Chapter 7 focuses on the two entities most often considered instances of revolutionary state formation after 2011 and which came into conflict with one another: the ISIS caliphate founded across Syria and Iraq, on the one hand, and the autonomous cantons ruled by the Kurdish PYD party in ‘Rojava’, or the Kurdish areas of north-eastern Syria, on the other. The chapter acknowledges that in attempting to create new forms of state – ‘democratic confederalism’ in the case of Rojava, and a Sunni Caliphate in the case of ISIS – these instances do resemble previous cases of revolutionary transformation. Yet their relationship with the revolutionary uprisings of 2011 is more complicated. In the case of ISIS, the chapter demonstrates that the caliphate is better thought of as a form of counter-revolution against that uprising, while in Rojava the PYD maintained an ambiguous relationship with the regime against which it was directed. For both the PYD and ISIS, international intervention proved decisive as the former were able to ally with the United States to defeat the latter – only then to suffer Turkish invasion once US support was withdrawn.

This chapter outlines the conceptual framework used in the book. Contrary to understandings of revolution based on their outcomes – on which basis the uprisings of 2011 are excluded from the definition of revolutions – this chapter argues that only a more open definition can encompass the phenomenon of counter-revolution. Adopting instead the idea of a revolutionary situation, the chapter outlines different forms of counter-revolution as a project of preventing or turning back a revolution through closing a revolutionary situation. Counter-revolution, the chapter demonstrates, cannot rely solely on the elite of the old regime but requires a popular base as well as external support. To succeed, therefore, counter-revolutionaries must unite the ‘counter-revolution from above’, ‘counter-revolution from below’ and ‘counter-revolution from without.’ Yet the social basis of such alliances has changed. Whereas the classic forms of European and colonial counter-revolution relied upon agrarian classes (sometimes united with urban capitalists and the lower middle class) supported by external powers, post-1975 democratising political revolutions were characterised by the absence or acquiescence of such classes and the encouragement of a liberal international order under US dominance. The Arab uprisings, by contrast, faced competitive regional counter-revolutions waged by financial and security elites – bolstered by the inheritance of previous revolutions from above.

Chapter 6 focuses on Libya and Yemen, both cases in which the former ruling dictator was removed – and eventually in both cases killed – but the result was the fragmentation and near-collapse of the state accompanied by direct and competitive foreign military intervention. Although ‘tribalism’ is often presented as a common factor in producing this outcome in both states, the chapter presents a materialist account of the tribe: just as in the case of the sect, tribal identification and forms of mobilisation acquiring their importance from previous forms of political economy. In both Libya and Yemen, the inheritance of previous revolutions from above – Gaddafi’s in Libya, and the anti-monarchical and anti-colonial revolutions of the 1960s in North and South Yemen, respectively – also shaped the revolutionary-counter-revolutionary conflicts after 2011. Although the NATO campaign in Libya in 2011 has been taken as a paradigmatic case of humanitarian intervention, assimilating the uprising to mid-2000s US policies of ‘regime change’, this chapter demonstrates that in both Libya and Yemen counter-revolutionary external intervention has been much more substantial and consequential.

Using the concept of a revolutionary situation as a turning point in which previously accepted social structures and relations are in flux, this chapter demonstrates the profoundly revolutionary nature of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Tracing the history of the revolutionary situations in each case – Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Libya and Yemen – the chapter demonstrates how mass uprisings of historically remarkable size and breadth established new forms and sites of sovereignty and challenged existing social relations. These included mass, class-based revolts rooted in dissatisfaction with decades of neoliberal economic policy in the region, and the rejection of hierarchies of gender and sect. These revolutionary situations often produced a new sense of expanded and collective selfhood, which would then require counter-revolutionary violence to be eradicated. This chapter, thus, outlines the revolutionary situations that post-2011 counter-revolutionaries sought to end.

The uprisings that shook the Middle East in 2011 shaped the subsequent decade of civil wars, coups and political crisis. The ‘Arab Spring’ has, therefore, come to be seen as a failure – a failure of transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes. Such transitions were expected to follow the model established in the last quarter of the twentieth century, producing only political rather than social transformation. Rather than revolutions, however, the 2011 uprisings have come to be seen as at most unsuccessful revolts. The reasons for this failure are typically ascribed to peculiarities of the region, in the presence of Islamist oppositions, sectarian division and external intervention into relatively weak states. Yet the crushing of the Arab uprisings represents not an inevitable failure or defeat but success: the success of counter-revolution.

This chapter focuses on Egypt and Tunisia, as the two states experienced political revolutions after 2011. In Egypt, the brief political revolution was overturned by the counter-revolution of 2013, while in Tunisia an unsteady democratic transition was achieved at the cost of the social demands of the uprising. Using the framework of counter-revolution from above, below, and without, the chapter demonstrates how counter-revolutionaries in both states were able to rely on the inheritance of previous anti-colonial revolutions from above to build a base of support – one aided by the record of Islamist parties once in power. The greater independence of the organised working class in Tunisia hampered a more fully counter-revolutionary outcome: while the external influence of the EU was concerned with fostering political revolution against social revolution. In Egypt, by contrast, the military as the core of the state was supported by a coalition of Gulf states already financially well-embedded in the country’s ruling class and pursuing a policy of outright counter-revolution.

The conclusion returns to the general questions raised in the first two chapters of the book. Reiterating and summarising the argument about counter-revolution from above, below and without, the chapter turns to the transformation in revolutions that occurred after 1975 – initially towards political revolutions and transitions towards liberal democracy, and then towards mass, urban-based uprisings frustrated by counter-revolutions. Drawing on the work of Mark Beissinger, the chapter shows that, far from being regionally unique, the Arab uprisings were the beginning of a decade of increasing mass protest that did not bring forth profound social – or in many cases, political – transformation. Nonetheless, as the example of the return of the slogans and tactics of 2011 with new forms of learning in uprisings in the region before the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate, the success of counter-revolution cannot be assumed.

This chapter focuses on Syria and Bahrain, states in which the ruling regimes of 2011 managed to retain power: albeit in the case of Syria at the cost of more than a decade of civil war. Acknowledging the great differences between the two states, the chapter highlights the similarity in the role of sectarianism and external intervention: binding the counter-revolutions from above, below and without. The chapter presents a materialist understanding of sectarianism, however, as the product of both particular forms of political economy and counter-revolutionary strategy. In Syria, this produced a cross-sectarian ruling elite, albeit with an Alawi core, that nonetheless had profoundly sectarian effects: whereas in Bahrain, sectarianism served more straightforwardly as a prop of the Khalifa ruling house. The Syrian counter-revolution could also rely, albeit to a lesser degree, on the inheritance of the previous revolution from above and the promotion of an ideology of development and modernisation. In both states, narratives of external intervention – Western, Zionist or Iranian – served to strengthen the counter-revolutionary cause, while extensive outside support for counter-revolution – mainly Russian and Iranian in Syria, Saudi and Emirati in Bahrain – made up for the limited appeal of the counter-revolution from below. This chapter focuses on Syria and Bahrain, states in which the ruling regimes of 2011 managed to retain power: albeit in the case of Syria at the cost of more than a decade of civil war. Acknowledging the great differences between the two states, the chapter highlights the similarity in the role of sectarianism and external intervention: binding the counter-revolutions from above, below and without. The chapter presents a materialist understanding of sectarianism, however, as the product of both particular forms of political economy and counter-revolutionary strategy. In Syria, this produced a cross-sectarian ruling elite, albeit with an Alawi core, that nonetheless had profoundly sectarian effects: whereas in Bahrain, sectarianism served more straightforwardly as a prop of the Khalifa ruling house. The Syrian counter-revolution could also rely, albeit to a lesser degree, on the inheritance of the previous revolution from above and the promotion of an ideology of development and modernisation. In both states, narratives of external intervention – Western, Zionist or Iranian – served to strengthen the counter-revolutionary cause, while extensive outside support for counter-revolution – mainly Russian and Iranian in Syria, Saudi and Emirati in Bahrain – made up for the limited appeal of the counter-revolution from below.

The 1848 revolutions impacted American politics as it increased the need for labor in the West Indies, elevated fear of abolition, and prompted disappointed European revolutionaries to emigrate.

Chapter 1 offers a reappraisal of the pathbreaking efforts of the peacemakers of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) to establish a more durable European peace order, and a new European concert, after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It then shows how the 19th century’s Vienna system provided novel mechanisms, rules and understandings to preserve peace and a new, more legitimate international equilibrium in and beyond Europe, thereby also creating essential conditions for the rise of the United States. Yet it also illuminates how changes in international politics and competing nationalist aspirations eventually led to the disintegration of the peace order of 1814–15 and the European concert in the aftermath of the trans-European revolutions of 1848–49 and the Crimean War of 1853–56.

Chapter 1 introduces the importance of low-carbon system transitions and associated challenges. It describes the dominant reformist approach (represented by neo-classical economics and mainstream policy organisations) and a revolutionary approach (represented by critical political economy and deep ecology), which emerged in opposition to the reformist approach. Moving beyond this stale dichotomy, the book argues for a reconfigurational approach which understands transitions as systemic, longitudinal and co-evolutionary processes, involving interactions between technologies, user practices, business strategies, public policies, cultural meanings, and infrastructures. To conceptualise this approach, the book builds on the Multi-Level Perspective on socio-technical system transitions (MLP) and elaborates it in several ways. The chapter ends with a description of the book's content.

Given the deterrent effects of transnational repression and conflict transmission in the United States and Britain before 2011, what brought anti-regime Libyans, Syrians, and Yemenis together for the Arab Spring? Chapter 4 describes how the Arab Spring mobilized members of the anti-regime diaspora by upending the normative operation and effects of transnational repression and conflict transmission in the diaspora. The Arab Spring did so by reducing the costs of activism, making members willing to take risks, and creating new solidarities against common threats. The extent to which diaspora groups experienced these quotidian disruptions determined whether or not they converted preexisting organizations to the cause and maintained solidarity over time.

Poetry makes nothing happen, except when it does. The sharpness of this barb may derive, strangely, from the fact that poetry keeps pretending to make things happen, keeps availing itself of a didactic, performative, and apostrophic language hailing from a world in which such techniques were for better and worse the very stuff of social reproduction, and where words could kill. Poetry is therefore the literary mode most practically suited to revolution, the literary practice that coincides most clearly with the concerted activity of revolutionaries in the throes of crisis. Resistance, insurgency, and revolution produce their novels after the fact but their poetry, often, right away. Inverting the scales of the systems of genre we inherit from Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson, poetry’s power turns out to derive from a strange literality.

This essay develops from the hypothesis that the relationship between Marx and cinema is mediated by a shared investment in the revolutionary subject, a collective being capable of abolishing capitalism, insofar as its liberation necessitates total demolition of the standing social order, from which an egalitarian organization of society might then develop. Beginning in Russia after 1917, when cinema was used as a material force to organize workers and peasants, the essay’s first half tracks the way that a cinematic emphasis on the industrial proletariat has been replaced, or superseded, by an emphasis on what Marx and Engels described as a relative surplus population. The essay’s second half illustrates this shift with reference to two popular films, released into the apparent fall of American economic hegemony, approaching them as ensigns of an economy in terminal crisis wherein revolutionary subjectivities might be forged out of the otherwise disaggregate members of the surplus population.

The revolutionary significance of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell’s first book and the best introduction to his thought, becomes increasingly evident fifty years after its publication, confronting us with newly relevant, transformative thinking about modernism, the idea of culture, ordinary language philosophy, the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, American philosophy, the 1960s, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Kant, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Shakespeare, and such eternal philosophical themes as truth, passion, utterance, self-knowledge, skepticism, and the value of criticism. Cavell’s intervention in ordinary language philosophy revolutionized its practice, overcoming its dogmas and challenging the analytic tradition from within, broadening its audiences. His focus on self-confrontation as central to philosophical practice, the shepherding of ordinary utterances into uses within forms of life, shows that the philosophical preconditions of democratic thinking lie in the embedding of meaning in everyday life, rooted in the ethical and aesthetic aspects of how we mean what we say.

Throughout the war and beyond, lawmakers largely abandoned their previous efforts to legislate polite speech, and instead crafted statutes designed to criminalize politically disloyal speech and reward loyal speech. General sessions courts, too, seem to have concentrated their efforts on subversive speech, while at the same time adopting a more expansive definition of impolite speakers and a more casual attitude toward impolite speech in general. Meanwhile, some evidence suggests that elite attempts to maintain a monopoly over their roles as credible purveyors of news about publicly significant events were undermined, as Americans questioned and reformulated the bonds between information and personal identity. Amid all this uncertainty about speech and status, a new ethos of respectability emerged as a set of values and a guide to behavior for those wishing to distinguish themselves from the lower orders. Indeed, cultural concerns about speech, its relationship to social order, and how best to regulate it have never totally vanished; they merely transformed and emerged in different incarnations that tend to reflect and reinforce existing structures of power and status in society.

The book opens with a chapter on slavery, starting with the absence of Blacks from “we the people” in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. The American Revolution led to the Constitution, and Hamilton’s reports were vital to the new country. They set the basis for the Louisiana Purchase and the Missouri Compromise. Cotton agriculture in the South and manufacture in the North contributed to economic growth. The 1837 banking crisis interrupted this progress and further compromises over slavery in new states set the stage for the Civil War. Time on the Cross is examined to illustrate the role of Blacks and how hard it is to write about it.

From 1904 on, the question of disabled veterans was in no way neutral on the political level. It fostered health care and social welfare policy, impelled an interpretation of the ongoing war, and reconfigured notions of heroism, sacrifice, and patriotism. The period 1915–1919 was marked by the disabled veterans’ remarkable political activism under three successive regimes, two revolutions, and two wars. As the only large-scale association of First World War veterans in Russia, the All-Russian Union of Maimed Soldiers managed to rally together men linked only by a common fate. They exerted a visible influence on the solution for the ‘disabled veterans’ question’ in 1917 and put out publicity for their own cause thanks to democratisation. They did not, however, manage to unify a group suffering a host of divisions stemming from the era’s political turbulence, nor did they succeed in consolidating a common identity distinct from that of all war veterans or all disabled persons. Their rapid, forced political demobilisation during the civil war made them veterans who had experienced both the Great War and the revolution and who were durably stigmatised by the Bolshevik regime. They suffered discrimination that benefited the disabled veterans of the Red Army, the only ones deemed legitimate under the Soviet regime. The political repression only doubled the punishment of their handicap.