This project promises to give “a novel account of how revolutions begin, unfold and end. By combining insights from international relations, sociology, and global history, it outlines the benefits of a ‘global historical sociology’ of revolutionary change, one in which international processes take centre stage.” The last phrase trails off here: what other than “international processes” can be at the center of revolutions: international refers to the whole world and processes can include just about anything, so it seems the researcher is being misleading by adding this nonsensical seeming twist. Without this turn, offering a theory that reflects historical evidence from revolutions is a meaningful concept for scholarly study, but this turn suggests that the book is full of double-speak that refrains from arriving at any clear-cut answers.
As the cover suggests, the interior of this book is littered with problems. For example, the “Contents” are divided into parts that address “Theories” separately from “Histories”. Given that the premise of the book is to explain theory through case studies from history, how can these two be isolated into distinct parts, when they are supposed to be supporting each other? The “Introduction” then commences with an opening so absurd, it’s funny but for the wrong reasons. A section called “What Are Revolutions?” answers with this opening sentence: “There are two main ways of approaching the study of revolution in the contemporary world—and they are both wrong.” The author insists both perspectives are wrong before naming what these are: as a toddler who says “No!” before hearing the question. And why would contemporary revolutions be approached differently from historic revolutions? This bit of nonsense if followed by the summary that some unnamed critics see revolutions everywhere, not only in “Kobane, Caracas, and Tehran”, but also in “Black Lives Matter” and in revolutionaries such as “Elon Musk”. The next paragraph proposes the other perspective on revolutions is that they are “irrelevant to a world in which the big issues of governance and economic development have been settled.” In the post-Soviet world, supposedly some believe revolutions are “minor disturbances” (1-2). Yes, obviously, both of these are wrong, but they are wrong because they are both nonsensical and because no serious scholars has actually voiced either of these perspectives. Who seriously equates a revolution in Caracas with Elon Musk, and who is viewing government overturns as minor revolutions without the capital “R”? The author is expressing his own misguided perceptions and makes them seem as if they belong to other critics, who he is proving wrong to explain the need for his own study. The nonsense dominates across this book. For example, the chapter on “Revolutionary Situations England and Chile” ends with a summary that hops across time and space without connections, as it hovers between seventeenth-century England and the United States, finally summarizing that “English patrimonialism” was “more vulnerable than the Chilean blend of sultanism, neo-patrimonialism…” What? Monialism versus neo-monialism? It seems this is all about the money-isms. All this babbling apparently “points to the need to see revolutionary situations both as contextually located events that contain situated logics and as idealized constructs with casual pathways that contain wider analytical purchase” (123). The “purchase” at the end of this sentence appeared unrelated until I read the bit about the monialisms: now it makes sense: the author is trying to make a living in academia by writing nonsense that can confuse even an Ivy League editor; well, he’s winning at this economic game.