Revolutionary violence and counter-revolution
By Killian Clarke, Georgetown College
What sort of revolutions are most weak to counter-revolutions? I argue that violent revolutions are much less possible than nonviolent ones to be reversed as a result of they produce regimes with robust and constant armies able to defeating counterrevolutionary threats. I exploit an unique dataset of counterrevolutions from 1900 to 2015, which permits us to doc, for the primary time, counterrevolutionary emergence and success worldwide. These information reveal that revolutions involving extra violence are much less susceptible to counterrevolution, and that this relationship exists primarily as a result of violence lowers the likelihood of counterrevolutionary success—however not counterrevolutionary emergence. I show mechanisms by evaluating Cuba’s nonviolent rebellion in 1933 (which succumbed to a counterrevolution) and its revolutionary rebellion in 1959 (which defeated a number of counterrevolutions). Whereas nonviolence could also be superior to violence in relation to toppling autocrats, it’s much less efficient at creating lasting change and guaranteeing that these autocrats won’t ever return.