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Killian Clarke, "Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Killian Clark about his book titled Return of why Counter Revolutions Emerge and Succeed, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Examining what? Well, exactly what the title says, right. How do we end up with counter revolutions? In what sorts of conditions do they come about? But then, of course, counter revolutions happening is only part of what's interesting. The other part of what's interesting is what happens to them once they have emerged. When do they succeed? When do they not succeed? What does this look like in theory? What might we want to be looking out for in the real world? And then, of course, helpfully, the book does look at the real world and takes us through some instances where this sort of thing can actually be seen in real life. We're going to be talking, for example, about Egypt to understand what this theory means practically. So we're going to be talking about a bit of theory about a bit of practical politics, the combination of those things. Clearly, we have a lot to discuss so, Cillian, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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It's great to be here. Miranda, thanks so much for having me.
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You're very welcome. Can we get started, please, with you introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book. What were the questions that were motivating you into this project?
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Yeah, sure. So, yeah, My name is Killian Clark. I'm a professor at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service. And this book is an extension and it sort of a second version of what was my dissertation, my PhD dissertation, which I did at Princeton University. And the motivation for the book was Egypt's counter revolution, which is the main case in the book. It's the main theory building case. Obviously, as you said in the introduction, there's a big theoretical component and a cross national comparative component, but Egypt is the main case and Egypt was the motivation. So I began graduate school at Princeton in 2014, which was one year after the counter revolutionary coup in Egypt which ended the democratic transition that had been occurring after the 2011 revolution. So Egypt's long standing dictator Hosn Mubarak was ousted in 2011 by a revolutionary uprising. There was a democratic transition process that was put in place but, but that transition was ended in 2013 by the coup. And, and I had been studying Egypt before I started my graduate training. I had been working on Egypt since, since I was an undergraduate actually, and obviously had been like many of us who work on Egypt and even many of us who don't, were very inspired by the 2011 revolution and optimistic about what it might bring about in Egypt. And so the coup and the return of military rule in Egypt was a profound disappointment and you know, obviously for Egyptians, but also for those of us who study the country. So a year after that happened, I started graduate school and I was, you know, interested in explaining why this had happened. There was still, you know, a lot of debate about what had gone wrong. There were some people who were making the argument that, you know, the democratic experiment in Egypt could never have succeeded, that that military rule was bound to return. I didn't believe that. But you know, there wasn't really a lot of data, there wasn't a lot of theory out there on counter revolution. We didn't even have basic, you know, sort of comparative statistics like how, how often had this sort of thing happened? How common was it for the old regime to return after a democratic revolution? So we really didn't have much to work with which to sort of make sense of, of this event. And so that was the motivation I went out to understand what had happened in Egypt, but also to put it in comparative context and to develop some theoretical scaffolding to understand when and why these sorts of things occur. And so I set about writing a dissertation on counter revolution. It's not the first book on counter revolution, but it's the first book to sort of study counter revolution using the paradigms and frameworks and methods of comparative politics. And the questions in the book, which again are motivated by Egypt, are why do counter revolutions occur and why do they succeed? Right. So as you said, it's in the title of the book, and that's what I set about trying to answer.
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Very helpful foundation. And it is, in fact, that idea of placing things like Egypt into context where I'd like to go next. Because, of course, Egypt is something I think a lot of listeners can kind of immediately remember and go, yeah, okay, those questions make a lot of sense given that particular instance. But Egypt is not, you know, this is a theory that isn't just about Egypt. So can you help us understand the sort of scale and scope of what we're talking about? I mean, how often, for example, do we see counter revolutions attempted? And then within that, how often do they succeed? Are we talking about one or two or what's the scale here?
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Sure, yeah. So. Great question. Yeah. So that was the first sort of, as I said, we didn't have even basic comparative statistics on counter evolution. So those were the first questions I set about answering. Important, before I answer that question, to explain what I mean by counter revolution. So how I define it in the book, because counter revolution is a term that's thrown around a lot. It's used in different ways by activists and scholars and, you know, practitioners and just in. In daily life. And it means different things to different. So the first thing I had to do in this project was I had to define what do I mean by counter revolution. And so I define it as essentially the restoration of the political regime that has just been ousted by a revolution. So it's, it's. That's why it's called return of tyranny, because it's about the return of the old regime after that regime has been brushed aside by a revolution. So it's not, you know, efforts to quell, for example, a revolutionary movement, which some people call counter revolutions as well. It's effort for the old regime to return after they've been toppled. And so defined in that way, counter revolutions are. They're actually not as common as I think many people Believe. So the starting point for evaluating this is you have to have a universe of successful revolutions. So in my case, I was fortunate that my dissertation advisor at Princeton, Mark Beissinger, was building a data set of revolutions covering the full 20th and 21st centuries. And so he shared his data with me and that was the starting point for my own data collection exercise. So I started off with 123 successful revolutions, success in the limited sense of, you know, a mass movement having achieved regime change. And of those 123 successful revolutions, roughly half of them face a counter revolution. So they face an effort by the old regime to restore themselves in office. And roughly 20%, so one in five of them are overturned by a counter revolution. So those are the kind of high level statistics. Right. So half of the cases see a counter revolution attempted and 20% of them are ousted by the old regime and they see the old regime return to power. And, you know, those are lower statistics than I think a lot of people imagine about counter revolution. If you read the scholarship on revolution, there's a bit of a kind of conventional wisdom that counter revolutions are, if not very, if not inevitable, then very common. You know, you read this in kind of classic accounts by scholars like Samuel Huntington and Theta Skocbull that, you know, counter revolution is an almost automatic reaction to revolutionary success. Now sometimes these works are only talking about a subset of revolutions, but that's generally the conventional wisdom. And the data I collected just show that that's not true. Right. Only about half of them see a counter revolution emerge. And then the rate of success is also relatively low and it's higher for certain types of revolutions. But even still, it's not an inevitability by any means that the old regime is going to return to power. Which again, I think helps to start the conversation about Egypt and what happened in Egypt, because there was a lot of sense after the Egyptian counter revolution that it was not inevitable, but very likely because the military was so strong. And we can get into that when we talk about the Egypt case.
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Yeah, no, we'll definitely get into that when we talk about the Egypt case. But that's helpful to understand kind of what we're talking about more broadly. And obviously you mentioned some key things there in terms of ways of thinking about this and data sets. So can you tell us more about methods and data to figure all this out?
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Yeah, sure. So like I said, I had this data set of successful revolutions that I began with. So this included all of the mass movements that had successfully toppled an incumbent regime from 1900 to 2014. So that was my starting point. And from there I went out and I conducted research on each of these cases, each of these 123 cases to identify where and when there had been counter evolutions. And so that involved, you know, doing historical research on these cases. Some of them were very well documented, some of them were not. But I was able to conduct a fair amount of research on each one and pinpoint instances of counter revolutionary challenge. You know, I. And so I. The data set in the book is an inventory of all the counter revolutionary challenges that have occurred from 1900 to 2014. So that's the cross national data. That's not the only data in the book. There's also two different empirical components that align with the Egypt case. So the first of those are interviews. So I went out and conducted about 100 interviews with Egyptian political elites who had been involved in the revolution and the post revolutionary transition. Um, I was interested in meeting people who were high up and involved in the kind of elite politics of the transition. That was a difficult set of people to access for different reasons. Um, and I can talk more about the kind of fieldwork challenges if that's of interest. Um, but briefly, I mean, these were, for example, people who were serving in the administration of the Muslim Brotherhood elected president Mohamed Morsi. Many of these people had been imprisoned after the 2013 coup. So those were a difficult group of elites to talk to and access. Some of them were based abroad. And those are the people that I focused on. I was interested in talking to people who had served in the governments that were put together by the military during the transition. Those people were mostly based in Egypt, but many of them were hesitant to meet with me. So, you know, the people I was trying to meet presented different types of challenges. But I was able to conduct about 100 interviews and some of them with people who were very well placed during this time. So that's the second empirical component. And then the third empirical component is a data set of protests which occurred during the 18 months leading up to the 2013 coup. I was interested in the mass component to the counter revolution as well as the elite component. So the interviews helped with the elite component. But I also wanted to study the population, secular and mass side of the counter revolution. Because as we'll get into, an important part of the argument is about mass politics and how mass politics create the possibility for counter revolutions to succeed. And so to study that, I collected an original protest data set of all the protests that occurred in Egypt from January 1, 2012 to July 3, 2013, which is the date of the coup. And I used an Egyptian newspaper, Al Masri al Yom, which is at the time was sort of the main national Arabic language newspaper in the country. I used that newspaper as a source to identify basically all the protests that they reported on during that time period. So those, those are the three main empirical components. One is global and cross national and then two are anchored in the Egypt case.
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Okay, that is very helpful to understand because that is a huge amount of work and different kinds of data as well to put together to make all of this make sense. And if you're offering, I think we are often interested in hearing about kind of some of the challenges of figuring putting things like this together. So if you do have comments about fieldwork or data collection, anything that you want to give us sort of a behind the scenes view of this?
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Sure, yeah. I mean, the most challenging part were the interviews. I mean, collecting the quantitative data was a lot of work, as you said, but in the end, if you devote enough time to these things, you can get them done. So, you know, the cross national data was a lot of me just sitting in a research center reading about history, which, you know, took a lot of time, but it's fun and interesting and it was a bit just about executing the tasks. The protest data set. I assembled a team of research assistants. We read all the issues of Onasio Yom and we coded the information about protests into a data set. So those were just, you know, pretty straightforward tasks. But the, the interviews were more challenging. And I was fortunate that I had done research in Egypt in the past. And so I had pretty good networks with certain parts of the political class in Egypt. I had been on the ground during and after the 2011 revolution. I had interviewed a lot of the activists who were involved in planning the protests. So I had pretty good networks among those people and I was able to use those to gain trust and speak to many of the youth and secularist activists who were involved in the protests and then involved in the transition. Those people were still nervous about speaking to me, but, but it helped that I had some prior relationships that I could build on the Islamists. I also had some relationships with those groups as well. I had done interviews with, with Muslim Brotherhood leaders and other Islamist leaders in the past, but those people were, some of them were just not possible to speak to because they had been imprisoned. So I focused on the people who were in exile. And you know, I, I, I held a handful of interviews in Istanbul where A lot of the Islamist leaders were based on in the summer of 2016. And then from there I was able to build on those. And I used a technique that many researchers who do interviews use called snowball sampling, which is where you ask for referrals from the people who you interview to other people in their networks who might be relevant. Sometimes I would come to people with names of figures who I wanted to speak to and ask them if they had a relationship with that person and whether they would be willing to introduce me. That helped a lot, and so I relied on those techniques. The other thing about the interviews that was challenging was that by the time I was doing this research, the accounts of what had happened were in some ways quite formalized. People had their scripts down and their sort of narratives about what had gone wrong. And, you know, many of these were self serving narratives because these are political elites and, you know, they want to characterize everything bad that's happened as the fault of others. So everyone had their kind of narrative tightly scripted. And so I had to figure out how to cut through those narratives to get to more concrete information, you know, details that were going to be valuable for the questions I was asking. And so, you know, I often came to interviews with specific incidents that I wanted to ask people about so that, you know, I could get them off of their kind of standard, their standard scripts. I also found that talking to sort of lower level advisors was more informative than talking to the senior political elites themselves. So rather than talking to the head of a party, for example, it was more useful sometimes to talk to the, you know, the senior aide who was the assistant to the head of the party, who was often less scripted and more willing to go into details and to sort of share on the ground information than, you know, the sort of higher level political official.
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That is a very useful tip. Thank you so much for sharing. That now lets us get into then some of the things you figured out by putting all this information together. So very simple question for me to ask, but complicated one, I imagine to answer. What are the factors that make Counter Revolution more likely to occur and how much does it depend on something you mentioned earlier around the type of revolution in the first place?
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Yes, great. Yeah. So the argument in the book is, I describe it as a movement centric argument. And what I mean by that is that, you know, the main. There are obviously many things that matter in Counter Revolution, but in the book I argue that the main thing that matters is the type of movement, the type of revolutionary movement that seizes power and it's that variation that explains a good amount of both whether counterrevolutions emerge and whether they succeed. So on the question of why they emerge, the theory points to a somewhat counterintuitive conclusion. I argue that basically counter revolutionaries, you have to think about the post revolutionary moment as this sort of unique moment. Revolutionaries have just seized power. They're the ones who are ascendant. They're the ones who for various reasons, have managed to overcome and overpower the agents of the old regime. And so these old regime forces are, they're on the back foot when the transition starts. When the post revolutionary transition starts. They are, they're cowed, they're broken. Either their armies have been destroyed or the legitimacy has been destroyed. Their social base has shrunk. And so they're very much kind of positioned in unfavorably vis a vis the new regime, which is led by the revolutionaries. So they're kind of considering whether or not to stage a counter revolution from a position of weakness. That's your starting point. And then I argue that basically they need two things in order to decide to launch a counter revolution in order to get one of these challenges off the ground. The first is they need a certain amount of capacity. Counter revolutions are almost always violent. They're almost always waged through force. Many of them are coups, and the rest, a large proportion of the rest of them, are rebellions. So they usually take the form of coups or rebellions. And so usually you need some level of coercive force, coercive capacity remaining in order to get a counter revolution off the ground. So that's the first ingredient that you need. The second ingredient is you need a certain level of interest, right? So you need to believe that your interests are going to be threatened by the new regime that has come to power. And this, these two factors lead me to the conclusion that basically counter revolutions are unlikely to emerge at the sort of extremes of the two revolutionary forms that I talk about in the book. So after very, very violent, radical, sort of transformative revolutions, the old regime is left with very little capacity, right? Usually these revolutions are waged through guerrilla warfare, armed rebellion. And if they've dragged on for a very long time, if they've resulted in a lot of deaths or casualties, the old regime emerges at the end of the process very weak. From the capacity perspective, they have very little of their old regime armies left. And so the likelihood of them launching a counter revolution is low because they just don't have the coercive force necessary to do that on the other extreme, if the revolution is relatively moderate, if it's waged through nonviolence, if it brings to power a sort of mild or temperate, a liberal government that's going to allow the old regime to participate in potentially in elections or a new political process, then these old reinforces might decide, well, look, our interests aren't really that threatened by this new government, and we're probably better off just making peace with the new regime and trying to compete under the new rules of the game, maybe forming a new political party and competing in upcoming elections and trying to get some of our power and prestige back that way. And so the takeaway from this is that counter revolutions are most likely in what I kind of call this middle space of revolutions that take more hybrid forms, that involve some level of arms or violence, and maybe have some radical elements to them, so they represent enough of a threat that there's an incentive to launch the counter revolution, but they're not so violent or destructive that they sort of leave the old regime totally broken and destroyed. And it's in that arena where we see that area, where we see counter revolutions, the probability of a counter revolution higher than others. Welcome to Walgreens.
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Well, if we're moving on to the question of success, it's actually a simpler story. As I said, the starting point for all of this is this kind of balance of power, this idea that revolutionaries start off with some with leverage over the old regime. And that leverage can be based on the fact that they have a course of organization that they've built up that allowed them to seize power through armed violence. It can be based on the fact that they have a mass movement behind them that has forced the regime from power through its kind of moral legitimacy and its strength in numbers. So the leverage of these new regimes is different, but the point is they start off with this leverage over the former incumbent. And so whether a counter revolution can succeed or not depends on how well revolutionaries can maintain that leverage and how easily they can institutionalize it. And here I make the argument that really a lot of it does come down to whether revolutionaries have an armed organization or not. So if the revolution took the form of a rebellion, a civil war, a social revolution, an armed insurgency, and the new government has its own coercive organization to support it, then it can consolidate its rule using violence, and it can defeat any counter revolutions that are attempted using force of arms. And so those types of revolutionary regimes are very difficult to overthrow, and counter revolutions very rarely succeed, succeed against them. So the, the rate of counter revolution after armed revolutions is, is very low. Whereas if revolutionaries come to power without use of arms with these sort of mass protest movements, with what scholars in the discipline call negative coalitions, which means a coalition of diverse participants who are united only by their antipathy for the incumbent, these regimes have to try to consolidate their rule without the use of arms. They have to, you know, keep their coalition intact. They have to manage the challenges of post revolutionary governance without, without a strong organization to support them. And so these regimes are much more susceptible to counter revolution because they lose their leverage more quickly, they lose their initial power advantage. And so, you know, this is the type of revolution that Egypt was, and most of the other cases of successful counter revolution in the dataset also have these characteristics. There are these unarmed mass uprisings that seize power, often very quickly with a broad coalition at their back.
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Okay, so this is a very helpfully laid out theory that obviously, as you've mentioned, has a lot of data and data sets behind it. If we then apply it specifically to Egypt, how much does what happened there fit this pattern you've just laid out?
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So Egypt fits the theory pretty well, which is good because it's the main case in the book it conforms pretty closely to both elements of the theory. Egypt obviously was an unarmed revolution. So it's closer to that kind of what I call in the book, moderate unarmed revolution ideal type. It definitely fits that model better. But, you know, Egypt's revolution also had some elements of violence. There was not armed violence during the revolution, but there was a good amount of unarmed collective violence. So rioting, stone throwing, burning of police stations. And there were some radical elements within the revolutionary coalition. Even though the Muslim Brotherhood is not a radical Islamist organization, it was still seen as a threatening force by some elements, many elements of the old regime, of Mubarak's coalition. And so there was plenty of a sense of threat from this new revolutionary government. And so the incentive to launch counter revolution in Egypt was certainly there. The old regime forces that were left always preferred counter revolution to any other outcome that was possible. And certainly on the success question, it also fits the theory quite well. So this was a revolution that was affected very quickly. It lasted 18 days. It was based on mass, on our mass protest, unarmed protests. By and large, it involved a diverse coalition of participants, including a whole range of, of secularist parties and movements espousing all kinds of different ideologies. Nasserism, Islam, liberalism, leftism, revolutionary socialism. And then it involved an array of Islamist actors, including Salafi Islamist, the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood and a handful of other smaller Islamist parties. It involved labor organizations, it involved popular forces from urban quarters. So it involved a whole range of actors. So it sort of fits that model of moderate unarmed revolution very well. And the challenges that Egypt faced when the Mubarak regime fell and the transition began, and particularly when they finally had a democratically elected government in the middle of 2012, the challenges were, you know, right in line with, with the ones I spell out in the book. Right. So they had a hard time consolidating their rule. They had a difficult, very difficult time keeping their coalition intact. There was a lot of infighting and disaffection within the coalition, particularly between the Muslim Brotherhood and the range of secularist parties and movements. And eventually the coalition fell apart. They had a really hard time managing discontent in society, which is part of what I show with the protest data. So there were a large number of protests, airing all kinds of grievances, some political, many non political. And there was a lot of mass unrest in society during the transition. And the elected government, the Morsi government, had a really hard time managing that. So a lot of the things that I talk about in the theory are borne out in the Egypt case. And ultimately, the counter revolution that occurred occurred because revolutionaries in Egypt lost the initial leverage that they had over the military. And they lost that leverage because of the things I just mentioned, because the coalition fell apart, because society turned on them. Society stopped supporting the revolution, stopped believing in the revolution. And these various forces, these elite and popular forces, grew so disaffected with the new government that they formed a mass movement against that government and ultimately sided with the counter revolution. And it wasn't until that mass movement formed in the spring of 2013 that the military really had an opportunity to seize back power. But that mass movement gave them the popular legitimacy and the popular base that they needed to return to return to power. And ask the Morsi government.
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Okay, that's a really key moment then, of the military being able to kind of act on some goals there. But I want to pick up on what made that possible, because you talked about mass mobilization there. But I want to make sure we don't bury the point right before that, that it was a combination of popular discontent, but also elite discontent. Right. We've got both of those layers being important here.
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Yeah. So that's a key component of the theory and the explanation of what happened in Egypt. So the idea is that these, these moderate, unarmed, these democratic, revolutionary governments come to power, and they have all these different challenges that they have to simultaneously deal with. So they have to manage their relationships with the lingering elements of the old regime. So there's usually these old regime forces that are still there because these are not armed revolutions, and they've left a lot of the old regime intact. So they're trying to manage those forces, but they also have these broad coalitions. And so they have to try to figure out how to get along with the elite allies in these broad coalitions. Right. These are coalitions that came together very quickly. They're usually not based on very strong relations or organization. They're often coalitions that I said were based on sort of mutual antipathy for the former incumbent, but they don't have a lot in common ideologically. So you're trying to figure out how to manage this fractious coalition. And then the third piece that you're trying to figure out is how do you deal with the expectations in society that. That have risen, you know, exponentially because of the revolution itself? Right. So people have just joined this revolutionary movement. They've just, you know, given their blood, sweat and tears to the revolutionary cause, and they expect. They expect some benefit. They expect things to get better. And an interesting paradox of these post revolutionary periods is that actually things normally get worse, at least initially. The economy is often in bad shape, foreign investment has dried up, inflation maybe is higher, unemployment is higher. Crime sometimes increases during these periods because everyday policing has fallen apart. So usually, actually, these post revolutionary periods are periods of instability, right at the same time that everyone is expecting things to improve. So the third piece that you're trying to manage is, is this popular piece of how do you deliver some benefits, how do you deliver on the promises of the revolution while, you know, the society and economy are in bad shape. So these new governments are trying to deal with all three of these things. And the argument is that counter revolutions become possible when they don't attend to the popular and elite side and actually when they prioritize too much, the old regime side of this. And the idea is that basically if you, if you spend too much time trying to appease the old regime, you end up marginalizing popular forces in society and elites in your revolutionary coalition. And when you do that, you lose your, you lose that initial leverage that you had after the revolution. You lose your ability to go back out into the streets and mass protest and stop old regime forces from staging a counter revolution. And usually you need both of the kind of the elite part of the revolutionary coalition and the mass base in order to do that effectively. And so those two pieces go hand in hand. And if you lose them both, then as a revolutionary government, you're left very exposed because you neither have a large elite coalition to back you, nor do you have popular support in society in a mass base anymore. And so you're left really on your own, which leaves you very exposed to being ousted by a counter revolution, which is exactly what happened to the Morsi government. By the middle of 2013, the Morsi government had totally marginalized the secularists and the coalition who were actively calling for its ouster, some of whom were overtly calling for military intervention. And they had also lost large parts of society. I mean, the Muslim Brotherhood has its own base and they still had that. But lots of other quarters of Egyptian society had turned against the Morsi government and had started blaming that government for all sorts of things, some of which was fair and some of which was not. But regardless of whether it was fair or not, that was the government that was in power and they were the new incumbent and they were the ones that people blamed for all the things that were going wrong. And so the Morsi government by July 3, 2013, was kind of standing on its own without, without any sort of mass popular base and out without any ability to call forward the original 2011 revolution to stand against the military in defense of the democratic transition.
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B
Yeah, that's not a good place for them to be in. And sure enough, that did not end well for that particular government. What then for other cases? If we go back to look at the data set and then look at what happens in real life, is Egypt an outlier, or do we see what happened in Egypt happening in other places too?
- [38:36]
A
Yeah. So the last chapter of the book is a chapter on shadow cases, what we call in political science shadow cases, which are essentially short cases that look at counter revolution in other parts of the world and give me an opportunity to unpack some of the other trajectories and outcomes in other cases. And they are deliberately selected to be useful comparatively vis a vis Egypt. And what that chapter shows is that Egypt's story is the story that characterizes many episodes of successful counter revolution. So there are some outliers. There's a handful of counter revolutions that occur after. Not even a handful. Sorry. It is. There's only three, really, that occur after armed revolutions. Usually those counter revolutions are achieved because the old regime has an alliance with some sort of foreign power who commits its own troops to restoring the old regime. So, as I said, it's very hard to oust revolutionary government that has its own coercive organization that took power through arms. The only real way to do it is if counter revolutionaries form an alliance with a foreign power. So a good example of this kind of trajectory or pathway is the counter revolution that ousted the Taliban. So most people know about the Taliban government that took power in 1996. People don't often think about the US invasion in 2001 as a counter revolution or part of a counter revolution. But in fact, it was the US Invasion that ousted the Taliban, restored to power an alliance of rebels, the Northern alliance, which had been waging a counter revolutionary civil war against the Taliban since they were ousted, since the Taliban took power. And they almost certainly would have lost that rebellion. In fact, they were losing that rebellion to the Taliban had it not been for the United States coming in and staging its foreign intervention and essentially placing them on the throne, essentially restoring them to office through their own use of arms. So that's a. That's an example of a successful counter revolution that looks nothing like Egypt's trajectory and represents a sort of different pathway. But it's a very uncommon pathway in large part because foreign powers, even if they provide arms or support to counter revolutionaries, they're usually not willing to commit their own troops. That was a sort of unusual instance where the US was willing to commit its own troops because of the 911 terrorist attacks. But that is very rare. So that's a different pathway. The vast majority of the other successful counter revolutions look very much like Egypt. They are democratic revolutions. They're these kind of unarmed mass uprisings with negative coalitions. The new regime takes power. Sometimes they hold an election, sometimes they don't even get to an election. But you see a lot of the characteristics that I just described in Egypt. Usually you see the new government prioritize appeasement of the old regime over managing its own revolutionary coalition and over attending to discontents in society. You often see these coalitions fracture. As a result, you often see a lot of mass unrest in society. And in some cases, though not all of them, you see a mass movement come together like the one we saw in Egypt, that explicitly supports and calls for counter revolutionary restoration. Now, in some cases you don't see such an organized mass movement. Sometimes it's just kind of, you know, more diffused generalized discontent in society and the abandonment of the revolutionary government by some portion of the original coalition. But in some cases you do see exactly what you saw in Egypt, which is this past movement that essentially calls for counter revolution.
- [42:42]
B
Kay Jeweler's early Black Friday sale is happening now. Get up to 50% off Black Friday deals and up to 40% off everything else. Don't miss this sale. Start your season with savings only at K exclusions. Apply ck.comexclusions for details. That's really interesting to understand, kind of how Egypt fits into other counter revolutions. Are there any other sort of broader context, things we want to discuss, for example, academic or policy implications of this research?
- [43:12]
A
Yeah, actually, well, before I get to the academic or policy implications, there's one other piece from the comparative case studies that's probably worth mentioning. The implicit counterfactual that I'm proposing for the Egypt case, kind of the way things could have gone had revolutionary leaders worked out or had revolutionary leaders made different decisions, is that the government in Egypt would have maintained this leverage and specifically would have maintained their ability to remobilize the original revolutionary coalition, return to the streets and mass protests, and if the Egyptian military had staged a coup, kind of force it to go back to the barracks through a return to the type of mass protests that we saw against Mubarak, that we saw in 2011. This is kind of implicitly what I'm arguing. Well, explicitly, actually, I do say it in the book. What I'M arguing could have happened in Egypt but didn't because revolutionary leaders made a different set of decisions. And to show that this is not just a hypothetical, but something that actually does happen and has happened in history. In cases of revolution that look very similar to Egypt, I talk about a handful of democratic revolutions where you basically see this pattern play out. You see, you know, in a country with a strong military, a democratic revolutionary government come to power, make a different set of decisions, maintain its leverage over the old regime. And when that old regime stages a coup or attempts a counter revolution, they pour back out into the streets and protest. So Venezuela's 1958 democratic revolution is a good example of this. It's the case that I analyze in the book. There's a handful of others. Colombia's 1957 revolution is another good example. Bolivia in 1982. There's aspects of this in the Philippines, people power revolution. Burkina Faso had her uprising in 2014. That, that, that showed these, these mechanisms. So this has happened in various other cases. And it's proven to be an effective strategy for democratic revolutionaries who, who want to try to maintain that, that bulwark, maintain that ability to push the old regime back if, if, if they attempt to counter revolution. So this is, this is what allows me hopefully to convince readers that another outcome in Egypt was possible. So that wasn't an answer to the question you asked. I can go back to that.
- [45:46]
B
That's okay. That was an interesting answer. So thank you for adding that in. But, yes. Now let's talk about implications.
- [45:53]
A
Yeah, So, I mean, there's a number of implications from this book that are relevant to both academic theory and policy. I'll just talk about a couple. One is that it does have something to say about this debate regarding violence and nonviolence in revolutionary processes. So there's this sort of long running debate among both activists and academics, actually, about whether violent or nonviolent resistance is a more effective strategy. Right. This is not a moral debate. It's not a, it's not a debate about ethics. It's a debate about strategy and effectiveness. And, you know, there's classic revolutionary leaders who argue that violence is a more effective strategy for resisting autocrats and seizing power and affecting transformative, transformative change. But there's also a long standing, you know, a long group of scholars and activists who've argued the opposite, that nonviolence is more effective. And this argument, you know, was most recently articulated in its sort of, you know, academic form by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stepan in a very well known book published in 2012. So my book's not about violence and nonviolence per se, but, but you know, two of the main features of, or one of the main features of revolutions that I talk about is whether or not the revolution uses arms or not. The other part is ideology. And as I said earlier, you know, whether a new revolutionary government has a coercive organization or not is pretty important for whether or not it's able to withstand counter revolution. It's one of the most important variables. And so, you know, the argument in the Chenopith and Stefan book and others as well who followed in their footsteps, the argument is that nonviolence is more effective at ousting autocrats than violent resistance. And I don't disagree with that. I think they're actually right about that. But the book raises kind of difficult questions about the type of regimes and the durability of the regimes that come to power following nonviolent revolutions versus violent ones. Because it's pretty clear in my data that if, if we're focused on the ability to withstand counter revolution, violent revolutions have an advantage, right? They're just, it's very rare that they're ousted by counter revolutions. Nonviolent revolutions are much weaker and they're much less durable. Now that doesn't, you know, as I said, there's a normative piece to this too, which is that violent revolutions often set up new autocracies, right? And these are often regimes that are, if anything, as brutal, if not more brutal than the regimes that were overthrown. So these are not necessarily durable regimes that we, you know, should be celebrating or that we necessarily want, but they are stronger. The, you know, democratic revolutionary regimes, liberal revolutionary regimes, which, you know, most people would agree are closer to, you know, what we would hope for, tend to be weaker. And so, and so that's why the book spends a lot of time thinking about what are the strategies for democratic revolutionaries to oppose counter revolution. Because they usually don't have a coercive organization, so they don't have that option. So if we, you know, want to think about ways that we can guide and help and advise these types of revolutionary governments and their ability to navigate the challenges of post revolutionary rule and the challenges of withstanding counter revolution, you know, what can we offer them? And so the book's, you know, interested in proposing a framework for thinking about the trade offs and strategies which I, which I talked about earlier, sort of these different competing imperatives and how to think about navigating that. And so it's not a It's not a handbook by any means for democratic revolutionaries, but it does hopefully offer some insights that can be useful for new governments who come to power through revolution, who don't have use of arms, who are trying to set up a new liberal regime, a democratic regime on the back of a formerly authoritarian one. You know, what are some strategies that they can pursue? Another takeaway, which I'll talk about, and I've written about this in a separate article that was published in the Journal of Peace Research, is about what foreign powers can do and how they can support these new democratic governments. And now we're, you know, again, talking about these democratic revolutionaries and the governments that they set up. And, you know, the, the role of foreign powers in the book is not huge. It's mostly a theory about domestic dynamics. But I do think that foreign support and foreign powers matter on the margin. And in Egypt, essentially what happened was that the United States, the United States took what I call an ambivalent position towards the revolution. The Obama administration had a series of people in the team, in the foreign policy team who were quite excited about Egypt's revolution, who wanted to give democracy a chance in Egypt, who wanted to support the transition, and who understood that even an elected government headed by the Muslim Brotherhood could be the first step towards consolidated democracy in Egypt. And so they, they did work hard to try to give Egypt's democracy a chance. But there was also a group of people in the Obama administration who were much more hostile, much more skeptical of the prospects of democracy in Egypt and the Middle east in general. A lot of these people were quite Islamophobic, did not believe that Islamists were capable of being good faith players in a democracy. And when the Muslim Brotherhood leader Morsi was elected, they essentially thought that, you know, the prospects of, of a democratic transition succeeding in Egypt were very low. And so I characterize this foreign policy position as ambivalence. I think the US Took an ambivalent stance towards the Egyptian revolution. I think that the Egyptian or the US Government often takes an ambivalent stance towards political change in the Middle east in general for, you know, reasons that we can get into if you want. But I argue that, that this ambivalent position was really problematic. It was really detrimental to, to the transition. In fact, I think it was even more detrimental than in the. If the US government had just come forward and been overtly hostile. And the reason for this is that the Morsi administration essentially misread the signals coming from Washington. Morsi and his team thought that the kind of on paper signals, the official signals they were hearing were the real ones. They thought that the US government was standing behind them, that they were committed to the transition. And most importantly, they thought that the US Government would work to prevent a coup from occurring. They thought that they were active agents of restraint restraining the Egyptian military from contemplating a coup. And they were wrong about that. The ambivalence of the foreign policy position meant that they were sort of acting based on the wrong set of signals because behind the scenes there were senior people in the Obama administration who were quietly encouraging the military or at least signaling to the military that they wouldn't be punished if they were to stage a coup. And I think this fed into the Morsi administration's decision to pursue a more exclusivist approach to governance. It's one of the reasons that they cut out the secularist part of the revolutionary coalition and decided to go it alone. They thought that they essentially had a, a foreign backer who was shielding them, and they were wrong about that. And so the ambivalence of the U.S. the U.S. government was, I think, the worst policy position they could have taken. I mean, explicit support would have been the best, but overt hostility would have actually been better because then at least the Morsi government would have known where they stood and would have known that they had to build a broader domestic coalition because they didn't have foreign support behind them. So the takeaway from that is that ambivalence, ambivalent sort of attitudes or foreign policy positions towards these new governments is, is really not helpful. And that if foreign power is want to support these democratic transitions, they really need to be 100% behind that support and they need to match their words with actions. And I think that, you know, the US government did have the ability to prevent this coup and they did have the ability to reverse it once it happened because the US government has a lot of leverage over the Egyptian military. But they were not willing to back up their kind of on paper commitment to democracy with anything like concrete action or concrete steps.
- [54:50]
B
That's a very important takeaway that's applicable well beyond Egypt, I think. So. Thank you for highlighting that for our listeners. Can I ask as a final question then, if we're in the theme of kind of looking ahead of what could be done, what you might be working on now that this project is released in the world in this book.
- [55:08]
A
Yeah, it's always fun to have a book out because it means you can turn to new things. And of course I'm still interested in counter Revolution. But I'm moving on to new subjects. So I'm hoping there will be other promising young scholars who will kind of take up the mantle of counter revolutions research and carry this research agenda forward. So I have two new book projects that I'm working on, both of them with co authors. The first project is about the 2019 uprisings in the Arab world. So in 2019, there were four revolutionary uprisings in the Arab world dot one in Sudan, one in Algeria, one in Lebanon, and one in Iraq. 2019 was actually this really interesting year where there were mass movements and uprisings all over the world. So there were four in the Middle east, but there were also a number in Latin America and Hong Kong and in Sub Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe. So it was kind of a year of revolution. And this book is focusing on the four revolutions in the Middle East. And the empirical source for the book is data, these protest data sets. So I'm continuing to use protest data in my research. And we built these original protest data sets covering all of the protests that occurred during these uprisings using original Arabic language media sources, both social media and news media. And so we've got this fantastic data set that allows us to trace the arc and contours of the mass movements in each of these four cases. And the book is trying to explain and unpack the variation and the sort of different trajectories that these movements took. And it's trying to tie those differences to the different regime characteristics during this revolutionary wave. Because if we look at the 2019 uprisings and we compare them to the 2011 uprisings, for example, the type of regimes that they broke out in were actually quite different. So the 2011 uprisings were all, by and large, they took place in these heavily consolidated, autocratic regimes, mostly republican autocracies, although a couple of monarchies too, but certainly full authoritarian regimes. Whereas the 2019 uprisings took place in a much more varied set of regimes. So Sudan is a classic consolidated autocracy. You know, looks a lot like the regimes that saw uprisings during 2011. Algeria is a more complicated case. It's what we would call in political science a competitive authoritarian regime. It's slightly more open, there are elections, it's more pluralistic, there's more space for opposition. So that's a competitive authoritarian regime. And then Iraq and Lebanon are actually weak democracies. I mean, they have elections. Iraq just had an election which was, you know, quite competitive. And those elections do matter. They do bring new governments to power. Now, there are serious issues in those countries. And there are serious issues with those democracies, but they are not the types of countries that we normally expect to see revolutions occurring in. And so the book, theoretically, beyond just wanting to kind of document and track these four really interesting revolutionary uprisings in this wave, that hasn't really been studied, certainly hasn't been studied as much as the 2011 cases. Beyond that, we're interested in theorizing and making sense of the different trajectories that revolutionary movements take and the different outcomes that they have in these different regime types. So, you know, is. Is revolution different? Does it look different? Does it take different forms? Is it potentially easier or more difficult when the regime that's confronted is a, is a weak democracy or a competitive authoritarian regime versus your classic consolidated autocracy? And this is again, a place where we don't have a lot of theory because most of the theory on revolutions and uprisings are about, you know, cases of consolidated autocracy, full, full blown dictatorships, because that's historically where we saw most of these movements. But that's changing now. We're seeing a lot more mass uprisings in these more competitive cases. And so we're trying to use the 2019 uprisings as an opportunity to theorize about how the contours of mobilization and repression and state response difference in these different regime contexts. So that's the first project which is underway. We've collected the data and we're kind of in the process of analyzing it, and we're likely going to do some interviews for that project as well with activists who participated in those uprisings. That project is with Chantal Berman, who's a professor here at Georgetown, and Rima Majid, who's at the American University of Beirut. And then the second book project, which, if we still have time, I can briefly touch on.
- [60:10]
B
Yeah, please.
- [60:11]
A
Yeah. That project is with Annie Meng from the University of Virginia and Jack Payne from Emory. And this is a project on authoritarianism. And it's interested in coming up with a new way of thinking about authoritarianism. The kind of traditional way of thinking about different types of autocratic regimes is according to institutions. So, you know, party based regimes, military regimes, personalist regimes, monarchies. We want to propose a new framework and a new way of thinking about autocracies, which is thinking about them in terms of their origins and how they're, how they're born. And this very much comes from, you know, all three of us are scholars who've worked a lot on rebellion and revolution. And so this very much comes out of this research and this interest in revolution and thinking about revolutionary dictatorships or dictatorships born through rebellion and how those might differ from other types of dictatorships. So that's actually where we all are starting from with this book. And we're trying to think about building that out and thinking about other sorts of origins beyond revolution and rebellion. So rebel dictatorships is one type of another major type are dictatorships that are born out of coups. That's actually the largest category in the data we've collected. And then there's two other kind of origin stories, dictatorships that are created through foreign handoffs. So a foreign power, usually these are anti colonial or decolonization cases where a foreign power hands things off to a set of domestic elites. And then the final category are the cases that we're all concerned about the most today. Right. So cases of authoritarian consolidation. Right. So an elected leader who comes to power through a democratic process, seizing that power and installing a dictatorship and consolidating his rule, you know, and, and doing away with it with the former democracy. So we're calling those cases incumbent consolidation cases. And those are the, the four types we're working with. And the idea is to write a book that theorizes about how the origins of autocracies shapes all kinds of different outcomes after the fact. It sort of has these path dependent downstream implications. So I'll just give one teaser on one of the findings that we're seeing, which is that the rebel regimes, the rebel autocracies, and the foreign created regimes are actually the strongest. They're the ones that last the longest by far, whereas the coup autocracies and the incumbent consolidation regimes are much weaker. So there may be a silver lining there in that, you know, the, the type of autocracy that we're seeing the most today, which are these income consolidation cases, these elected autocrats who are trying to stay in power and install a new dictatorship. Those regimes are actually not very long lasting. They typically don't last very long. So. And there are various reasons for that that we're still trying to figure out. But that's maybe something, some sign of hope in an era where we're seeing unfortunately, an increase in a rise in authoritarianism around the world. So we're hoping the book will have something to say about those dynamics as well. Yeah, but those are the, those are the two new projects. They'll probably keep me busy for a little while going.
- [63:43]
B
Yeah, they certainly sound like it. And both interesting. So I'm sure if they become books, you'll come back and tell us more about them. But of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book you've just finished titled Return of why Counter Revolutions Emerge and Succeed, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Cillian, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [64:04]
A
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.
- [64:07]
B
Sam.