Revolutions Of The Late Twentieth Century

by Jack A. Goldstone (Editor), Ted Robert Gurr, Farrokh Moshiri

Departing from the “Great Revolutions” tradition, Jack A. Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, and Farrokh Moshiri have drawn together a variety of area experts to examine contemporary revolutionary crises in light of recent social and political developments. The result is a wide-ranging compendium of cases placed in current theoretical perspective.The book opens with a survey of theories of revolutionary conflict, ranging from Marx and Engels to Skocpol and Tilly. Next, Goldstone lays out an analytical framework for understanding contemporary revolutions that traces a sequence from processes of state breakdown and the ensuing struggle for power to the process of state reconstruction. The framework is then used to examine ten very different revolutionary crises—in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iran, Poland, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza. Factors implicit in state breakdown and reconstruction such as political and fiscal crisis, elite divisions, and mass mobilization are highlighted in the analyses of the individual crises.The concluding chapter, coauthored by Gurr and Goldstone, compares the origins, dynamics, and outcomes of the revolutions in the case studies and applies the findings to ongoing and prospective cases. Taken together, the contributors’ and editors’ work shows that the end of the cold war does not signal the end of revolution and that with proper attention to certain conditions and factors, revolutionary “surprises’’—such as those in Eastern Europe—need not catch us off guard in the years ahead.THIS PARAGRAPH FOR TEXT PROMOTION ONLYAppropriate for upper division courses in revolutions and social movements, Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century is fully documented, illustrated with maps, figures, and comparative tables, and bolstered by chronologies to accompany each country-specific chapter.

Genres: History, Politics

395 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

Jack A. Goldstone is an American sociologist and political scientist, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, and international politics. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 140 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution. He was also a core member of the “California school” in world history, which replaced the standard view of a dynamic West and stagnant East with a ‘late divergence’ model in which Eastern and Western civilizations underwent similar political and economic cycles until the 18th century, when Europe achieved the technical breakthroughs of industrialization. He is also one of the founding fathers of the emerging field of political demography, studying the impact of local, regional, and global population trends on international security and national politics.

Goldstone is currently the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He has also worked as a consultant of the US government, for example, serving as chair of the National Research Council's evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the Research Laboratory in Political Demography and Macrosocial Dynamics at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow.

His academic awards include the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, for 'Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,' the Arnaldo Momigliano Award of the Historical Society, and seven awards for 'best article' in the fields of Comparative/Historical Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, and Collective Behavior and Social Movements. He has won fellowships from the Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the MacArthur Foundation, the Australian Research School of Social Sciences, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Affairs and the Sociological Research Association. He has been the Richard Holbrooke Visiting Lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin, the Crayborough Lecturer at Leiden University, and a Phi Beta Kappa National Visiting Scholar.