International Politics and the Role of Ideology in Revolutions

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

While earlier scholarship focused on structural factors, the study of revolutions during the last decade has given a central role to the ideology of revolutionaries. Radical ideologies have in fact been the hallmark of all major revolutions and the engine of massive social transformations where they took power. Another significant shift in recent scholarship involves the endogenization of international factors in theories of revolutions. Revolutions are not studied as simply domestic events but as rooted in interactive international and domestic processes. Their outcomes in turn trigger changes within as well as across national borders: major revolutions have almost always been followed by wars and have produced lasting ruptures in the global order.

This panel joins the new trends by presenting the latest research on key 20th-century cases. Going beyond existing scholarship, we aim to jointly explore the specific conditions under which ideology matters or the international impacts of revolutions are most profound. Daniel Chirot’s paper analyzes the particular tendencies in the revolutionary processes that have allowed ideologically radical factions to seize power and cause immense tragedies in their aftermaths. Studying the fascist and communist revolutions in interwar Europe, Chad Nelson argues that ideological differences cause international conflicts not because revolutionary states want to export revolutions but primarily because counterrevolutionary states fear contagion. Tuong Vu examines the particular combination of ideas and practices in the North Korean revolutionary state’s ideology that has made it extremely difficult for that country to reintegrate into the global order decades later. In contrast, Parichehr Kazemi shows in her paper why the interactions between domestic and global factors in the Iranian case played a key role in generating a deeply hostile relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the West. Together the papers in the panel hope to strengthen theories of revolutions with in-depth analyses of revolutionary processes in crucial cases.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Individual Presentations

• "Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold" (Yeats) - Daniel Chirot, University of Washingtonb, Seattle

• Revolutionary Contagion and Communist and Fascist Revolutions in Europe - Chad Nelson, Brigham Young University

• Challenges of Post-Revolutionary Reintegration: North Korea and the Global Order - Tuong Vu, University of Oregon

• Hostility Is Not Destiny: The Iranian Revolution and the United States - Parichehr Kazemi, University of Oregon

Chair

• Luyang Zhou Zhejiang University

Discussant

• Luyang Zhou Zhejiang University