Revolutionary Violence and Counterrevolution

Abstract

What type of revolutions are most vulnerable to counterrevolutions? I argue that violent revolutions are less likely than nonviolent ones to be reversed because they produce regimes with strong and loyal armies that are able to defeat counterrevolutionary threats. I leverage an original dataset of counterrevolutions from 1900 to 2015, which allows us for the first time to document counterrevolutionary emergence and success worldwide. These data reveal that revolutions involving more violence are less at risk of counterrevolution and that this relationship exists primarily because violence lowers the likelihood of counterrevolutionary success—but not counterrevolutionary emergence. I demonstrate mechanisms by comparing Cuba’s nonviolent 1933 uprising (which succumbed to a counterrevolution) and its 1959 revolutionary insurgency (which defeated multiple counterrevolutions). Though nonviolence may be superior to violence when it comes to toppling autocrats, it is less effective in bringing about lasting change and guaranteeing that these autocrats never return.

The Role of Violence in Nonviolent Resistance

“…Many of these relate more to the organizational survival of a campaign-through recruitment, funding (Haines 1984), the achievement of progress ranging from verbal recognition to concessions short of full success (Belgioioso et al 2021), and internal movement solidarity (Barrell 1993)-than to the ultimate victory of such campaigns. Indeed, no existing cross-national studies appear to suggest that people power movements tend to win more often when they coexist with a contemporaneous, organized, armed violent flank, although new work does claim that armed revolutions tend to produce the most durable dictatorships (Levitsky & Way 2022, Clarke 2022. However, when one considers the divergence of the findings in Table 2, it is clear why there persists an active debate in the field regarding the utility of unarmed collective violence.…”