There are two main ways of approaching the study of revolution in the contemporary world – and they are both wrong. So argues George Lawson in his book, Anatomies of Revolution.
On the one hand, Lawson argues, revolutions appear to be everywhere: on the streets of Yangon, Hong Kong, Minsk and Kobani, amidst the Naxalite guerrillas of Central and Eastern India, in the rhetoric of social movements like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, in film franchises ranging from Star Wars to the Hunger Games, and much, much more. Rarely do weeks go by without a revolution of one kind or another being proclaimed. On the other hand, there is an equally common, but apparently contradictory, belief – that revolutions are irrelevant to a world in which the big issues of governance and economic development have been settled. With the passing of state socialism in the Soviet Union, it is supposed, revolutions appear more as minor disturbances than as projects of deep confrontation and systemic transformation. What is left, for good or for bad, are pale imitations rather than ‘real’, ‘proper’, ‘authentic’ revolutions. Revolution, it seems, is nowhere.
Anatomies of Revolution sees both of these positions as untenable. The first makes revolution so all-encompassing that it becomes an empty term without substantive content – it’s too loose. The second fails to see the enduring appeal of attempts to overturn existing injustices and generate alternative social orders – it’s too complacent. The book’s main aim is to generate a more judicious appreciation of the place of revolution in the contemporary world, examining how revolutions emerge, how they unfold, and how they end. Its central task, therefore, is to unravel the anatomies of revolution.
This forum contains contributions from a range of commentators – Jack Goldstone, Adam David Morton, Eric Selbin, Maria Tanyag, Ayşe Zarakol – who took part in roundtables on Anatomies of Revolution at the Oceanic Conference on International Studies (OCIS) in December 2020 and the International Studies Association (ISA) Convention in March 2021. It closes with a reply by George Lawson. The essays raise a range of issues about, and pose a number of challenges to, the book. But all of the commentators agree that it serves as an essential starting point for assessing the myriad ways in revolution appears in the contemporary world.
The set image reproduces Iakov Chernikhov, Fantasy #67: Linear Resolution of 3-Dimensional Architectural Rendering in Axiometric Perspective, 1933.
Getting lucky
A few years ago, I got lucky. An editorial team that I was part of found ourselves at the end of our tenure and with money in the pot, money that needed to be spent. The lead editor proposed that the funds be used to host a workshop, which I would convene. They had just one [...]
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George Lawson’s Anatomies of Revolution offers both rich descriptions and causal analyses of several important episodes in the history of revolutions and embeds these in arguments that advance the scope and quality of our theories of revolution.
Lawson’s description of revolutions is [...]
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I begin with George Lawson’s own admission in his book, Anatomies of Revolution, in footnote 10, page 88, that “[T]he story of women and revolution is not, on the whole, well told…” and that, “to its detriment, [is] no better in this regard”. Indeed, the book does contribute to the analytic [...]
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George Lawson’s Anatomies of Revolution is a brilliant book: cleverly conceived, beautifully crafted, and pretty much the state of the art with reference to revolution. Lawson judiciously walks us through where we’ve been, are, and proffers a glimpse of where we must go, but it is by [...]
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There can be no bigger compliment to George Lawson’s new book Anatomies of Revolution, than to invoke the figure of Fred Halliday. For the last six years of teaching a course on revolutions in the making of “the international”, I have used a quote to try and grab students’ attentions about [...]
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As George Lawson observes in the introduction to Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), there is something elusive about the concept of revolution in the twenty-first century. Revolutions seem to be everywhere and nowhere. Listen to the news and you get the impression [...]
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