep distrust for political elites and
frameworks.
The
Revolutionary City has ten chapters, the conclusion included. The statistical
method builds on data from across the globe and covers the period between 1904
to 2014 with sensible projections beyond these dates. The text comes peppered
with statistical illustrations, charts, and tables; they can be at first
intimidating for readers who are unused to quantitative approaches. But lest
these readers rush to close The Revolutionary City prematurely, it becomes
particularly rewarding to note how numbers and statistics speak the truth and
common sense regarding the uses and abuses of revolutions. The razor-sharp
distinctions save scholars hailing from Marxist and phenomenological
backgrounds from the lyricism regarding what revolutions are and how they
propagate. Besides, the text is followed by four major appendixes for those who
want to check to further the data from the survey experiment Beissinger conducted.
This priceless data may look like heartless commodification of human lives and
legitimate aspirations for better lives to the realm of quantifiable at the
expense of the qualifiable. Readers again should resist the temptation to
disengage from its findings or method because these numbers tellingly underline
human experience. The data is similarly available on the author’s website.[1]
The
first chapter: ‘A Spatial Theory of Revolution’, underlines how the spatial
relocation of revolution leads to the proximity dilemma. What is solved through
galvanising large crowds and the power of numbers is lost through the critical
need for coalitions. The latter involves ideological dilutions that haunt urban
civic revolutionists once they succeed in ousting the contested power in terms
of murky performances, precipitating upcoming societal upheavals.
The
second chapter, ‘The Growth and Urbanization of Revolution’, specifies an
increasing frequency of revolutionary episodes around the world. He finds that
the massive shift of people from rural places to cities, the consolidation of
states during the Cold War, and the rise of the unipolar world order dictate
the rise of urban revolutions.
In
the third chapter, ‘The Urban Civic Revolutionary Moment’ Beissinger sets the
stage for his probabilistic approach. Instead of presuming causes (falling into
biases), he proposes exploring factors that mark urban civic revolutionary
episodes. He calls these factors ‘structural conditions.’ Because conditions
such as inequality, poverty, and underdevelopment are associated with social
revolutions, Beissinger finds that urban civic revolutions do not correlate
with such conditions. Structural conditions explain the break between the
unfolding of revolutions past and present. Meanwhile, the conditions crystalise
the methodological cost when considering contemporary revolutions as a
continuum of past ones.
Chapter
Four, ‘The Repression-Disruption Trade-off and the Shifting Odds of Success’,
stipulates how the chances of revolutionary success have never ceased of
augmenting thanks to urbanisation and proximity to power centres. This does not
mean that with each revolutionary scenario, the task of unseating regimes is
more frequent and predictable than failures.
As
outlined in the fifth chapter ‘Revolutionary Contingency and the City’” it is
challenging for both incumbent regimes and their contestants to steer the next
move and respond to rapidly unfolding updates. Mistakes or missteps from either
party become acutely magnified, with direct and often irreversible
consequences. This is the impact of what Beissinger brilliantly underlines as
‘thickened history.’ Mistakes, even outright blunders, used to be contained and
remediable with social revolutions, which is never the case with urban
revolutions.
The
sixth chapter, ‘Public Space and Urban Revolution’, reiterates the far-reaching
impacts of the unfolding of revolutionary work in cities and capitals. Cities
like Paris were initially rebuilt to facilitate the quelling of revolts and
popular movements. Beissinger, in this chapter, finds that the physical
location and the symbolic value in the design of cities can be redefined to
serve urban revolutions.
Beissinger,
in the seventh chapter, ‘The Individual and Collective Action in Urban Civic
Revolution,’ finds participants widely diverse. That explains the fundamental
disagreements once the contested regimes fall and revolutionaries assume the
steering wheels of the state apparatus. Limitations in leading smooth
post-revolutionary scenarios underline how, irrespective of massively
circulating narratives and “judging from motivations mentioned by participants
themselves, these were revolutions not for democracy, but against the corrupt
and abusive rule.” (p. 304)
Chapter
eight, ‘The Pacification of Revolution’, finds that the data from the past
century indicates that even with the ever-increasing number of revolutions,
revolutionary situations have become significantly less lethal. Urbanisation
ranks among the top causes of the decline of lethality. The decline should not
lead us to assume that seating powers have grown ethical. Rather, regimes are
mortally worried about the backlash from deploying pacification forces to
control unruly or seditious crowds.
‘The
Evolving Impact of Revolution’ or chapter nine, contrasts the achievements of
social revolutions against those of urban civic ones. Testable achievements are
scaled down to five: political order, economic growth, inequality, political
freedom, and government accountability. Orders emerging from urban civic
revolutions last less in power than their counterparts from social revolutions.
Even when they introduce a substantial increase in political freedom, urban
civic revolutions fail to deliver on economic growth or fight inequality. These
shortcomings—Beissinger finds—are never the fault of urban revolutions. The
latter inherited the state with its embedded networks of corruption and
nepotism.
The
last chapter, ‘The City and the Future of Revolution,’ concludes its historical
perspectives by predicting that revolutions, as they have substantially changed
in style and delivery during the last three centuries, will continue evolving.
The internet already displays new mobilisation techniques and
counterrevolutionary and surveillance potentials. In a nutshell, there is no
end to the possibilities for revolutionary regime change.
Sometimes
Beissinger’s designed abstention from qualification as with ‘coupvolution’
defined as “a mass siege of government aimed at regime-change that precipitates
a military coup” (p. 29) sacrifices complexity for the smooth unfolding of a
theory, for there are situations where revolutions and counterrevolutions are
so close to each other and unfold in a confusing attire. Likewise, Beissinger’s
approach, built on la coupure or rupture between social revolutions and urban
civic revolutions, can be deployed by counterrevolutionaries to rationalise
historical discontinuity, that is, to discourage people from looking at
historical antecedents to carry out unfinished emancipations.
These
two remarks aside, policymakers and democracy activists will find the book
particularly rewarding. Busy readers may limit their engagement to the
introduction since Beissinger has squeezed the gist of his book in a nicely accurate
synthesis there. Even counterrevolutionaries will benefit from The
Revolutionary City. Quite an irony but true! Indeed, the quantitative method
convincingly explains why certain post-revolutionary situations such as
Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya are stuck in loopholes. Beissinger’s method leaves no
space for self-flagellation (a path taken by several activists and
pseudo-historians). Again, the method enables readers to register that every
eventuality subscribes to the Hegelian logic of necessity where all that exists
could not have existed. The Syrian nightmare remains the exception that proves
Beissinger’s case: the more time it takes to defeat the incumbent and the
bloodiest the struggle, the more enduring will be the fruits for the proletariat.
________________________________________
[1]
Please check it at: https://scholar.princeton.edu/mbeissinger/software--
Fouad
Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID
iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz
