This chapter, building on the previous one, attempts to explain the different outcomes of the transnational cycle of protest that erupted across colonial Southeast Asia during the decade following World War II. I claim, once again, that a state-centered approach best explains these outcomes. I argue, more specifically, that the success or failure of Communist movements in actually seizing state power in this region was determined by the specific characteristics of colonial (or neocolonial) rule in each national society, particularly policies toward moderate nationalists. This chapter, then, takes the existence of the Communist-led national liberation movements that emerged during and immediately after the Japanese occupation of World War II as “given” for present purposes.

The analysis of this chapter reflects two growing concerns in recent analyses of social movements.

This chapter analyzes the strengths and limitations of the state-centered perspective on revolutions, which I briefly introduced in the previous chapter and which I deploy in the chapters that follow. As I noted earlier, the discussion here is primarily theoretical and somewhat abstract, although I do try to ground this discussion in a short case study of the Cuban Revolution, itself one of the major revolutionary conflicts of the Cold War era. Nonetheless, some readers may wish to forge straight ahead into the more empirical chapters on revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia and Central America in Parts 2 and 3, respectively.

I argue in this chapter that state-centered theoretical approaches comprise some of the most powerful analytic tools that are currently available to analysts of revolutions – more powerful (as I argued in the previous chapter) than the modernization and Marxist perspectives.

The previous chapter characterized the Salvadoran and Guatemalan revolutionary movements as failures, which is true by definition if a revolution, or a “successful” revolution, requires the overthrow of the existing state. But there is another side to the proverbial coin: As we have seen, the Salvadoran and Guatemalan states were themselves unable to defeat militarily the revolutionary movements that challenged them. This raises a question that has received relatively little attention in the literature on revolutionary movements (and social movements more generally): Why have certain movements (but not others) been able to persist for many years or even decades, maintaining a significant base of popular support, even when subjected to extraordinary levels of state violence? To address this question, I compare in this chapter cases of “persistent insurgency” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru (with a glance at Colombia) with major defeated rebellions in Malaya and the Philippines (discussed in Part 2) as well as Venezuela.

Revolutionary movements are not simply or exclusively a response to economic exploitation or inequality, but also and more directly a response to political oppression and violence, typically brutal and indiscriminate. This is the principal thesis of this book, one that I reach through an examination of revolutionary movements that emerged during the second half of what has been called the “short” twentieth century (1914–91), a period characterized by the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

The Cold War era (1945–91) was truly an “age of revolution,” even more so, arguably, than the great revolutionary age of 1789–1848 (see Hobsbawm 1962). Dozens of powerful revolutionary movements emerged across the globe during this period, mainly in the Third World, and a number of them successfully overthrew existing political authorities. In the process, some movements also radically restructured, destroyed, or replaced key institutions, social relationships, and shared beliefs.

Between the incineration of Hiroshima and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, dozens of revolutionary conflicts shook the world. Most revolutionary movements of the Cold War era, including several quite powerful ones, were defeated. But many successfully seized state power, remaking large parts of the globe and, in the process, the international balance of power. In East Asia, revolutionaries seized power in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and challenged imperial and neo imperial rule in several other countries, including Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines. In Africa, French Algeria and Portugal's far-flung colonies violently threw off imperial rule, and popular revolts in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa hastened the demise of imperial and/or white-supremacist rule in those countries. In Latin America, meanwhile, revolutionaries seized power in Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua, nearly triumphed in El Salvador, and powerfully shook Venezuela, Guatemala, Peru, and Colombia. Finally, a series of popular rebellions in 1989 finished off the more recalcitrant Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, which had been demoralized by Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union and his rejection of the Brezhnev Doctrine.

The various chapters and ideas in this book have been presented on so many occasions and before so many colleagues, peers, and students that any list of the people who have kindly (and sometimes impatiently) responded to its arguments would no doubt consume several pages. I would like to thank, however, a rather smaller circle of friends and colleagues who have been especially helpful, directly or indirectly, in my continuing efforts to understand revolutions, social movements, and political conflict more generally.

I have been most privileged – perhaps uniquely privileged – to know and to have worked with the two most influential contemporary scholars of revolutions, Theda Skocpol and Charles Tilly. I want to thank them for their inspiration and encouragement, both that which they have expressed personally and that embodied in their own exemplary scholarship. I also want to recognize several other important scholars of revolutions who have also greatly influenced my thinking, albeit often from a somewhat greater distance, including John Foran, Jack Goldstone, Tim McDaniel, Eric Selbin, and Timothy Wickham-Crowley. And I would like to thank Mustafa Emirbayer and Jim Jasper, intellectual collaborators who have continually engaged and challenged my thinking about a host of issues.

A number of people at Harvard, Northwestern, and New York Universities (many of whom have since moved on to other institutions) have also helped me, more than they may realize, to think more clearly about revolutions and not-so-related issues.

If one set out in the spring of 1980 to analyze recent revolutions – inspired, perhaps, by the dramatic events of the previous year in Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan – one's attention would have been drawn inexorably and indeed exclusively to the Third World. At that time, certainly, there did not seem to be anything particularly revolutionary occurring in the “Second World” of the Soviet bloc (and certainly not in the “First World” of advanced capitalist societies). Indeed, opposition movements in Eastern Europe seemed extraordinarily weak or simply nonexistent. The fact that powerful movements within and without the ruling Communist parties had been bloodily suppressed by the Soviet Union in Hungary in 1956 and rather more easily, but no less thoroughly, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 only underscored the apparently insurmountable difficulties in opposing the extant Communist regimes.

In the preceding chapters, I have tried to demonstrate how a state-centered approach illuminates the uneven development of revolutionary movements in postwar Southeast Asia. But perhaps the power of this approach for that region, at that time, has something to do with the fact that these societies were formal colonies ruled by powerful external states that were then suddenly occupied by yet another foreign power, Japan.

This chapter presents a state-centered explanation of the uneven development of armed, Communist-led revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War. More specifically, it attempts to explain why Communist movements became formidable threats to incumbent regimes in Vietnam, Malaya, and the Philippines during the decade or so following World War II, but not in Indonesia. The following chapter attempts to explain why only the Vietnamese Communist insurgency was subsequently able to seize state power (at least, during the period under examination, in northern Vietnam), while the other two Communist insurgencies that developed in the region were defeated.

After noting some of the common characteristics of Southeast Asian societies at midcentury, I examine two hypotheses about “Indonesian exceptionalism” (i.e., the absence of a Communist-led national liberation movement in that country), and present my own solution to this puzzle.