Revolutions Reloaded: Updating the Literature

Abstract

Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe. By Mark R. Thompson. New York: Routledge, 2004. 192 pp., $104.95 (ISBN: 0-41530415-6). Mark Thompson's Democratic Revolutions is a much-needed update that seeks to address a variety of conceptual challenges that recent revolutions around the world have created for the comparative revolution literature. Unfortunately, the book is just a patch and not a truly significant work that helps us understand revolutions in a new way. The greatest drawback of this interesting book is that it could have been so much more. Thompson's introduction positions the book among other recent comparative studies of revolution—such as Jeff Goodwin's No Other Way Out (2001) and Misagh Parsa's States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions (2000). However, Democratic Revolutions does not measure up to these works. The key difference between Thompson's democratic revolutions and Goodwin's peripheral revolutions or Parsa's social revolutions is that Thompson has no overarching theoretical framework. He does not give us an explanation for democratic revolutions. What Thompson does do, however, makes Democratic Revolutions an interesting addition to the revolution literature that suggests new applications of old ideas. Rather than setting out a theoretical framework, Thompson is content to make the case that democratic revolutions do exist and are valid objects of study. He defines democratic revolutions as “spontaneous popular uprisings—peaceful, urban-based, and cross-class in composition—which topple unyielding dictators to begin a transition process which leads to the consolidation of democracy” (p. 1). To highlight …