The event will focus on Mark R. Beissinger’s recent book: The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Princeton University Press, 2022). Mark’s book focuses on the question: How and why cities have become the predominant sites for revolutionary upheavals in the contemporary world? He addresses the puzzle by using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion survey and engaging examples from around the world. Mark highlights 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.
Mark R. Beissinger, who will be joining the event virtually, is Henry W. Putnam Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He previously served on the faculties of University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard University. His main fields of interest are social movements, revolutions, nationalism, state-building, and imperialism, with special reference to the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states.
Read more about the book here: scholar.princeton.edu/mbeissinger/home
Commentators:
Anne Wolf is a Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She researches Authoritarian Politics, with a specific focus on the Middle East and North Africa. She is also an Associate Editor at the Journal of North African Studies and a Senior Research Fellow at the Project of Middle East Democracy. She was previously the Margaret Smith Research Fellow in Politics and International Relations at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her current research uncovers why in democracies some people decide to mobilise for autocracy.
Stathis Kalyvas is Gladstone Professor of Government and fellow of All Souls College at Oxford. Until 2018 he was Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he founded and directed the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence and co-directed the Hellenic Studies Program. In 2019 he founded and directs the T. E. Lawrence Program on Conflict and Violence at All Souls College. His main fields of interest are the dynamics of polarization and civil war, ethnic and non-ethnic violence, and the formation of cleavages and identities. He has also researched party politics and political institutions in Europe.
Neil Ketchley is Associate Professor in Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations, the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, and Fellow of St Antony’s College. He is a political scientist of the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa working at the intersections of political sociology and comparative politics. Neil’s current research interests include episodes of mass protest in the MENA, the rise of political Islam in Egypt, and the changing profiles of regional political elites.
Chair:
Andrea Ruggeri is Professor of Political Science and International Relations and Director of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Oxford. He joined Brasenose College and the Department of Politics an International Relations at the University of Oxford in 2014. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Amsterdam from 2010. His current research deals with civil wars and peacekeeping. His broader research interests include collective political violence, state development, and comparative politics in Africa and Middle East.
