Revolutions and world order: still the 'Sixth Great Power'?
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

Right, I think we're about ready to start as we clear the glass off the stage. It's a good sign, I think, that we're going to have a good discussion. Welcome to the Fred Halliday Memorial Lecture, where the title of the talk is Revolutions in World Order, Still the Sixth Great Power? Question mark.

I'm lucky enough, honoured enough to be the chair tonight. I'm Toby Dodge and I teach in the International Relations Department. I'm flanked on either side by George Lawson and Jasmine Garnie who I'll introduce more fully in a minute.

But I just thought it would be, it's a pleasure to be chairing tonight and I thank Rohan Mukherjee and Nita Lumi for organizing this because they put a lot of time into bringing you all here. And this lecture honors Professor Fred Halliday who was born in 1946 in Dublin and died in Barcelona in 2010 aged 64.

And I think it would be worth reminding ourselves why we hold this lecture each year and why Fred Halliday is such a huge figure both in the Lund School of Economics, in left-wing politics, in Middle East studies and in international relations.

He had an early career in radical journalism, moved to the Transnational Institute, was on the New Left Review's editorial board until he left in 1983, and was at LSE from 1985 to 2008, 24 years of which he was a professor in international relations.

in an obituary that George had a central hand in writing. He said Fred was such a dominant, took such a dominant position in the department that they needed two professors, a professor of international relations and a professor of Italy studies to replace him. And I think his books

The dominant books of his career indicate this. Arabia without Sultans in 1974, Iran dictatorship and development in 1978, the making of the second Cold War in 1983 as he moved towards international relations. My favorite paper of Fred's is in the New Left Review and it is called An Encounter.

with Fukuyama and I think that shows Fred at his philosophically most sophisticated interacting with Fukuyama and what modernity means. We then have Rethinking International Relations which still I think is used a lot in teaching and I think is a wonderful explanation of Marxism in international relations. The book I suspect that George is going to interact with in depth, Revolution in World Politics in 1999.

My favorite, Two Hours That Shook the World, which is Fred responding to the attacks of 9/11 and coming up with this theory of a greater West Asian crisis in 2002. And then the Middle East in international relations in 2005. So immediately you get a picture of a dominant intellectual spread across international relations and Middle East studies. I think a huge and influential figure in both.

But I think as I look out in the audience and see people of both student age, but also my own age, I'm struck by Fred as a PhD supervisor.

an academic mentor. I'm sitting with one of Fred's PhD supervisors here and he was a clear mentor and I see several of his PhD students in the audience now, senior academics spread across the university. So I think what we need to

to do is recognize him as an academic, recognize him as a mentor and a co-creator of a series of senior academics who now shape international relations and Middle East politics. And finally, a public intellectual. And I think all the obituaries of Fred when he died identified his public role. His son described Fred banging out...

newspaper articles on a typewriter, I think on a Sunday morning when he was trying to sleep in in the house. He had a ferocious hunger to write and to shape. And when we were preparing our articles about the hole that he left in intellectual life in Britain, I remember reading two articles that he wrote, one in the Listener and one in the Observer,

in the summer of 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq. And I was struck that they made two very different arguments.

for two very different audiences. And what Fred was trying to do constantly in his interventions in the public sphere was to challenge and educate and to say to people, look, it's not as simple as that. It's not as easy as that. Don't let your prejudices lead you into...

your thinking about this subject and I think his role as a public intellectual caused him a great deal of trouble, death threats, the loss of old friends, libel, a successful libel case that he fought because he was libeled. So I would like

To say that Fred was a huge figure, I still miss him every day. And I think bringing George Lawson to speak about revolution, I think is a very fitting tribute to Fred, both of his PhD students, one of his ex-PhD students, and doing work that...

pushes on the intellectual legacy that Fred left. So George is a professor of international relations at the Australian National University, works on the interface between global historical sociology, history and theory. He's written Negotiated Revolutions,

book in 2005, Anatomies of Revolutions, Cambridge 2019, my own favourite, Global Transformations written with Barry Bazan, it was published in 2015 and the most recently on revolution and unruly politics in the contemporary world. George will speak for 45 minutes.

And then Dr Jasmine Ghani, recently appointed in the International Relations Department at LSE, but having taught for many years in the International Relations Department at St Andrews, will then speak for few

15 minutes afterwards in response. We'll then open the floor to questions. And we'll open, those of you looking at this event in Zoom, please get your questions ready. Those of you in the audience, if you don't have any questions, I'll pick on random people. So please draft some questions as well and we'll carry on the debate.

So without further ado, please welcome George Lawson, who's flown all the way from Australia to give this lecture. And let's listen to him for 45 minutes speaking on revolution. Thank you. Thanks, Toby. That's very loud.

Can I echo you? I'll speak softly. Thanks, Jasmine. Thanks, Nita. Thanks, Rohan, Fred's family and friends and mine too. Thank you very much for coming.

I loved Fred. He was the most important academic influence on my life. He was one of the most important figures in my life more generally. A mentor in the true sense of the word, a trusted advisor to a younger person. I'm not young anymore. I probably wasn't then, but I felt it. But I do still feel deep bonds of personal and professional comradeship to Fred.

And so I'm coming to this talk tonight and with that sense of love and comradeship at the heart of what I want to say.

So the question I guess I ask myself on almost a daily basis, I don't know if others here do as well, is what would Fred think? You know, what would Fred think about Gaza? What would Fred think about Ukraine? What would Fred think about Trump's tariffs and the broader ascendancy of the global right? About the latest jokes from the Gulf transmitted via the Edgware Road?

I suspect that one thing Fred would enjoy pointing out is the transnational origins and etymology of the word tariff itself, which arrives in English via the Arabic word tarif, meaning notification, and via various intermediaries, including Italian and French colleagues. It's a very Fred journey, I think, one way or the other. But mostly I wonder what Fred would think about the subject on which he had the biggest effect on me, which was revolutions.

How would Fred place revolutions in the contemporary world? On the one hand, there's been a proliferation of the term. You find it as a common sense applied to almost any kind of change, however minimal, including most recently Keir Starmer's desire to have an electric car revolution in the UK. Now, the Starmer government is many things, but I don't think revolutionary is one of them.

On the other hand, we're clearly in a time of great turbulence. There's an awful lot of revolutionary-like stuff going on in the world. Here's an example from three recent data sets on the subject.

where you can see, and I'll get to this in a moment, quite different understandings of what revolution is or what revolutionary-like episodes are, but nevertheless, at least in the Bisinger most conservative take on the subject, 58 revolutionary episodes in the 15 years after 2000, and nearly three times that many in the Chenoweth and Shea database.

So what we have is clearly, on the one hand, some kind of proliferation of the term, some type of hollowing out of the term. And yet, at the other hand, a lot of revolutionary unruly politics going on in the world in a substantive sense.

So even as we live in these unruly turbulent times, we seem to be losing a clear sense of what revolution is. And this evening I want to ask, think through these issues with you and ask whether, as Fred and before him Karl Marx argued, revolution should be seen as the sixth great power of the contemporary world.

And this book, which Toby trailed for us, is Fred's, I think, major work on the subject, published in 1999. Stephen Kennedy. Welcome, Stephen. Now, what Fred was getting at was a line from Karl Marx from the 19th century and Marx's idea that revolution would be the sixth great power of its time that would bury the five great powers, Britain, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia.

Now, we know Marx was wrong about that. And you'll notice with the subtitle of Fred's book is the rise and fall of the sixth great power. So Fred himself seems to think that what the promise of the revolutionary dreams of the 19th and 20th centuries had come unstuck as we move towards the late 20th century.

But Fred still thought of revolution as an emancipatory force, a necessary means of contesting domination, injustice and inequality in the hope of creating a world that was better, not perfect, but better.

So my question is, what forms does revolution take in the contemporary world? Can we still see it as the sixth great power or potential sixth great power? What potential do unruly politics and revolutionary politics have today, even as we seem to find it both everywhere and then simultaneously nowhere?

So I'm going to start my search in an unusual place. This is The Castle, an Australian film released in 1997 in which the lead character, Daryl Carrigan, played by Michael Caton, he's the guy in the moustache, periodically tells one of his children that the price of an object they're thinking of buying is too high.

So in response to the seller's demand, Darrell tells his sons, tell him he's dreaming. You can see I've picked up the accent. That was my Australian accent for those who were wondering. So despite Darrell's incredulity, lots of these objects actually appear at some points, often in background, in the film itself. There's a pulpit, there's a pair of jousting sticks, there's all sorts of games you can play to try and find these objects that apparently his sons have been dreaming about buying.

So my point of starting here is to note that dreams are sometimes made real. And this is never more apparent than in revolutions, when what appears to be impossible in the morning becomes possible by lunchtime, becomes probable in the afternoon, and then inevitable come evening time. There's this compression of revolutionary time. So to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, revolutions are the realization of utopias.

But at first glance, the contemporary world doesn't seem ripe for utopian thinking. I think we more commonly think about the contemporary world as full of various forms of crisis, and here I've highlighted four. I want to get on to the protest part of this, so I'm going to just summarise a couple of lines from these points of crisis. The first is that they're clearly interlinked.

That, for example, the global right has a certain way of understanding and practicing militarism, which we're seeing most damagingly, but not only in Gaza. The notion of a 21st century capitalism with its concentration on platforms is itself in the notion of the sovereign individual that underlines 21st century capitalism, which we associate with figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and others, is itself unbiased.

a product and constitutive of the global right, which again has a particular way of either denying or seeking some type of technological workaround when it comes to the climate emergency. So the first point is that these are interlinked.

The second one is that in many ways the global right and its way of understanding crisis, constituting perpetuating crisis, is the dominant trope of our times. They are winning. And I think they're winning for two reasons. They're winning both actually because they're winning power, whether it's electorally or by other means, but perhaps most importantly they're winning because they're shaping the terms of political debate even when they're not in power.

Hence the defensive reactive response to left and centre-left parties when they come into power, as I think we've seen in this country, but also in Australia and presumably also in Canada in years to come.

So what I really want to just point out here is this notion of generalized interlinked crisis with a hegemonic global right at its core as setting the parameters for how we might understand the rise in protest or this significance of unruly politics that we see in the contemporary world. There's interlinked crisis that are themselves accelerating, intensifying, and synchronizing. So to put this most simply, crisis today appears to be everything, everywhere, all at once.

So polar crisis is, I think, the starting point for how we might understand the contemporary global conjuncture and how we might understand the rise of protest. But where are we if we think historically about the type of protest that we're in, but also the amount of protest that we're seeing around the world?

One point of comparison is to see it as the equivalent of the first couple of decades of the 20th century with both the constitutional revolutions that we saw in Iran, one of Fred's favorite countries both to study and to visit and to understand. In 1905, that period between 1905 and 1911, this wave of constitutional revolutions in many parts of West Asia and the broader world.

Or is this period following the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the revolutions that we saw or general sense of turbulence that we saw both in Europe and Asia and further afield during that period as well?

So taking Mark Bisinger's understanding of revolution, which if you remember from that initial slide was one of the more conservative takes on contemporary revolution, we have an average of around four new revolutionary episodes every year between 2000 and 2019, and at any one time an average of around 30 revolutionary episodes taking place around the world. So you have actual experiences of revolutionary protest, but you also have a much wider sense of revolutionary rhetoric

So as I'll go on to discuss in a little while, various militant Salafist groups, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that's taken power in Syria late last year, all the way from them to progressive social movements like the Movement for Global Black Lives around the world, also takes on the mental and the rhetoric of revolution. So this spreading of the idea of revolution between groups that we might understand on the far right and those that we might understand on the left.

So alongside lots of practice of unruly politics and revolutionary politics is this spread. So on the one hand, of course, maybe it's not surprising that this moment of polycrisis is met by these multiple forms of protest. If you think about one well-known expert on the subject, Mao Zedong, he said to have put it, of course, that everything under heaven is in utter chaos. The situation is excellent.

But to bring Mao's insight down to earth, I think we can maybe speak of two craters, dual craters, as Eric Hobsbawm would have it, of contemporary poly-protest. The massive protest, anti-war protest that accompanied the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and then those equally huge protests that followed the financial crisis of 2007-8.

I think what those protests spoke to was both the depletion in the material and symbolic capital of many Western states, a loss of confidence in various projects that the financial crisis and the war in Iraq represented. But they also generated, I think, a new coalition, a new set of actors that were mobilising from below.

And it's what Donna Della Porter called the "porporization of the working class" and the "proletarianization of the middle class." And if you look at major waves of protests that we've seen since then, including the Arab uprisings of 2010-11, that alliance between what Asif Boyack calls the "middle class poor"

Those that are middle class in terms of their status and professional capacity and in many ways their symbolic capital, but actually materially are seeing an erosion of their income, they're seeing declining property prices, they're seeing reduced welfare provisions, they're seeing a material relative loss of income and status out of keeping with what they expect to be something that they possess.

So in this sense, there's been this middle class poor, this pauperization of a particular group of people at the same time as many at the bottom end of the income scales have become even worse off.

So if we think of many societies around the world as constituted by a kind of apartment block, then the penthouses at the top have become much larger, the rooms in the middle of the apartment block have become squeezed, the basement has flooded, and perhaps most importantly, the elevator between those floors has broken down.

So there's been this retraction of the middle class, there's been this expansion and pauperization of the working class, and the same time as social mobility has gone down. And I think this alliance between these different groups of characters has enabled mobilization from below, even as there's been a loss in confidence by various state elites from above.

Now this speaks back to other forms of grassroots mobilization, such as the World Social Forum and the ultra-globalization movement of the early 20th century. And that shifting from that elite type of idea that there is no alternative to a much more positive constructive line that another world was, or in this slide, is possible.

Now, I'm a little hesitant to bring up these movements in this setting, given Fred's explicit hostility towards them. And I'll read out an example of this. He described the movement around the World Social Forum as, and this is the quote, "A children's crusade of intellectual demagogues, dreamers, and unreconstructed political manipulators peddling vapid recycled platitudes and narcotic incantations of their moral superiority."

Not much gray area there, and Fred definitely had a way with words. But I'm no fan of intellectual demagogues and unreconstructed political manipulators, but I am quite fond of dreamers, and I think Fred was too. As he puts it towards the end of the 1999 book, Revolution and World Politics, dreaming, the aspiration to a better world and the imagination thereof is a necessary part of the human condition.

So I think what Fred favored was borrowing from Eric Olin White, utopias. In other words, the goal of revolutionary movements is to turn the probably impossible into the improbably possible. But I think the difficulty we have with understanding contemporary revolution is in understanding or at least in accepting that there's more than one way of doing this.

From the two centuries on that followed the French Revolution, we tended, I think Fred here shared this, to see revolution as capital R, as a single historical motor, and progress itself that revolution carried with capital P as moving in a largely singular direction, and history itself therefore itself capital H being propelled by history towards some type of progressive end state.

So it was a curiosity for me when I was going back over Fred's work to see him both accept that view, I think largely, while also understanding how much the meaning of revolution changed over time and place. So very obviously from the early modern understanding of revolution as a circular movement, as if it was the planets orbiting the sun, to the sudden rupture that you start seeing from the end of the 18th century on, and up to, I think, fairly recently.

So the question here is, did the meaning of character of revolutionary utopias, real or otherwise, change again relatively recently? And I think the answer is they have.

And I think those of us who study revolutions haven't been quick enough to pick up on this change. Again, for that two centuries following the French Revolution, scholarship largely revolved around the great social revolutions of France and Mexico and Russia and Cuba and China and Nicaragua, Iran, and one or two others.

And these cases were associated with a violent transformation of social orders significantly underwritten by class-based movements from below. And they were clearly extremely significant world historical events. But I don't think they were the only type of revolutionary movement that we saw during that time. And they're certainly not the only type of revolutionary movement that we see in the contemporary world, hence this slide.

So we have a troubling of the concept and practice of revolution from that idea of singular social revolution. And I think Fred would be very interesting on this today. I think the 1999 book is really troubled by that kind of already existing shift, as we saw from the 1989 revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe.

So Mark Bisinger, for example, finds that only a quarter of revolutionary episodes since the beginning of the 20th century, so up to 2015, can be characterized as social revolutions. That's far fewer than the number of liberal revolutions, which is not a term that you find in common currency. And it's far fewer, again, than the number of anti-colonial nationalist revolutions, of which relatively few can be described as socialist or social, at least not straightforwardly so.

So I think what we have is a muddling of the concept of revolution at the same time as we're seeing a muddling of the practice of revolution. And this slide is a relatively crude attempt to start drawing out some of these differences. I'm not going to spend much time on this now because I'm going to talk about it a bit as the talk develops.

But I do want to point out the way in which both types of revolution are so bound up with the practice of revolution itself. I think revolution is relatively unusual in the sense that the practitioners of revolution are also the theorists of revolution.

whether it's going back to Marx and Engels or then Lenin and Trotsky and Luxembourg and Kollontai, whether we're thinking about Mao and Castro, Fanon or Ortega, Sankara, Khomeini, Comandante Romana and others. They're not just people who practice revolution, they also theorize it. They're making sense of the context in which they find themselves and developing a revolutionary practice that makes sense of the world that they see around them and they're seeking to radically change.

So the idea here is that we can't see revolution as a concept that's somehow removed or abstracted, let alone fetishized, operating in some kind of super-sensible realm above history and practice, but an idea that itself is forged through history and practice. And if that's the case, then it makes sense that, of course, it must change according to the times that it finds itself, including our contemporary era of polycrisis.

This is my working definition then in terms of where we might start thinking about a more open, dynamic, adaptive idea of revolution. So not wanting to swallow revolution into any type of just unruly politics, but think about its relative autonomy, but only its relative autonomy from other forms of protest.

It's not elite-driven change, but it can sometimes be extremely dramatic and radical, going back to the Meiji Restoration or China since its opening up since 1978, or various Gulf states and their extremely rapid autocratic modernisation. It's got to be quick enough that it can't just be a couple of centuries of parliamentary reform.

I think forcibly overthrow rather than violent overthrow, and we'll come back to that in a minute or two, but something extra constitutional, not just bound up in a particular legal order, however radical, that might be shaken up. That attempt, so not just success stories, but many more examples of attempted revolution rather than just success stories. And then this idea that you're actually trying to transform everything, at least that's the idea, you may not do it.

But it's not just something that's either a particular type of nationalization or redistribution regime on the one hand, or a particular political order or legal regime on the other, or even something content with thinking about everyday practices of various kinds, but something that's trying to do it all. That's my start for thinking about how we might understand revolution. And then I want to highlight three particular forms that I think that type of revolution can help us think about in the contemporary world. The first is people power.

So this is, I think, the preeminent form of revolution in the contemporary world. Erika Chenoweth says that the first two decades of the 21st century saw more unarmed people power revolutionary campaigns than the whole of the 20th century.

And then in Bisinger's recent study, that data set that I've been referring to, he says that eight out of ten movements since the end of the Cold War have been people power movements. So we're talking about those movements that are largely familiar to many of us today. They're huge movements.

whether it's 45% of people in Hong Kong that at some point are estimated to come out on one type of protest or another in 2019-20, or the still relatively large movements we see today in Serbia or Indonesia.

So the heritage here goes back to some of those dates that I've mentioned already in passing, whether it's the East Central European people power uprisings in 1989, the Philippine revolution against Marcos in 86, the Carnation revolution in Portugal in 74, the global, if preeminently, Euro-Atlantic movement in 1968.

So this is, I think, the preeminent form of revolution in the contemporary world, but it's one that appears to be becoming less successful. And I want to talk a little bit about why that's the case in a few minutes.

The second category is one that I call restoration revolution, which is violence and centralized and largely in many ways about renewal. It ties together this sense of an idealized past with some kind of utopian future. And I think this is the revolutionary potential of the radical right, of the global right movement, of various different white supremacists, but also some militant Salafist groups.

And there's a curiosity here, which again I'll come back to in a moment or two, where this is often a category that's relatively unstudied, if not ignored by revolutionary scholarship, including by Fred, who sometimes sort of chanced upon it or wrote the odd line about it, but didn't, I think, sustain it because he wanted to maintain that idea that revolution was progressive and secular and marching history along to a particular pathway.

The third type, which I'm borrowing from the sociologist Hussein Rezit, I'm going to call decentralised vanguardism. Here are my examples of what's going on immediately today in Myanmar and Rojava and various other places, where you're getting a commitment to this mass, decentralised, deliberative, democratic movement, mass participatory movement, where some type of militarised armed struggle is being grafted onto it. That has to have a centralised component.

but it's one that has this melding of these two traditions. So I'm going to unpack these three movements and carry out a very thread task, carry out a provisional balance sheet of their respective forms. All right, so starting with people power movements. I think the really crucial thing about people power movements is the concentration on means rather than ends.

So if you think about revolutionary movements again that we're used to, there was some type of logic that underpinned it that was really about by any means necessary. The point was to win because only by winning could you use the state to transform societies. Whereas this is different. This idea here is much more prefigurative. The notion that the ends of a revolutionary struggle must be united with their means. And actually a just revolutionary movement cannot be sustained through unjust means. So

So there's this focus on inclusivity, there's this focus on deliberation, there's this focus on pluralism. But I think there's focus particularly on three different elements, which I'll spend a couple of minutes on. The first is mass participation, the second is non-violence, and the third is a decentralised organisational structure. I'm going to use Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020 to illustrate my points here.

So the first one is just the sheer size, what Erica Chenoweth, probably the leading analyst of people power movements in the world, calls the power of numbers. That simply by generating these huge movements, sustaining them over time, occupying major public space, you represent as wide a portion of society as possible. And that itself makes it extremely difficult for states to coerce, particularly through bloody means, the people that are part of those protests.

So Chenoweth has actually developed an empirical rule that no revolution has failed once 3.5 percent of a population has actively participated in a peak event.

So although noting this is a high threshold that few movements reach, Chenoweth is clear that the bigger and more diverse a movement, the more likely it is to succeed because you reduce the likelihood of repression and you induce defections from the security forces. And this is an example of an academic idea that's crossed over

into protest movements extremely widely. So if you look at the recent hands-off movements in the US, the leaders all cited the 3.5% rule as the target of their particular movements, the figure that they were trying to reach. Now there's lots of questions that we can raise about the power of numbers approach.

Chenoweth thinks her data shows that these are between two to three times more effective as movements than the older model of revolution, the more violent vanguardist model of revolution. There's lots of debate about the coding that goes into that particular understanding and we can go into that if people are interested. But I think one thing that is clear is however good they are

reaching their immediate goal to remove a dictator, a family, a regime, they're much less good at what comes after. And they're much less good at what comes after precisely because of the power of numbers. So if you have these huge coalitions, just think about that Hong Kong example. How do you generate a revolutionary program that 45% of a population is going to buy into?

They might very clearly agree on what they don't want. They don't want that dictator, they don't want that system, they don't want that regime, they don't want that family. But in terms of what comes next, what's the project to be realized? How are we going to transform society? In other words, what happens if we win? That's a question that many movements find quite difficult. Just think of the counter-revolutionary coup by the military in Egypt in 2013 that followed the 2011 successful revolution there.

These movements often struggle to sustain a coherent program precisely because they're such vast coalitions. There's a similar kind of story when it comes to the issue of violence. So Chenoweth defines nonviolence as practices that do not physically harm or threaten to physically harm another. Now leaving aside the question of whether violence is reducible to physical harm but doesn't contain other forms of harm,

Even physical violence itself is very difficult to define. You take property damage, for example. For state actors, a protester damaging the window of a corporation or a particular political party during a protest is an act of violence. While the police violently evicting someone and leaving their possessions on the street is not an act of violence, but protesters would see that exactly the other way around. So it's clearly a contextual way of thinking about what nonviolence means in particular settings.

There are also in some societies, some groups that cannot be considered to be non-violent. So there's lots of research showing that whatever a black, predominantly black protest does in the United States or parts of Europe, it is never seen by the police as non-violent. It doesn't matter what its aims and tactics and motivations are, what its public utterances are. It's still going to be treated as a threat or a potential threat and actually a potentially violent one.

So in this sense, violence is a structural force, something that lots of anti-racist protesters deal with today and lots of anti-colonial revolutionaries discussed in the past. At the same time, very few movements actually operate in the absence of violence

if you think about violence as also constituting not just bombs and guns but also fist fights or the throwing of rocks or self-defense against the particular coercive apparatus. So following Charles Tillier actually might be more useful to think not in terms of non-violence and violence but in terms of armed and unarmed, where armed is guns and bombs, unarmed is

is people that don't use guns and bombs but are willing to use various forms of violence to defend themselves against this type of incursion in the case of Hong Kong tear gas and rubber bullets.

So these events are violent, but unarmed. And there's increasing amounts of research that I find convincing, including by Neil Ketchley and Ali Kadaiva, that says that most movements are actually violent, but unarmed. And if that's right, then that binary on which much of the people power type of understandings rest, the binary between violence and nonviolence actually breaks down. It actually breaks down quite meaningfully and quite sharply.

Finally, we come to organizational structure. So that concentration on the power of numbers, the concentration on revolution, not as an outcome, but as a process present in multiple acts of creation.

So if you think about Diva Woodley's research on the global movement for black lives, what she concentrates on is this whole notion of a leaderful structure. One that's based on taking seriously the lived experiences of those who are the most dominated, the most exploited, those at the sharpest end of these various forms of state action.

So this commitment to revolutionary change in these particular groups emerges from these multiple starting points that are in turn rooted in lived experiences. So it's not an accident then that you would have a leaderful structure or a decentralized structure. It's inbuilt, it's required, it's hardwired in that particular understanding of movements that are looking at the sharp end of state oppression.

And at the same time, the particular organizational form these movements take is itself seen as a revolutionary act. By sharing understanding, sharing connections, sharing relationships, by making connections of various kinds, you're in the process reimagining political possibilities. You're carrying out a utopianism. Utopianism of process, utopianism of means, as you're actually carrying out the political struggle itself.

So there's an ethical reason to actually be decentralized and leaderful at the same time as you might have a tactical rationale for being leaderful and dispersed that you don't get the police concentrating on particular individuals, in this case Joshua Wong, who people will probably know from the Hong Kong protests. He's been active for well over a decade there and spent much of his time since then in jail as a result.

So the idea is that you might remove the leaders of particular movements, but the movement itself will persist because it's not something that is only a product of particular leaders or a particular vanguard. The decentralization is not just an ethical choice, it's also a tactical one. So some of these issues around means ends, around non-violence, around effectiveness are alive in contemporary movements themselves.

There's one or two others I wanted to mention as a way of just moving us on, but also bringing Fred back into the conversation.

One is that for all of the goals of these movements to be relatively flat, horizontalist, decentralized, deliberative, and so on, you're never going to completely erode particularly hierarchies of which gender is an obvious example. Think of the violence against women in Tahrir Square in 2011, the fact that even in people power movements, women are still much more likely to be the symbolic head rather than the actual leaderful characters that actually take part in these movements.

and the way in which, somewhat depressingly, in these movements, even when they succeed, the aspirations to a far more emancipatory gender space becomes one in which women are pushed back into various forms of subjugation in the post-revolutionary period. The second issue these movements face is what we call the moderation curse. That because you're not attempting to seize power, because you don't have a single project that's then going to be instituted if you win,

then you allow a space for old regime networks and deep states to reestablish themselves. There's no attempt to fully dismantle the old social order, although all revolutions struggle with a degree of continuity with the old regime. There's an extreme version of this in people power movements, where there's a greater continuity between the old social

and the new, and hence a great disappointment very often in the post-revolutionary regime that you see. So all revolutions disappoint, but some disappoint more than others. And the way in which the Marcos family is back in power in the Philippines from 2022 is an indication of that, as is the way in which Central and Eastern European publics have turned to populism in many ways out of a disappointment with the post-1980 regimes to fundamentally transform their societies.

Then we have those last couple of issues, the state and the international. So why have these movements become less successful in recent years? Now a lot of the scholarship on these movements, including by Erica Chenoweth and her team, looks at the movements themselves, that says they're no longer fully non-violent in terms of their discipline, and that's a problem because it legitimizes state oppression.

Actually, the leaderful nature is actually a leaderless nature, which means that you don't have that kind of traction and coordination and coherence that will allow you to generate a particular project. Or simply size is reducing and we're not getting to that 3.5 threshold in a way that some movements used to.

And that may be true, but I think there's something missing here, or at least two things missing. And one is states. One is the capacity of states to actually learn, including learning, to oppress or outlast or co-opt or coerce these particular movements. It's exactly what the state in Serbia is trying to do. It's exactly what the Chinese state has done, the Russian state has done, the Iranian state has done, the Belarusian state, and so on.

There's a way of seeking to outlast or co-opt or coerce these movements that actually defangs their radical intent. At the same time, it's very difficult for these movements to blow from succeed unless there's some kind of international opening. And very often recently there's been an authoritarian shield or a counter-revolutionary shield that's actually prevented these movements from having any chance of succeeding.

Think about the role of China and Russia today in sustaining the military regime in Myanmar or the role of Russia in Iran in maintaining Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria from 2011 to 2024. Now, the removal of these shields can then provide an opening for movements from below of various kinds, whether people power or other, to succeed. But it's very difficult to do so unless you get that international opening in the first time.

So I think what we need here is not just a focus on the movement itself, on the society aspect of this analysis, or even one that tries to bring that in conversation with types of states, so a state-society type of analysis. I think what we actually need is an international state-society, three-leveled, multi-layered analysis. Exactly the agenda that Fred promoted and I think is still waiting to be taken up. Restoration revolution.

So here I think we have the example, I'll start with the example of Syria from late last year when the militants of this group, Hayat Takri al-Sham, took power ending a more than decade long civil war. Now the group's leader who you see in the middle there, the one not wearing a balaclava or hat, is Ahmed al-Sharra, also known as Abu Muhammad al-Jilani. Now what's interesting about him I think, one of the things that's interesting is he describes himself as a revolutionary.

And it describes the group itself as a revolutionary movement. And there seems to be a curiosity about how to deal with that, because on the one hand, you're getting a relaxing of sanctions by the British and the US governments, at the same time as other major international actors like the UN Security Council are still designating the movement, the group, as a terrorist organisation.

So how should we... Now there's close links between Hayat Takri al-Sham as a group and also between al-Shara personally as it was. Now the claim that al-Shara is making is that the group has been Syrianized. We're now interested in revolution in one country. There's no longer this attempt to reconstruct the particular region or the wider geography that militant Salafists operate within.

But there clearly are groups that still consider this particular ideology as a way of reconstructing parts of the region and other parts of the world as well.

It's worth remembering that at its high point Islamic states control the territory that included 8 million people. It had ministries covering everything from war and precious minerals to health and education. It rewrote education curricula. It deeply encroached on everyday practices and smoking and alcohol were banned and so on. And Hayat Zakaria Al Sham has begun to establish comparable codes.

Now militant Salafism isn't a single thing, but I think there are some groups some of these particular some of these types of groups that see themselves as operating in a transnational space that want to reconfigure the particular geographies that they're part of that want to seize the state in order to radically transform how governance operates how law operates however they practices and

a run that I think is worth taking seriously as a type of revolutionary actor. And it's worth remembering that until the 1970s, it wasn't uncommon to think about revolution and terrorism as being linked. We had lots of revolutionary terrorists. From the 1980s on, terrorism went down a different path, but I think it might be worth bringing them back together, at least for some of these movements.

thinking about how they understand violence as a cleansing force, thinking about their vanguardist organizational form. I think what's really unsettling here is in many ways, in sociological terms, if not in normative terms, they look more familiar as revolutionary organizations than the people power movements that have so disrupted our understandings of revolutionary protest over the past 20 or 30 years.

So I think what we have to allow here is there have always been, and there certainly are today, certain groups that seek to use violence to seize the state, to transform societies, not as a way of marching history along a particular progressive path, but to generate this curious, syncretic understanding which both this idealist past is used to transform societies towards some type of utopian future.

And it's worth remembering that many movements in the past conducted revolutions or at least radical politics not to rebuild society from scratch in some progressive direction, but to contain the dislocating effects of modernity, whether it was colonial and imperial projects of various kinds, the extension of global capitalism, projects of state transformation, the disruptive effects of new technologies, challenges of often dramatic cultural changes, and more.

and some revolutionary uprisings like the movement that seized power in Iran in 1979 underline that sense of restoration, revolution, a kind of renewal, but a radical one. And that strikes me as fairly important in a time when the global right is hegemonic, that we actually take them seriously in terms of their ideas, in terms of their projects, and in terms of their practices. And one way of doing so is to think about restoration as an attempt to capture both this moment and this moment.

Now, I hope the shortcomings are fairly obvious. The extremity of violence, the deeply exclusionary vision, the control of women's lives and bodies and the close association that these movements have with despotism.

But I think in terms of our analysis, I think what you have here is a movement that has almost the opposite problem of people power movements. If people power movements emphasize means more than ends and therefore struggle to consolidate a revolutionary transformation even when they win,

The problem here is this concentration on outcomes rather than means justifies extreme violence, justifies tyranny, justifies despotism, justifies what Fred called an indulgence of violence and a tyrannical streak that regrettably is as much a part of the revolutionary tradition as ideals of emancipation.

All right, third and finally, decentralized vanguardism. Movements that combine a commitment to horizontalism, to democratic deliberation, to decentralization, along with an acceptance of the need, depending on context, for armed struggle.

Now again, I think there are roots to this particular idea. I would highlight Rosa Luxemburg, the early 20th century German socialist, and her critique of the Bolshevik revolution. And I'll give you a couple of quotes.

Luxembourg, she says that socialism cannot be something for which a ready-made formula lies complete in the pocket of the revolutionary party. She goes on, socialism should only be and can only be a historical product born out of the school of its own experiences in the course of its realization, a result of the development of living history.

So again we get the idea that revolutions are not abstract formulas, but forged in history, in practice, from the currents and contexts.

that radical actors and groups find themselves operating within. There's no commitment here to an easy utopianism of ends, as we find in lots of traditional revolutions of the modern era, and I would argue in restoration revolutions, nor is there a utopianism of means that we find in people power movements, but there's an understanding of the practical necessity of revolutionary politics,

to meet particular contexts. I'll give you just a couple of examples as we go. One from the early 1970s in Trinidad and Tobago.

in which the National Joint Action Committee, that's the NJAC that you see on the slide, generated an organic process in which institutional forms emerged out of the struggle itself. And that unarmed resistance was then grafted onto a guerrilla tactic of the National Udham of Freedom Fighters, where you had decentralized people parliaments on the one hand, and you had this vertical organizational structure of the armed movement on the other, and you had a coalition between the two.

But we have more contemporary examples as well from Myanmar and also from Rojava. In Myanmar you have both a decentralised, deliberative, horizontalist, unarmed civil disobedience movement which is dominant amongst many parts of the youth, particularly in the major cities.

but it's an umbrella movement alongside armed groups, some of which have been fighting the state for over half a century. In this picture, you're getting characters from the civil disobedience movement being sent to the ethnic armed movements along many of the frontiers in Myanmar to receive military training. At the moment, there's a kind of armed stalemate between the two groups, but one that seemed highly unlikely only a year or two ago.

An example in the bottom right is Rojava, probably a better known case for people here just because it's been around for longer, where you have this commitment to democratic confederalism based on highly participatory, highly egalitarian, decentralized assemblies combined with a people's army, including women's only protection units.

So you're getting these blended movements, these hybrid movements emerging from melding traditions together, as has always been the case in revolutionary practice, but that we haven't always been quick enough or smart enough or aware enough to actually study and move with. It's revolutionary practice that, if you like, has gone ahead of revolutionary theory. So that brings us to today.

so the last section of fred's book in 1999 is titled the permanence of unrest and fred highlights the ways highlights the ways in which people will always mobilize the radical rejection of the given true enough and ongoing examples of butchery before starvation and terror today in gaza demonstrate all too starkly the need to keep radically rejecting the given

What I think the role of the revolutionary movement does in these type of conditions is to ground people's experiences, to ground their understandings and practices of domination and exploitation and justice in human action.

If people think that the causes of your oppression are defined by God based on some type of natural selection based on gender or race or colony, if they're bound to fail in the face of overwhelming regime force, then you're likely to accept the conditions of your subjugation. But if you can ground these conditions in a particular ruler or regime or state, in historical conditions rather than something natural and innate,

then perhaps, just perhaps, something can be done about it.

So revolutionary utopias here become a means through which the dominated, the exploited, the excluded and dispossessed conceive themselves to be part of struggles that aren't just righteous, that's the utopian bit, but also achievable. That's the real or realistic or concrete bit. It's the grafting together of the real and the utopian that I think both highlights why unrest is permanent, but also why it takes these different forms across time and place.

So today, as I've tried to outline, I think unruly politics is virtually everywhere. The age of polycrisis really is also an age of polyprotest. And trying to make sense of the ways in which polyprotest forms in contemporary world politics, I've tried to highlight three main currents. And I think these are likely to coexist for some time to come. As Fred acknowledged at the end of that 1999 book, revolutions are always unfinished.

And that doesn't mean that they represent the sixth great power of contemporary world politics any more than they represented or could bury the five great powers of the 20th or 19th centuries. And there's a curiosity that the three major powers of the contemporary world, with apologies to India for the moment, of the United States, China and Russia, are themselves revolutionary states.

But I think there's no real attempt by contemporary revolutions to become great powers along those lines. But that doesn't mean that there isn't revolutionary schemas and practices around the world today. So I think in that sense, while revolutionary dreaming is a constant form, its aspiration or its character aren't. Because revolutionaries adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves. And sometimes, if only sometimes, these revolutionary utopias are made real. Thanks.

That was superb, as we expected. And now Jasmine has the daunting task of speaking and summing up and critiquing and putting her own stamp on the evening. Is it here? I'll sit here. Thanks, Toby. Thanks very much. Thank you, Nita. Thank you, Rohan, for inviting me to be a discussant today.

As one of Fred Halliday's last doctoral students, it's an honour for me to be able to celebrate him and his work in this way. I think that makes us academic siblings.

And especially thank you, George, for your excellent lecture. It's thought-provoking and timely in its own right, but also it's a wonderful tribute to Fred's legacy. So there's so many really interesting parts to your lecture, and I think it's part of a longer paper that you're also working on, but I do want to pull out just a few elements that stood out to me as important and helpful. So first of all, you remind us that revolutions...

are processes and not necessarily contained events. I think that allows us to be a bit more careful and expansive in how we define success and failure of revolutions or revolutionary movements. I really appreciated your point about the deep interconnectedness between theory and practice and that the two feed off each other.

Your typology of contemporary revolutions helps us to think through the complexities of the various forms that revolutions and revolutionary movements take. And I thought your point on the role of dreaming and imaginaries in the current political moment was apt and important and resonant. So I've got a couple of questions, which since you're the expert on revolutions, I'm genuinely interested in your answers and reflections, and maybe a couple of friendly critiques or provocations.

So my first question is about your category of people power movements. I think your analysis here is excellent. It really helps us to make sense of so many of the movements and protests that we're seeing are coinciding on a global level and not on the same causes but often with similar features.

So very relevant for the times we're in. And you mentioned that this is a form of revolutionary movements that are increasing right now. And just prior to that point, you had located...

to some extent, the emergence of increasing revolutionary movements now in the Iraq war and the financial crisis earlier on in the 21st century. But I wonder if you could speak a bit more to the structural reasons of why, why people power movements in particular seem to be on the rise now. Is this something cyclical or is there something different about this increase from people power movements in the past?

And you've mentioned a lot about class in your talk, of course, given how closely associated it's been with revolutions. You did mention gender, you mentioned race. But I wonder, what do you make of age? So is there something generational about the increase of people power movements that we're seeing now? So my second point is, which revolutions get remembered?

and how does that shape scholarship on revolutions, including your own?

So I was lucky to read your paper beforehand. So I took the opportunity to do a search in your talk for the word France in relation to the French Revolution. It comes up five times. I did a search of Russia in the context of the Russian Revolution and it comes up five times. And I did a search for China in the search of revolution and it comes up four times. I mean, you mentioned these countries in other contexts, but specifically about revolution.

and their revolutionary past. The Haitian revolution was mentioned zero times in your talk. Now this isn't a critique about Eurocentrism because you provide a plethora of non-Western examples of revolution in your talk. But I would say that the absence of the Haitian revolution is notable, not just because it's one of the most interesting and consequential revolutions of the modern era,

but precisely because of the impressive erasure of the revolution in 19th and 20th century Western scholarship and teaching and popular discourse on revolutions. So I've been writing a paper on Kant

And there's a great article by the Kantian scholar Dilek Hussein Ziadigan where she sheds light on Kant's obsession with the French Revolution. So he loves to talk about it all the time. It's there in his everyday conversations with colleagues, with his students. It's in his diaries. It's in his personal notes. You can find them in his lectures. And yet there is this conspicuous silence and visibilization of the Haitian Revolution in his work.

which of course is entirely concurrent with the French Revolution. And it's not because it's far away that we can say this is the reason why it's not there, because the Haitian Revolution of course was deeply entangled with the politics of and the financing of the French Revolution.

the French Revolution with which he was so enamored. There was even a boycott in Germany at the time of sugar imported from France because it was sourced from Haiti. So there were movements, there were individuals who were activists on behalf of Haiti. So there's a very active discussion about the dualities that these two concurrent revolutions threw up and yet it's entirely missing from Kant's work. And this is somebody who spoke about and wrote about everything.

So which of course has a bearing on future knowledge production given how influential Kant is in Western knowledge production. So there's a very good point that you made in your talk where you said, and I quote, "Perhaps the meaning and character of revolutionary utopias might have changed more recently."

Sure, and you gave reasons for why they have and they should in your talk, and you did that really well. But the meaning and character of revolutionary utopias might have changed less recently over the course of the past 200 years if there had been a more expansive compendium of revolutions that people were and could be learning from.

So we do have, of course, more recent work by historians like Michel Truliot, of course, by sociologists like Rominda Bambra. As you know, I ask scholars like Robbie Sheelan who have sought to restore the narrative of the Haitian Revolution to our scholarship and teaching.

So it's increasing our awareness of it. I don't just want to make this about the Haitian Revolution, but to go back to my original question then, why do some revolutions get forgotten? And what causes other revolutions to be remembered? And how might that affect both our knowledge production, but also contemporary practical repertoires of revolution? So that's my second point. So on to my third point. So I really enjoyed the denouement of your talk where you spoke about utopias, and

But I wonder if your binary between unrealistic and realistic utopias is in itself unrealistic and couched in something inadvertently normative. So abolition movements during the transatlantic slave trade, the history of indigenous resistance, the civil rights movements, the Palestinian intifadas, these are all examples of, to quote your category, people, power, mass movements.

And they were in part, not entirely, but in part large segments of those movements were deeply tied to cosmologies that one could say from a purely scientific or social scientific basis were or are deeply unrealistic.

actually the cosmologies and the utopias they produced were in fact meant to be unrealistic. And I remember going to see a Smithsonian exhibition of indigenous and African American art from the 20th century about five years ago in Washington DC. Incredibly moving, incredibly moving exhibition.

But they all connected their physical and temporal emancipation with spiritual emancipation and the unseen. This is the common theme through all of the works of art. And some of them were from the early 20th century, some of them from the mid, and some of them from later.

In contrast, looking at your definitions of revolutions, your typology, cosmology or religion, however you want to define it, was pretty much confined to that middle category of restoration and revolution. And I don't think that you were saying it's not present in the other categories, but where it was present was in that section. And that section was cast with...

a gentle, I think, but also liberal disapproval of the restoration revolutions. I don't think you're being overly normative, but I noticed that through the categories of people power and the decentralized vanguardism, though they were flawed and you acknowledge those flaws, they're still centered around democratic ideals, rational concerns, whereas the groups in that middle category of restoration revolutions were all a bit unsavory.

But that's where, if you're going to locate cosmologies and religions, you could locate them. So all of that is to say, I wonder if you could be a bit more embracing of unrealistic utopias and recognize the role that they play in sometimes sustaining realistic utopias. And not just for the unsavories in Restoration Revolutions, but for your other two categories as well. Because otherwise I think we lose something from our understanding of the plurality of revolutionary movements

and also the profundity of what mobilizes some of those movements. Okay, so and then my final point is to return to your great and crucial recognition that theory and praxis are deeply intertwined and indeed thinkers were, are revolutionaries and vice versa. This is such an important point.

And in some ways we often talk about revolutionary ideas, but where do we locate those ideas? Where's the agency? It's from these thinkers, from the revolutionaries. And so that got me thinking about, and not to make it sound self-absorbed, we're in a university, we're academics, we're students as well, but what about the role of universities in this rising revolutionary era? Firstly, can revolutionary thought emerge from intellectuals in the university?

or if there are revolutionary intellectuals in the university, are they always necessarily a product of praxis outside of the university, not limited by the constraints and the co-optation and neoliberalization that comes with the university? And what does that also mean for what I see is an increased reassertion of the binary, I'd say constructed, perhaps a false binary, between the intellectual and the activist?

So I've noticed, I don't like the term activist. I just put that out there. But since it exists in binary to the intellectual, let's use it. So I've noticed the label scholar activist, scholar activist is often used in a pejorative way, even if it's not explicitly said. Or it attracts disdain as somehow diluting the objectivity of the scholar.

There's something ideological about the scholar, therefore can they be objective? Can they be rational? And this being the ultimate pursuit of knowledge production, it's problematic. Whereas the term scholar practitioner is viewed or used in a more praiseworthy context, and I've seen it used in...

reference to Joseph Nye who died recently and well deserved all the accolades and given his role that he played of reaching out of the ivory tower and his public engagement Toby spoke really well about Fred's public engagement as well so this is often seen as something laudable it's a reflection of the scholar using their knowledge for the sake of impact societal impact being

being willing to advise policy, as I mentioned, beyond the ivory tower. But I was thinking about the real difference between the two. So a scholar who attends a protest or organizes a protest on the one hand, and then a scholar who advises government on the other, are the two not equally politicized? Except one contests power.

and the other does not. The other is actually, to some extent, advising or upholding power. So let me expand that then to thinking about the role of students. And I don't think we can overlook the most, I would say, significant phenomenon to sweep across universities over the past 19 months across the globe, but especially in Western institutions, in the United States, here in the United Kingdom, across Europe.

which is the rise of and the momentum of the Palestine Solidarity Movement. Mobilization through teachings,

through protests, through calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions, the BDS movement, and of course through the encampments, which I thought you gave a lovely summary of the utopias that are being created through people power movements. And many encampments were seeking to do just that. So is this revolutionary? And what within the university, specifically within the university system,

inspires this people power type of revolutionary movement? And then what does that or can that do for people power movements beyond the university?

Do they have any impact on it? Or is it just as often, again, with quite a bit of disdain, it's referred to as it's just a fad that students are going through, that they've grown out of? Or is there a deeper impact of these types of movements that we've seen within the university? And I think it must be doing something.

Otherwise, the first actions and executive orders by the Trump administration arguably wouldn't have targeted universities. So what's the relationship between what's happening in society and the universities, especially in this moment? So I think I'll leave it there, but really look forward to your reflections, and thanks again so much.

That was superb. We have about 15 minutes. So with your permission, I'll collect some more contributions from the audience and then we'll give you the difficulty of rolling in your answers to those four very powerful points with other further points from the audience. Otherwise we're going to completely run out of time, aren't we?

So I look to the audience and I look to the internet to see if there's any questions there. Who wants to ask the first question after that superb interview? Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

Hello, thanks very much.

for the lecture and the discussion. I actually had a question, but I wanted to kind of maybe extend Jasmine's question about Haiti and wondered whether it was a good example of decentralized vanguardism in terms of the final category of contemporary...

movements. But the question is actually something a bit more kind of practical. Has the balance of power shifted towards the state? So if you look at all of the ways in which states are able to run interference now, particularly the digitalisation of all of these platforms, increased surveillance powers, militarisation of security forces and all the rest of it, has this shifted the balance of power, I suppose, towards the states and away from movements? Thank you. And I think we have a question there that the person with the hand up.

Thank you, George. I wanted to ask or comment on the definition of revolution, which seems to me you have broadened quite considerably. What are you gaining, but what are you losing by leaving out change achieved? You talk about revolutionary episodes, you talk about attempted revolution being included in your definition. That means that if

whatever it is, has failed, it is also included in that definition. And it seems to me that there is a loss there. I understand the gain, but what is the loss? Thank you. Right. Some more questions? Ah, yes. Hi. Thank you for the...

Great lecture and discussion. My question is set in the context of the literature relating to the international relations of the Middle East, which obviously Fred, you integrated his thoughts on the revolution. Into the microphone. Sorry. My question is set slightly in the context of the literature of the international relations of the Middle East, which obviously Fred integrated his thoughts about the Iranian revolution and so on.

In any reading list, I think nowadays one would also have, say, the work, The International Politics of the Middle East by Ray Hinebush. And when she talked about the Middle East needing... The complexity of the Middle East needing a hybrid approach involving structural realism, historical materialism, front policy analysis and constructivism. And my thoughts on this is...

In Fred's focus on historical materialism, so historical structures and so on, what role do you feel he played, he assigned to constructivists? Or when we think about revolutions, especially, for example, the Arab uprise in 2011, one of the trends in the literature was the, in a sense, a predominant trend to some extent, was that notion of authoritarian stability. And yet it was perhaps...

the butterfly effect, if you want to call it, of the social media, of a fruit seller in Tunis going through and overturning. So in a sense, my question is, did Fred underestimate the potential role of constructivism in his analysis of revolutions, the way that thought structures and so on, and what weight do you assign to that theoretical perspective? Thank you.

And the final question in the corner there before giving it back to George and asking him to deal with it. Can you guys hear me? Cool. So I come from Georgia and just above Georgia, I think everyone knows, is Chechnya.

And after the First and Second Chechen Wars, we had quite a bit of a prior struggle from Sufi leadership and Salafist groups. And after these wars, there was a big question about... There were multiple revolutionary groups, and one of the big questions was...

had any of these revolutionary groups, you know, had they been sustained without Russian, you know, oppression, which this is not just specific to, you know, church and groups, but actually all over the world, we find that a lot of revolutionary groups do face sanctions and oppressions from other countries. So my main question is, when you have something that is restorative as a main focus in the revolution...

How does one change... When they get into power, they lose the inertia from the revolution. How does one change that so there is progress instead of just power? If that makes sense.

Right, George, I'll leave the floor to you and a few brief questions, but also I'm... No, no, no, I'm carrying the image of Joe Nye compared to Fred Halliday, two different activists, one inside the state and one outside the state, but I'll leave it to you. Thanks, Toby. My pleasure. Thanks, Jasmine, thanks, everyone. I'll just crack on, shall I, and just see how we go.

In terms of the people power movements that you started from, Jasmine, where did they come from and why do they have the traction? I think there's a couple of different things. I mean, the one is they were learning from what happened to modern revolutions and the tendency to turn into some form of authoritarianism. So there was a very deliberate anti-version of that. You look...

the Central Eastern European dissidents, you can find that very clearly in their writing. The sense to which that by any means necessary, the ends justifies the means logic can so often end up in despotism and tyranny. But the second thing I think, and this gets to your point of which get remembered and which doesn't, is there was a current

of people power movements that was there. We just didn't spend much time concentrating on them because they weren't the preeminent current or they didn't seem revolutionary enough in terms of that particular historical period. So you can trace it back

to various anti-colonial struggles. I mean, the great hero of people power movements is Gandhi, after all. So that current of people power movements, whether it had that normative stream through radical civil rights protests and then various forms of revolutionary or at least radical eruptions was there. It was just the non-dominant strand of revolutionary practice.

I think that what was new about the contemporary version was that although I think that ethical normative dimension was there, I think it developed the strategic logic. It developed that it works. So that line from Erica Chenoweth that it's two to three times more effective than other forms of revolutionary protest...

was something that clearly, if you're a group in Georgia or you're a group in Syria or you're a group in Kenya or wherever it might be, then that is an idea that makes sense. And it is, on the face of it, a very powerful one, which is what do you do

In asymmetrical protest, when you're faced with a state that's armed to the teeth and maybe learning from other states around it that what it should do is hold steady and fire on its own people, it doesn't make much sense to pick up a gun because it just allows them to mow you down that much more easily.

So the idea was that it makes sense strategically to not play by the rules of your adversary and to make it at least hard for them to coerce you. They can't throw everyone in jail, it looks bad, you've got an interdependent set of trade relations, particularly if you've got a liberal ally of your estate, then they need you to at least play human rights at some level for their own domestic audiences. So you might have military aid or a particular type of trade deals turned off

if you start firing on your own people. So I think there was a long-standing ethical, more submerged tradition that then got grafted onto a more strategic set of decisions.

And there was also something powerful about the idea that revolutions weren't just a young person's game. I mean, they are, but not only. One of the great things about the power of numbers, when you have a predominantly or entirely nonviolent or unarmed protest, it allows more people to come to the streets that otherwise wouldn't. You don't just need the young men, right? You can actually have a far greater representation, whether it's around gender or various minority groups or whatever it might be, that feel safe and feel part of that particular movement.

So I think it makes a lot of sense in terms of where it came from. I think the problem, which really gets at Mira's point, is that there's no theorization of the state there.

I think you went from analysis within revolutionary studies that was almost entirely focused on the state and on various different structural dynamics, and the response to that was to go far too voluntarist, to spend far too much time on movements. If movements did the right things, they'd win. If they didn't do it, then they didn't. You don't have to spend very long thinking about, let's take the Arab uprisings of 2010-11.

There's a reason why Syria doesn't go the same way as Tunisia and Egypt, and it's because it's that part of the wave where Assad looks over and says, well, the last thing I want to happen is what happened to Mubarak and what happened to Ben Ali, so I'm going to hold steady here. I'm going to hold my nerve. And the various different elites around him decided, for a while at least, to do the same thing, and it helped that he had very powerful international backers. That's why I think you need that international state society analysis in dealing with Syria.

these particular movements. I think the states are absolutely back in that respect. A less liberal, less Western order, a more pluralist type of international order, a more regional type of international order is also one way you get these authoritarian shields where states themselves are not just

in and of themselves recognizing their own power to co-opt or see or outlast these movements, but also have allies that are backing them to do so. So I think that's one reason why you are seeing there is a return of the state again type of moment here. I think the point about Haiti is very well taken. I got such a cop-out, you know, it's like, I've worked on Haiti. Yeah.

It wasn't in this talk, you're right. It's not something that I tend to forget, but I did this time, which in and of itself is interesting, I think. And thank you for making the point. I think there's two points here. I mean, one is that

There's a very obvious reason it gets forgotten. It's deliberately elided through Eurocentrism and through a failure to take that type of struggle seriously, even though, as you say, it was the most important colony of its time, had the largest French expeditionary force ever sent overseas, and Napoleon sent his brother-in-law to get the job done, which he didn't. Slavery's abolished, and then...

and all the rest of it. So it's an incredibly important uprising, and Kant may not have known it, but Hegel did at the time and spent a lot of time thinking about just how important it was. I guess what I would like to say there is that I think...

The way that I find this interesting to think about is thinking about France-Haiti together. It's part of a transnational field of contention where the two are going back and forth and you can't understand one without the other. You can't understand debates in France and the metropole around rights without understanding the way that race troubles those idea of rights. You can't understand simply the material events unless you start thinking about them together. Take an obvious example,

Tucson is the sort of Trotsky of Haiti, right? You know, what if...

he'd actually been around rather than Dessalines, but he's not because the French arrested him, taken him to the Fort de Jeune, he's died there. So, you know, the revolutionaries of 1789 have become the jailers of 1792. So I think there's very powerful ways in which we might start thinking about a transnational field of contention where Haiti and France are their own dual creators in their own ways, but actually also connected ones.

I think your point about unreal and real utopias in my own binary is very powerful, the way that actually unreal dreams make space for real utopias. I think that's just a fantastic point which I take very well. I think that that's why Fred thought he didn't like the World Social Forum and related movements at the time. He thought they were unreal and he thought that therefore they were going to make things worse for actual existing revolutionary politics.

I don't think that's right for two reasons. One, for the reason you lay out, that actually those unreal utopian visions can themselves provide a space within a broader field of praxis for different types of radical politics to emerge. But also because they weren't unrealistic in many ways. In many ways, they were the ones who were adapting to the circumstances in which they found themselves and trying to generate new coalitions that made sense of the way power was moving in the world and within particular states.

In terms of universities in particular spaces, I still think for exactly the reasons you ended up with, universities are dangerous spaces. I think the global right recognises that very well. That project in the US, the project in Australia to defang universities, to remove them from funding, to require all sorts of conditionalities to still be supported by the state, is a global project and it's one where the right has recognised its own great

or at least potential grave diggers. I mean, I still think your point about it's okay to be a practitioner but not to be an activist is a really, really powerful one. And Erica Chenoweth is an interesting example because Erica Chenoweth is, after all, based in the same school as Joe Nye. She's based in Harvard. She's based in the Kennedy School.

And she, I think it wasn't easy to appoint her, but she was a kind of safe radical in some ways in terms of how she works, partly because methodologically she works within normal political science. In many ways she acts in a certain normal political science way, even as she clearly is bringing a particular type of normativity and activism to her intellectual work.

So I think on the one hand, it's a point very well taken and speaks to our times that we don't recognize those roles as equivalent, but in many ways, see one as legitimate and one not. But in terms of the student part of it, I think the encampments are a fantastic example. The other very everyday way, but powerful way is to teach this stuff.

I've just finished a course on contemporary unruly politics where the task of students at the end is to design your own unruly movement. So here you have various examples, let's see what you do. And I don't know whether I'm more scared by the ones that trot out the 3.5% or the ones that start wanting to generate particular terrorist cells. But at least they're thinking and they're coming up with stuff. And I find the radical imagination of students to be very much alive and well.

Final couple of things. So, Katerina, in terms of what you lose, I don't think you lose very much. I mean, you do lose a degree of specificity, but, I mean, that notion of you only know after the fact what a revolution is, is so difficult to assess in the first place. How much change is enough and when do you start counting? You know, if you were to assess...

Haiti, 10 or 20 years after the fact, what would you see? If you assess it 50 or 100 years after the fact, what would you see? You see a lot of continuity, you see all sorts of ways in which the movement itself has been co-opted, and you see some of the promise of the revolutionaries there. That kind of mixed scene is itself pretty difficult to start saying when is a sufficient amount of transformation there that we're going to call this a capital R revolution. This is enough. We've got it.

So there is a difficulty both in terms of you only know it a long time after the fact, but also how and when you make that assessment in terms of what you see. And you may have very different judgments in terms of how you make those assessments.

Finally, Francis on Fred and ideas, well, I mean, he claimed not to take them seriously at all. I mean, you know, that line about nationalism is only as old as the oldest living inhabitant of that country that is the arch modernist. And you have to keep reproducing nationalism or organically it would die out because there's nothing to it.

I actually read the book, the 2005 book, when I was a research student here. And one of my critiques of it was you're not taking ideas seriously enough. Because at least people think... Even if you don't think they are, the people themselves think they're serious and they're doing something on that basis. And it strikes me as someone who's spent so much time on revolutions, probably...

should really take ideas and revolutionary ideas seriously. But I think he was so determined in that book, this is where I think the analysis of the Middle East and revolutions comes apart, that the Middle East was like other regions in terms of the importance of power, of states, of materiality, rather than religiosity and unreason and irrationality, that therefore there was something that saw him as an arch-materialist, an arch-modernist in that book, even more so than he was elsewhere.

But we know, and Fred knew about the extraordinary power of ideas to energize particular populations. And I'm sure he would have

been full of admiration for the women life freedom movement in Iran, for example, and the way in which something there has been generated from a particular part of society that itself has become so huge in terms of its ramifications for the broader society. So I think there's a tension in Fred's work, as there is in everyone's work, but here a very stark one

about the role of ideas that are clearly present in his understanding of revolutions and utopianism and revolutionary dreaming, but probably much less present in terms of his analysis of certain parts of the world, including the Middle East. Right, and that brings us to the end. We've run out of time.

George has brought his right to answer. I thank Jasme for a superb afterword of discussion, bringing up raising some crucial points. I thank George for a superb lecture. And I will just leave you with the thought, the reason I mentioned Fred Halliday's new left of view piece of 1992 is it's the most serious intervention

interaction he has with ideology and philosophy in trying to deal with Fukuyama and Fukuyama's understanding of modernity I think that's Fred at his most constructivist, Fred at his most philosophical, Fred at his most ideational so I think that's worth going back to to capture the ideas that are as you say clearly underplayed but

So it leaves us with the delightful task of thanking Jasmine, thanking George, thanking the organisers of today's event and the stewards, and thanking all of you for coming in the middle of the exam term. Thank you very much.

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