The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion is a 2022 book by the American political scientist Mark Beissinger.
Using a dataset of 345 revolutionary episodes worldwide between 1900 and 2014, narrative case studies, and nationally representative surveys of participants and non-participants in four contemporary revolutions, Beissinger argues that revolution, once pursued mainly through armed insurrection in cities and later from the countryside, returned to cities in the late twentieth century in a new form he calls the "urban civic" revolution, which seeks to overthrow corrupt and repressive governments by massing large unarmed crowds in central urban spaces.
Jack Goldstone described it as "perhaps the most important new book on revolutions to appear in decades," and in 2023, it was named co-winner of the Gregory Luebbert Best Book Award for the best book published over the previous two years in the field of comparative politics.
Background, dataset, and the future of revolutions Shortly after the book's American publication in April 2022, Beissinger discussed the origins of the project in an online lecture hosted by the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He said the research began in 2010, when historians convened a workshop at Yale University on "blank spots" in the understanding of revolutions and asked him to address the relationship of violence to revolution. He recalled sharing the common assumption that revolutions had grown less deadly over time, but found that no systematic information existed to establish how much less deadly they had become, when the change had occurred, or what factors were associated with it. His initial attempts to gather such information convinced him of what a knowledge of global patterns of revolution might teach us about the ways in which populations challenge rulers from below and have these have changed over time.
In another interview with the Review of Democracy, Beissinger said that before the dataset of 345 episodes assembled for the book, there were "no comparable global records of revolutions," and that without such information it would be impossible to know with certainty whether revolutions had been growing more frequent, less violent, or more successful over time (with “success” defined narrowly as removing the targeted regimes). He described compiling a narrative and bibliography for every episode that he examined, embedding "a qualitative strategy within a quantitative strategy." He called the four surveys "the most detailed records that we have ever had about the individuals who participated in revolutions" and allowed comparisons across a wide variety of attributes between revolutionary participants, those who supported revolution but did not participate, those opposing revolution, and those who remained apathetic, thereby providing new insights into the nature of revolutionary coalitions and of societies experiencing revolutions. Analyzing the cross-national data was complicated, he said, because revolutions are rare events involving endogenous processes for which normal statistical methods are inappropriate. For readability, he confined the details of statistical methodology to the book's appendices. The full dataset, including the statistical files used to produce the book's calculations, was made available for download from his website. At the WZB lecture, Beissinger warned against considering his model of revolutionary onset as a forecasting tool, since it had not been tested out of sample, revolution as a phenomenon has continually evolved over time, and structural models of revolution consistently over-predict rebellion. The full dataset also includes cases that, for one reason or another, fell short of Beissinger's definition of revolution, as well as robustness checks for the effects of including these cases in the statistical analyses.
Beissinger told the Review of Democracy that the consequences of revolutions are "a tremendously under-studied topic" within social science. "The work is thin, and it's an area that's ripe for research," he added. Reflecting on developments after the dataset's cut-off, he said that regimes had learned ways of countering the urban civic repertoire by dislocating protests from government nerve centers and repressing them with greater vigor. This has led to a "more volatile synthesis of the revolutionary riot and the urban civic repertoire [that] may represent the future of revolution in cities." He added that as democratic backsliding proceeds, democracies' traditional immunity to revolution may be weakening. He thought that the United States had become "much more vulnerable to revolution under Trump" and that had the January 6 riot succeeded in overturning the 2020 election, "a revolutionary response by sectors of the American public was fully conceivable."
Summary In 1905 Kyiv, then an imperial industrial center of 300,000, fell into several years of failed revolt during Russia's 1905 Revolution, involving demonstrations of up to 20 thousand, armed insurrection, mutinies, pogroms, and peasant rebellion in the surrounding countryside, as well as hundreds of deaths. By contrast, in 2004 Kyiv had become a capital of 2.5 million and produced crowds approaching a million during the Orange Revolution. After seventeen days of revolt, the government capitulated, and the single death during the Orange Revolution was from a heart attack. The two uprisings, a century apart, give the book its subject: how the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities has changed the frequency, practice, and consequences of revolution.
Beissinger defines revolution as "a mass siege of an established government by its own population with the goals of bringing about regime-change and effecting substantive political or social change." The definition excludes military coups, electoral turnovers, and reform from above, but revolutions can be put to multiple purposes and can hybridize with other forms of regime-change. His unit of analysis is the revolutionary episode, successful (i.e., resulting in the removal of the targeted regime) or failed. For evidence, he assembled a dataset of 345 such episodes from 1900 to 2014, each with at least a thousand civilian participants. He paired it with narrative case histories and with nationally representative surveys from four revolutions: Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004 and Euromaidan of 2013–2014, and the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2010–2011.
Theoretically, Beissinger builds the book around what he calls the proximity dilemma, which he likens to the spatial trade-off within evolutionary biology between individual growth and predation risk. Cities are where a state's nerve centers sit and its coercive power is thickest. Revolutionaries operating close to power can disrupt a regime most directly, but they are also most exposed to its repression. Distance buys safety at the cost of leverage. As a result, urban revolutions tend to be compact affairs occurring within days and weeks, while rural revolutions stretch over years. He reads the modern history of revolution as an evolutionary process, as largescale social, political, economic, and technological change influence the nature of this trade-off, and regimes and oppositions manage the consequences. Through the early twentieth century, revolution was largely an urban armed affair, fought from barricades but usually defeated by better-armed states. From the 1920s onward, social revolutionaries traded disruptive capacity for safety and moved to the countryside, where they discovered the peasantry as a revolutionary force. The pivot was the Chinese Communists' retreat from the cities after 1927. By the late twentieth century, urbanization, land reform, and the end of the Cold War were dissolving the agrarian-bureaucratic order that, according to Skocpol, had sustained peasant social revolutions, which, Beissinger shows, went into sharp decline. But in the late twentieth century, revolution returned to the city in new guise: the urban civic revolution, an unarmed uprising that assembles as many people as possible into central squares and boulevards, paralyzing government and commerce through the power of numbers. Since 1985, urban civic revolutions have made up about two-fifths of revolutionary episodes worldwide, and their spread accounts for an overall rise in revolutionary activity around the world (from 2.44 new episodes per year in the first half of the twentieth century to 4.10 per year between 1985 and 2014).
Urban civic revolutions break out under conditions unlike those that foster the social revolutions of the twentieth century: not poverty and land inequality but middle-income economies, closed and personalist regimes, high executive corruption, and leaders long in office. Earlier theorists likened revolutions to earthquakes or wildfires; Beissinger proposes the hurricane, a storm that forms mostly where structural conditions favor it but develops contingently out of the interactions between regimes and oppositions. Once underway, urban civic revolts have overthrown regimes more often than other forma of revolution. However, only very large crowds tip the odds in favor of oppositions, and the violence that serves rural insurgencies backfires in cities, where there is no place to hide. This drives urban civic revolutions to seek to maximize numbers by pulling in all who oppose the regime, irrespective of policy preferences. This has been greatly facilitated by the emergence of digital media as a vehicle for mobilizing large numbers. Moreover, because they unfold over days or weeks rather than years, urban revolutions compress decision-making, magnify the effects of error and rumor, and turn contention into a struggle for control over public space; success is strongly associated with mobilization near the seat of government. Separate chapters of the book illustrate these interactive and spatial dynamics.
Using the surveys, Beissinger shows that participants in urban civic revolutions are disproportionately educated and middle class, more politically diverse than either supporters or opponents of revolution, and united at the moment of revolt in a “negative coalition” againstthe ruling regime over a variety of grievances (most prominently, corruption, economic issues, and repression). Accordingly, Beissinger argues that these revolutions are better understood as revolutions "against repressive and abusive government" than revolutions for democracy. A chapter on violence charts the steep fall in revolutionary mortality from its mid-century peak, as civil wars shortened, contention moved to the cities, and states adopted less lethal crowd-control technology, even as rural counterinsurgency grew deadlier.
Using cross-national data of developments following revolutions, Beissinger shows that regimes born of urban civic revolutions bring gains in political freedoms and government accountability, but in both areas fall short of the average electoral democracy. They inherit the old state apparatus largely intact, including its widespread corruption. On average, economic growth turns sluggish, they are accompanied by greater inequality, and they remain in power less-than-half as long as regimes produced by social revolutions. These consequences, he argues, to a large extent are the products of the urban civic model, which, in its desire to maximize numbers, rapidly assembles, in a makeshift manner, “all who favor the removal of the incumbent regime, irrespective of purpose."