The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion

Lecture by Mark R. Beissinger, Princeton University

Understood as a mass siege of an established government by its own population with the goals of bringing about regime-change and effecting substantive political or social change, revolutions are, in Foucauldian terms, exceptional moments of “chance reversal”--when the ongoing trajectory of a political order is ruptured and potentially altered in fundamental ways by those subject to it.  But the ways in which populations go about the business of regime-change from below, the reasons they engage in such action, and the social forces that mobilize in revolution have altered dramatically over the past century.   This lecture is about that transformation--and in particular, about the impact of urbanization and the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities on the incidence, practice, and consequences of political revolutions. 

Mark R. Beissinger is Henry W. Putnam Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

Moderated by Swen Hutter, Vice Director of the Center for Civil Society Research at the Berlin Social Science Center WZB.

The event is part of the lecture series Civil Society and Political Conflict, organized by the Center for Civil Society Research.