The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion - Softcover

Beissinger; Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691224749 ISBN 13: 9780691224749

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2022

Synopsis

How and why cities have become the predominant sites for revolutionary upheavals in the contemporary world

Examining the changing character of revolution around the world, The Revolutionary City focuses on the impact that the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities exercises on revolutionary processes and outcomes. Once predominantly an urban and armed affair, revolutions in the twentieth century migrated to the countryside, as revolutionaries searched for safety from government repression and discovered the peasantry as a revolutionary force. But at the end of the twentieth century, as urban centers grew, revolution returned to the city―accompanied by a new urban civic repertoire espousing the containment of predatory government and relying on visibility and the power of numbers rather than arms.

Using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion surveys, and engaging examples from around the world, Mark Beissinger explores the causes and consequences of the urbanization of revolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beissinger examines the compact nature of urban revolutions, as well as their rampant information problems and heightened uncertainty. He investigates the struggle for control over public space, why revolutionary contention has grown more pacified over time, and how revolutions involving the rapid assembly of hundreds of thousands in central urban spaces lead to diverse, ad hoc coalitions that have difficulty producing substantive change.

The Revolutionary City provides a new understanding of how revolutions happen and what they might look like in the future.

About this title

About the Author

Mark R. Beissinger is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics at Princeton University. His books include Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State and Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691224749
• ISBN 13: 9780691224749
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 488