On July 3, 2013 Egypt suffered a counterrevolution. At a press conference that evening the Minister of Defense, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, announced that the military had arrested the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and removed him from office. Morsi’s election a year earlier had been one of the culminating events following an eighteen-day revolution in 2011, in which unarmed protesters had filled the country’s streets and squares to force the resignation of the longstanding dictator, Hosni Mubarak. After this revolution, Egyptians believed they had definitively turned the page on their authoritarian past and that going forward the country would be ruled by presidents who were anointed by the people, rather than the military. But in the weeks and months following Sisi’s press conference, these Egyptians began to experience an uneasy sense of déjà vu, as they watched the military consolidate its hold on power and resurrect many of the institutions that had supposedly been swept away. As it became increasingly clear that military authoritarianism had, in fact, returned to Egypt with a vengeance, fingers began pointing and anxious questions were raised. What had happened? How had the generals managed to stuff all the energy and ferment of 2011 back into an autocratic box? Why had tyranny returned to Egypt?

The reversal of Egypt’s 2011 revolution represents one of approximately one hundred counterrevolutions that have occurred globally since 1900. Some of these counterrevolutions, like Egypt’s, went on to establish harsh authoritarian regimes, like Miklos Horthy’s pseudo-fascistic government in Hungary, Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship in South Korea, Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist autocracy in Sudan, and Guatemala’s brutal military government. Others ultimately failed to return the old regime to power but still generated vicious cycles of conflict, like the civil wars in Mozambique, Uganda, and Nicaragua. And still others, in failing, unintentionally bolstered nascent revolutionary governments, producing some of the most durable dictatorships of the modern age, including the Soviet Union, China’s communist government, and the Castro regime in Cuba. According to this book’s data, just over half of all the revolutions that occurred in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries faced a counterrevolutionary attempt and roughly one in five of these revolutions was reversed.

This book asks why revolutionary governments come under threat from counterrevolutions, and why some counterrevolutions are able to successfully restore the ancien régime to power. I answer these two questions with an original cross-national dataset of counterrevolutions since 1900 and data collected during several years of fieldwork researching Egypt’s counterrevolution, including nearly one hundred interviews with Egyptian political elites and an original protest dataset from the eighteen months preceding the 2013 coup. My definition of counterrevolution is based on the idea of revolution’s reversal: A counterrevolution is an irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the pre-revolutionary political regime. By a revolution, I mean that a regime has been overthrown through the mass mobilization of everyday citizens. This understanding of revolution therefore includes famous historical cases, like the Russian and Chinese revolutions, which sought to radically transform their states and societies, but it also includes more limited revolutions like Egypt’s, where protesters ousted a long-standing dictator and ushered in a new system of government. In short, I understand revolution to be a mode of regime change involving mass mobilization, and counterrevolution to be an effort to reverse a successful revolution.

The book forwards a movement-centric argument to explain patterns in counterrevolution. The argument is movement-centric because it emphasizes the strategies that movement leaders embrace, both during their revolutionary campaigns and after they seize the reins of government. These strategies matter because they, more than anything else, define the capacities and interests of the old and new regimes during the post-revolutionary transition. The book examines these post-revolutionary dynamics following two ideal-typical forms of revolution: radical-violent movements, which come to power through armed resistance and seek fundamental social change; and moderate-unarmed movements, which involve the widescale mobilization of everyday citizens in unarmed protest seeking a change in political regime. Though victorious revolutionaries from both types of movements enjoy an initial power advantage over the ousted forces of the former regime, it is revolutions of the latter type that are most at risk of losing this leverage and ultimately being reversed by counterrevolution. With no coercive resources of their own and with the backing of broad and fractious coalitions, these movements’ leaders are forced to govern through conciliation and compromise. To be sure, some new governments do manage to walk this fine line. But others slip up, usually, I argue, because they prioritize appeasement of old regime forces over the preservation of their revolutionary base. These revolutionary leaders see their elite coalitions fracture into bitter opposing camps and their core supporters grow disillusioned over the revolution’s unmet promises and never-ending instability. For the shattered forces of the former regime, these developments present a sudden opportunity – to cultivate new alliances and begin rebuilding their depleted social base. And if they can successfully seize this opportunity, they may be able to coast back to power in a way that would have been unthinkable at the revolution’s end: at the head of a popular counterrevolutionary movement for stability and order.

This movement-centric theory implies that, ultimately, it is a movement’s strategies that will determine whether it can withstand counterrevolutionary threats and produce lasting political order. To some extent, violence is key. Revolutionary governments that emerge from the cauldron of violent struggle, where the travails of guerrilla combat generate hardened soldiers and loyal cadres, have unique coercive resources at their disposal for hunting down counterrevolutionaries and for defeating their reactionary campaigns. But the theory also offers a path to avoiding counterrevolution for governments that come to power through unarmed mass movements, and who appear grossly outmatched in firepower against their counterrevolutionary foes. For these governments, the key to resisting counterrevolution is to maintain their revolutionary leverage over the old regime at all costs, by preserving the unity of their coalitions and keeping their social bases rallied behind the revolutionary cause. That way, if a counterrevolution does emerge, they can mobilize their followers to pour back into the streets and send the old regime packing the way they ousted it in the first place.

This is one of the first social science books devoted to counterrevolution. In fact, as a number of recent works have pointed out (Mayer Reference Mayer2000; Slater and Smith Reference Slater and Smith2016; Weyland Reference Weyland2016; Allinson Reference Allinson2022), it is striking how little research exists on this subject, especially as counterrevolution represents one of the foremost concerns for new revolutionary leaders. For whatever reason, counterrevolution has fallen between the cracks of research agendas on other modes of regime change, like revolutions, coups, and democratization. As a result, we have virtually no data on counterrevolutions, no sense of how frequently they occur, and only limited theory with which to explain them. Yet counterrevolutions are immensely consequential political events. They have produced some of the most brutal conservative autocracies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have spawned destructive civil wars, and have inflicted untold harm on everyday citizens and revolutionaries alike. Indeed, if we take Egypt’s counterrevolution as but one example, today Egyptians live under a regime that is far more tyrannical than the one they deposed in 2011. For those who care about supporting nascent revolutions like Egypt’s, it is crucial to interrogate the shadowy forces most likely to bring these projects to an end. Further, in shedding light on the reasons for counterrevolutionary emergence and success, the book contributes to a growing body of research on why some revolutions are able to establish durable political order, whereas others rapidly break down. And, finally, in an era of resurgent authoritarianism and democratic erosion worldwide, understanding counterrevolution – which, the data suggest, is also on the rise – can help us to make sense of the broader seductions and appeals of reactionary politics.

Counterrevolution: Findings and Facts

There have been ninety-eight counterrevolutionary challenges in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, twenty-two of which were successful in restoring the old regime to power. This basic inventory of counterrevolution worldwide is helpful because it allows us, for the first time, to document where, when, and how often counterrevolutions have historically taken place. For example, many classic works claim that counterrevolutions are “inevitable” or “automatic” responses to revolution. But, according to the data, only about half (53 percent) of all revolutionary governments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have come under threat from counterrevolution. Moreover, whereas some regimes have skated by without ever being challenged, others have suffered four, five, or even six successive counterrevolutions. Why have some revolutionary governments managed to avoid counterrevolution entirely, whereas others have had to weather multiple challenges?

The trends become even more puzzling when we look at counterrevolutionary success. The data reveal that counterrevolutions have successfully reversed 18 percent of all modern revolutions. On the one hand, this represents the most common way by which revolutionary governments break down – more common than foreign invasions, state collapse, rebellions, backsliding, or elite defections. It is no wonder that so many revolutionary leaders through history have been obsessed with identifying and thwarting counterrevolutionary plots. But, on the other hand, if only one in five revolutions succumb to counterrevolution, then perhaps this threat is overstated. In fact, the data show that counterrevolution is a quite inauspicious form of regime change. Counterrevolutions have a success rate of 22 percent, considerably lower than the rate for other modes of regime change, including revolutions, coups, and secessionist campaigns. These data suggest that counterrevolutionaries face tough odds in returning to power, which of course then raises the question: How do some of them manage to do so?

A third stylized fact is that the vast majority of successful counterrevolutions since 1900 have toppled democratic revolutions that involved largely unarmed resistance – in other words, revolutions like Egypt’s. There have been almost no successful counterrevolutions against revolutions that resemble history’s most paradigmatic cases, i.e., armed revolutions seeking radical social transformation. Indeed, it is telling that many of the most famous counterrevolutionary campaigns in history ended in failure – e.g., the Bay of Pigs invasion following the Cuban Revolution, the White movement following the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Contras rebellion in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas. The successful counterrevolutions identified in this research are generally less well known, in part because they rolled back nascent democratization projects before they were able to take root and leave their marks in the annals of history. That being said, it is still important to put this finding in context: Even though most successful counterrevolutions in history have overthrown democratic revolutions, it is still true that 70 percent of these regimes managed to survive intact. What makes democratic revolutions so much more susceptible to counterrevolution than armed revolutions embracing radical change? And how, despite their apparent weakness, did more than two-thirds of these democratic revolutions manage to survive?

One last major descriptive finding emerges from these data: Counterrevolutions have been on the decline globally since 1900 – with the exception of the last decade, when rates of counterrevolution have ticked up. The decades with the three highest rates of counterrevolution were all in the pre-World War II era. During the Cold War, counterrevolutions continued to emerge at a high rate but their chances of succeeding dropped off precipitously. And the post-Cold War decades of the 1990s and 2000s saw some of the lowest rates of counterrevolution in the modern era. Worryingly, however, this trend has recently reversed, with the half decade from 2010 to 2015 seeing an uptick in counterrevolution. Why was there a secular decline in counterrevolution for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Why has this trend recently reversed, and how might this be connected to the broader resurgence of authoritarianism globally? These are some of the questions this book will seek to answer.

The Argument

The book develops a movement-centric argument to explain two linked counterrevolutionary outcomes: whether a counterrevolution is launched against a new government (counterrevolutionary emergence) and whether counterrevolutionaries manage to restore themselves in office (counterrevolutionary success). By a movement-centric argument, I mean an argument that places greatest causal weight on the manner in which revolutionary movements come to power and the way they govern once in office. These movement characteristics are the most important determinants of three crucial factors that pattern counterrevolutionary emergence and success: (1) the capacities and (2) the interests of the old regime members who survive the revolution (which determines whether a counterrevolution will emerge); and (3) the capacities of the nascent revolutionary government (which determines whether counterrevolution can succeed). The theory examines how these configurations of capacities and interests differ following two ideal types of revolutionary movements: radical-violent revolutions, which come to power through armed warfare and embrace transformative ideologies; and moderate-unarmed revolutions, where diverse groups seeking more limited political change come together in broad coalitions and engage in unarmed mass protest.

To a certain extent, all post-revolutionary transitions begin in the same way: The new revolutionary government is ascendant, basking in the euphoria of its recent triumph and reveling in the support of the masses, while the remnants of the former regime are cowed and broken, forced, at least at first, to accept the dominance of their revolutionary foes. Indeed, by definition a successful revolution means that everyday citizens have mobilized with sufficient strength to force an incumbent from power against his will. Though these challengers may have started off as plucky underdogs, over the course of the revolution they build up considerable capacity, either through their proven ability to organize widespread protests or through the military acumen of their guerilla forces (or some combination of the two). At the same time, the revolution saps the strength of the incumbent and his cronies: It destroys or depletes their armies, peels away their domestic allies, and undermines their legitimacy in international eyes. When the revolution ends, then, and the transition to a new order begins, there is a fairly well-defined distribution of capacities and interests between revolutionaries and the former regime. Yet the nature and basis of revolutionaries’ initial leverage over the old regime differs considerably from revolution to revolution. And it is this variation that determines both whether these old regime forces will attempt to force their way back into office and whether that effort can succeed.

For a counterrevolution to emerge following a successful revolution, members of the former regime must believe that their interests are sufficiently threatened by the new government and must have some lingering coercive capacity at their disposal. On the one hand, if the revolutionary government is relatively mild and eschews radical reforms, former incumbents may calculate that they are better off accepting revolutionary rule than attempting a risky counterrevolution, which could leave them in an even worse position. On the other hand, if the revolution is particularly destructive, it leaves old regime forces so debilitated that, no matter how strong their will, they lack the means to organize a counterrevolutionary campaign. This reasoning leads to a somewhat surprising set of implications – that counterrevolutions are unlikely to emerge following extreme versions of both radical-violent revolution and moderate-unarmed revolution. Instead, counterrevolutions are most likely following revolutions with medium levels of violence and ambiguous ideological commitments – i.e., those that leave some of the old regime’s coercive capacities intact and present enough threat to their members’ interests that they are willing to risk a counterrevolutionary gambit.

If counterrevolutionary emergence is tied to old regime capacities and interests, counterrevolutionary success is largely the product of the new regime’s capacities – and specifically how those capacities evolve through the tumultuous post-revolutionary transition. At the outset of these transitions, revolutionaries hold the upper hand – as noted earlier, this is definitional in a successful revolution having just taken place. All else equal, we would expect these revolutionaries to defeat any counterrevolutionary attempt using exactly the same modes of resistance that secured them victory during the revolutionary struggle. Logically, then, for a successful counterrevolution to occur, one of two conditions must change: Either the former incumbents must receive a sudden windfall of fresh resources that bolster their capacities and allow them to overpower the new regime, or revolutionaries must squander some of their initial post-revolutionary capacity. The first scenario is technically possible, usually through a sudden influx of foreign support. But the second scenario is far more likely, in large part because post-revolutionary transitions are immensely difficult times to govern.

Specifically, all revolutionary governments face what I call a post-revolutionary governance “trilemma” – the dilemma of neutralizing lingering agents of the former regime, the dilemma of preserving the unity of their revolutionary coalitions, and the dilemma of converting mass support into a durable social base. New leaders who struggle to manage the conflicting imperatives of this trilemma will struggle to consolidate their revolutionary gains – and eventually see their capacity to resist the old regime bleed away. Further, some revolutionary movements will be in a far better position to manage this trilemma than others. In radical-violent revolutions, movements build up strong militias and guerilla armies, construct integrated party organizations, and cultivate powerful foreign allies, and when they come to power these resources prove invaluable in helping them cement their rule – most especially by allowing them to deploy violence against their opponents. But revolutionary leaders who come to power with moderate-unarmed movements have to navigate the governance trilemma without resorting to violence. They must rely instead on political acumen and negotiation to placate potential counterrevolutionaries, keep their coalitions intact, and maintain their social support. And, if they falter, their capacities can rapidly diminish, opening opportunities for shrewd counterrevolutionaries to rebuild their own capacities and restore themselves in office.

The post-revolutionary governance trilemma also points to the mechanisms that generally facilitate counterrevolutionary success. First, if new leaders fail to accommodate the demands of their coalition allies, these elites grow bitter and afraid, even coming to believe that they were better off under the former regime than they are likely to be under the new one. Second, if the new government delivers poorly on the revolution’s promises or fails to deal with the upheaval that often follows revolution, it risks alienating broad swaths of society, including even those who once supported the revolution. Like the jaded elites from the revolutionary coalition, these citizens begin to yearn for the stability of the pre-revolutionary days. Opportunistic counterrevolutionaries may be able to capitalize on these yearnings, using them to cultivate a new and somewhat improbable set of elite and popular allies. They can then return to office in a manner that many would have thought unimaginable during the revolution: as the leaders of a genuinely popular movement calling for the return of security and order.

This process by which successful counterrevolutions generally occur implies a set of lessons for how moderate-unarmed revolutionaries can protect themselves from these threats. Indeed, though their path through the post-revolutionary governance trilemma is more perilous, we still need to account for the fact that more than two thirds of them manage to successfully navigate it. One option is to strike a compromise with the old regime: As noted earlier, some revolutionary governments never experience a counterrevolution simply because these former incumbents conclude that their interests are not under serious threat. But this strategy comes with risks. For one, it forces revolutionaries to restrain themselves, preventing them from fulfilling many of the promises they made during the revolution. More importantly, it leaves them exposed should counterrevolutionaries, on a whim, decide to launch an attack. A shrewder strategy for these governments is therefore to preserve their initial post-revolutionary capacities at all costs – even at the risk of further antagonizing potential counterrevolutionaries. They can do this by doubling down on their revolutionary coalition and base, which will ensure that they retain their ability to return to mass mobilization. That way, if counterrevolutionaries do decide to strike, they can pour back into the streets and force them, through a raw show of people power, to return to the barracks once again.

This movement-centric theory of counterrevolution is summarized in Figure 1.1. On the top of the figure are the two revolution ideal types: radical-violent revolutions and moderate-unarmed revolutions. Below are characteristics commonly associated with each type, which I explain in more detail in Chapter 4. Radical-violent movements usually come to power with the backing of a loyal army or militia, a vanguard political party, and a strong foreign ally. In contrast, moderate-unarmed movements have no coercive organ of their own, are grounded in broad coalitions, and often enjoy weak or ambivalent foreign support. Moreover, because these revolution ideal types may hybridize, the figure denotes with a line that there is actually a spectrum of revolutionary forms lying in between these two types. Then, in the bottom half of the figure are the likelihoods of counterrevolutionary emergence and success. Counterrevolutions are most likely to emerge in the middle of the spectrum, following revolutions with hybrid features, which leave old regime members with some coercive capacity but also present a sufficient threat to their interests. If a counterrevolution does emerge, however, its chances of success are greatest following moderate-unarmed revolutions. This explains why nearly all of the successful counterrevolutions in world history have toppled democratic revolutions (which tend to conform to the moderate-unarmed ideal type). These movements struggle to navigate the post-revolutionary governance trilemma and preserve their initial capacity over the old regime. Though their demise in the face of counterrevolution is hardly inevitable, their inability to resort to violence means they must pursue a more delicate course in consolidating their rule.

Figure 1.1 A movement-centric theory of counterrevolution.

Figure 1.1Long Description

Diagram is organized into four rows. At the top are the two movement types, radical-violent revolution and moderate-unarmed revolution, with a line connecting them, which indicates that these types exist on a spectrum. In the second row are descriptions of the main characteristics of each type of revolution. For radical-violent revolutions, these include a loyal army or militia, a vanguard party, and a strong foreign support. For moderate-unarmed revolutions, these include no coercive organization, a diverse coalition, and weak or ambivalent foreign support. In the third row, the likelihood of counterrevolutionary emergence for each type is listed. The likelihood is low for extreme versions of both types of revolution, and high for types in the middle. In the fourth row, the likelihood of counterrevolutionary success for each type is listed. The likelihood is high for moderate-unarmed revolutions, medium for revolutions in the middle, and low for radical-violent revolutions.

Ultimately, then, this is a theory of counterrevolution that privileges the strategies of revolutionary movements and their leaders, both during their resistance campaigns and after they seize the reins of government. And I show that these movement strategies matter more for counterrevolutionary outcomes than a range of other plausible factors, including the military might of the former regime, the structure and performance of the economy, cleavages and polarization within society, and foreign support. Revolutionary movements, in other words, hold their fates vis-à-vis counterrevolutionaries largely within their own hands.

Contributions

This book contributes to a number of theoretical and policy debates and advances several active research agendas. The most direct and obvious contribution is to develop theoretical and empirical knowledge on counterrevolution. Here, the book builds on and advances a still-nascent but burgeoning social science literature on counterrevolution – in Egypt (Holmes Reference Holmes2019; Grimm Reference Grimm2022; Said Reference Said2023), in the Arab Spring revolutions (Allinson Reference Allinson2022), and in general (Mayer Reference Mayer2000; Slater and Smith Reference Slater and Smith2016; Weyland Reference Weyland2016). It is reassuring to see this important phenomenon, which has been largely ignored by scholars for too long, now being given the attention it is due, and my hope is that the insights in this book will prompt further research on counterrevolution in its various forms and manifestations. In Chapter 2 and the Conclusion, I propose some directions that this research might take.

The book also develops new insights on revolution, particularly on the sources of revolutionary order and the reasons why some revolutions break down. It was not so long ago that scholars were pronouncing the age of revolutions over (e.g., Nodia Reference Nodia2000; Kumar Reference Kumar and Donald2001; Foran Reference Foran2003). But the revolutions that swept through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of the Global South in the early twenty-first century have largely put this idea to bed. Indeed, more recent scholarship (e.g., Chenoweth et al. Reference Chenoweth, Dahlum, Kang, Marks, Shay and Wig2019; Beck et al. Reference Beck, Bukovansky, Chenoweth, Lawson, Nepstad and Ritter2022; Beissinger Reference Beissinger2022; Clarke Reference Clarke2025) has argued that revolutions are emerging now more than ever (albeit in different forms), creating fresh imperatives for scholars to take up research on this important mode of regime change.

Here, this book joins several recent studies in helping to make sense of the varied forms that post-revolutionary order can take. In the past, scholarship on revolution focused on the question of why revolutions break out. But perhaps because the revolutions of recent years have taken such varied forms and wrought such disparate outcomes, newer research has begun to pay more attention to the messy periods that follow revolutions and the different political realities that they can bring about (Stinchcombe Reference Stinchcombe1999; Hale Reference Hale2005; Goldstone Reference Goldstone2014; Pop-Eleches and Robertson Reference Pop-Eleches and Robertson2014; Bayat Reference Bayat2017; Lawson Reference Lawson2019; Beissinger Reference Beissinger2022; Clarke et al. Reference Clarke, Meng and Paine2024). Some revolutions are able to create durable institutions and pass transformative reforms, whereas others struggle to effect much change at all or even to survive beyond the moment of their initial victory – in many cases because they are ousted by counterrevolutions. This book also sheds light on these divergent pathways and varied post-revolutionary landscapes.

Relatedly, the book contributes to active debates on the relative merits of violent versus nonviolent resistance. Specifically, and in line with other recent studies (Levitsky and Way Reference Levitsky and Way2022; Meng and Paine Reference Meng and Paine2022), it traces the lineages of post-revolutionary stability to processes of armed resistance, which generate valuable resources for new regimes in consolidating their rule. Scholars of nonviolence have generally argued that unarmed civil resistance is a more effective strategy for toppling autocrats than armed guerilla warfare (Schock Reference Schock2005; Nepstad Reference Nepstad2011; Chenoweth and Stephan Reference Chenoweth and Stephan2012; Celestino and Gleditsch Reference Celestino and Gleditsch2013; Chenoweth Reference Chenoweth2021). While this may be true, this book raises troubling questions about the tenacity of the regimes established by these movements (see also Clarke Reference Clarke2022). Indeed, it suggests that there may be something of a “no pain, no gain” logic to revolutions: While nonviolent resistance may be better at forcing dictators to step down, it is armed resistance that best positions revolutionaries to cement their rule and ensure that these tyrants never return.

This research also has implications for scholarship on democratization and democratic consolidation, as one of the main findings is that democratic revolutions are the most likely to suffer counterrevolutionary reversals. But even though they do face tougher odds, the book still proposes a path for navigating these perilous transition periods. And, importantly, these lessons stand in contrast to much of the conventional wisdom on successful democratic consolidation. The reason is that the knowledge we have on these processes was largely built through the study of democratization episodes effected through elite negotiations and pacts, rather than revolutionary upheaval. Its recommendations for new democratic leaders are therefore somewhat ill-suited to the unique challenges of post-revolutionary transitions. For example, democratic leaders are urged to avoid rocking the boat – e.g., by reining in social movements, eschewing radical policies, and kowtowing to old regime officials – lest these former autocrats grow skittish and cut the transition short (e.g., O’Donnell and Schmitter Reference O’Donnell and Schmitter1986; Huntington Reference Huntington1984; Higley and Burton Reference Higley and Burton1989; Diamond Reference Diamond2008; Miller Reference Miller2021). But dictators who have been forced from power against their will are likely to be much harder to placate. Instead, democratic revolutionaries are better off maintaining their capacity over the old regime at all costs, by preserving the unity of their coalitions and rapidly consolidating the support built up during the revolution.

The book also sheds fresh light on Egypt’s tragic revolutionary experience, and the broader disappointments of the so-called “Arab Spring.” It is now difficult to remember the optimism and euphoria that followed the 2011 Arab revolutions, which seemed to herald the beginning of the end of authoritarianism in the Middle East. Egypt’s counterrevolution three years later was simply the most spectacular in a series of failed democratic experiments – along with sectarianized civil conflict in Syria, state breakdown and proxy war in Yemen and Libya, and democratic backsliding in Tunisia – that left scholars wondering why this revolutionary wave had delivered such a “modest harvest” (Brownlee et al. Reference Brownlee, Jason, Masoud and Reynolds2013). Out of this, a consensus began to take hold that these revolutions perhaps always stood little chance of success, either because of endemic weaknesses in their organization or because of the overbearing nature of the regimes they tried to displace. But in this book, I argue that this posthoc pessimism about the fate of the Arab Spring is somewhat overstated. For example, the comparative analyses show that a number of revolutions closely resembling those in the Arab Spring – in places like Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, Nepal, and Bangladesh – went on to consolidate robust democracies, often in the face of strong militaries and fierce counterrevolutions. In most cases, they did so by guarding the power that they built up during the revolution, something that Egypt’s government failed to do. Indeed, process tracing reveals that at the outset of the transition, Egypt’s revolutionaries enjoyed precisely the kind of leverage this book’s theory would predict, even over generals from a powerful military establishment. Had these leaders done a better job of preserving this initial capacity by maintaining the credible threat of re-mobilizing the full 2011 coalition, Egypt might well be a democracy today.

Finally, I hope this book will help us make sense of the broader counterrevolutionary moment that we are living through. Our current historical era is one in which counterrevolutionary politics, broadly defined, are on the rise globally, manifested not just in escalating rates of counterrevolutionary restorations but also in muscular and resurgent authoritarianism, rising right-wing populism, and the erosion of liberal institutions and norms in supposedly well-consolidated democracies. These concerning trends have prompted robust research agendas on topics like the populist radical right (Mudde Reference Mudde2016; Norris and Inglehart Reference Norris and Inglehart2019; S. Berman Reference Berman2021; Rodrik Reference Rodrik2021), authoritarian successor parties (Loxton and Mainwaring Reference Loxton and Mainwaring2018; Daly Reference Daly2019), democratic backsliding and autocratization (Bermeo Reference Bermeo2016; Levitsky and Ziblatt Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2018; Waldner and Lust Reference Waldner and Lust2018; Lührmann and Lindberg Reference Lührmann and Lindberg2019; Haggard and Kaufman Reference Haggard and Kaufman2021), and the bases of authoritarian popularity (Wedeen Reference Wedeen2019; Matovski Reference Matovski2021; Tsai Reference Tsai2021; Guriev and Treisman Reference Guriev and Treisman2022). I see this book as contributing to this collective effort to better understand the drivers of authoritarian resurgence and democratic erosion. By understanding how and why counterrevolutionaries are able to rebuild their credibility and develop new bases of social support, we gain important insights about why everyday people might willingly place their fates in the hands of autocrats, strongmen, and tyrants.

Research Design and Plan of the Book

The arguments in this book were built through a process of inductive theory-building, in which I toggled between my emerging theoretical ideas and the evidence from the Egypt case and my cross-national dataset. Such an approach – what some call “inductive iteration” (Munck Reference Munck, Henry and Collier2004; Kapiszewski et al. Reference Kapiszewski, MacLean and Read2015; Yom Reference Yom2015, also Ragin Reference Ragin1989: 164–68) and others call “abduction” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Reference Schwartz-Shea and Yanow2013; Tavory and Timmermans Reference Tavory and Timmermans2014) – is appropriate for studying phenomena, explicating puzzles, and answering questions on which there is limited existing theory. This is precisely the situation I found myself in when I began this project. With no corpus of research on counterrevolution (particularly in the way I define it), I had few hypotheses to test and only weak theoretical priors to guide my inquiry. And though I did draw from the scholarship on related political processes, like revolutions, democratization, and coups, these literatures did not contain theoretical arguments that were directly appropriate to explaining counterrevolution.

Like many scholars who engage in theory-building and puzzle-driven research, I began with in-depth study of a single case, developing an argument that was well-suited to explaining Egypt’s 2013 counterrevolution. That version of the argument ended up being too idiographic and case-specific – essentially a summary of what had happened in Egypt, with proper names removed. I then revised the arguments as I read more in adjacent literatures, constructed the cross-national dataset, learned about other cases, and began seeing patterns in the data. Some of these arguments simply could not have been developed through examination of my one case; for example, there was no way to learn about the importance of revolutionary armies in defeating counterrevolution by researching a case in which such a coercive organization did not exist. In this sense, my theory evolved over time, as I widened the lens away from Egypt, yielding, ultimately, an argument that I hope is both parsimonious and capable of explaining a good deal of the variation in counterrevolution over the last twelve decades.

I believe it is important to be up-front about the epistemological foundations of this project because, even though the research was iterative and inductive, I have written the book, as most social scientists do, with a largely deductive exposition and framework – i.e., beginning with a theoretical argument and then proceeding to empirical analyses that provide support for the argument. Nevertheless, though the structure of the book follows this more deductive logic, I mostly try to avoid language that is more appropriate for truly deductive research designs, which derive hypotheses and test them with various forms of data. Instead, I prefer to use the language of persuasion and explanation. This certainly does not mean that I cannot be wrong. A different argument might do a better job of explaining the observed patterns in counterrevolution – and, in fact, I do enumerate what I consider to be the strongest alternatives to my movement-centric explanation. Alternatively, there might be other evidence on counterrevolution, from other cases or historical time periods, that calls my arguments into question. Indeed, I would be the first to welcome such critiques, as this is how research agendas progress.

The first part of the book is devoted to conceptualization and theory. Chapter 2 begins by laying out my definitions of revolution and counterrevolution, and how they compare to other uses of these terms. I then explain how I operationalized these definitions in constructing my cross-national dataset and lay out empirical patterns on the frequency and distribution of counterrevolution that motivate the theoretical argument. Chapter 3 develops this theory, which unpacks how the strategies of revolutionary movements shape the capacities and interests of new governments and old regime forces during post-revolutionary transitions. The theory has implications both for where and when we are most likely to witness counterrevolutions, and for how they emerge and succeed. For example, some of my most central claims are about the likelihood of counterrevolution following radical-violent versus moderate-unarmed revolution. But I also make arguments about the strategic calculations that motivate (or restrain) counterrevolutionaries, and about the types of events and decisions that weaken the capacity of revolutionary governments. The diverse nature of these claims – i.e., about cross-national and historical variation, but also about processes and causal mechanisms – demands a similarly diverse set of evidence, which I lay out in Chapters 4 through 7. These chapters proceed in something of an arc, beginning at the level of the global and historical with a series of statistical analyses, then proceeding to in-depth analysis of the Egypt case, and then returning to a macro framework with six shadow cases that put Egypt’s experience in comparative perspective.

In Chapter 4, I use an original cross-national dataset of counterrevolutions since 1900 to demonstrate the validity of my arguments about the likelihood of counterrevolution following different types of revolutionary movements. I analyze this dataset using observational statistics, which allows me to identify probabilistic relationships between various macro-level characteristics (like the nature of the revolutionary movement, international alliances, old regime institutions, and socio-economic structures) and counterrevolutionary outcomes (see also Clarke Reference Clarke2022). These analyses reveal that counterrevolutions are much less likely to topple radical-violent revolutions than moderate-unarmed ones – and this finding holds across two different operationalizations of these ideal types. Subsequent analyses shed light on the mechanisms behind this relationship: It turns out that strong revolutionary armies and powerful foreign sponsors are the keys to defeating counterrevolution, whereas a robust party apparatus seems to make little difference. Further, counterrevolutions are most likely to emerge following revolutions with medium levels of violence, where the old regime is left with both enough capacity and sufficient incentive to launch a counterrevolution. I also use these statistical models to evaluate a number of alternative explanations for counterrevolution, including old regime structure, political economy, and socio-economic cleavages. The chapter then examines further implications of the theory by analyzing how key events during the post-revolutionary transition (like land reforms, elections, and neighboring counterrevolutions) affect the likelihood of counterrevolution. And it concludes with an exploration of the puzzling decline in counterrevolution since 1900, which I argue can be traced to a combination of the changing form of revolution and shifts in the distribution of global power. These factors may also explain why there has been a recent uptick in counterrevolution.

In Chapters 5 and 6, I defend my claims about the processes and mechanisms that facilitate successful counterrevolutions by examining interview and protest data from Egypt’s 2011 revolution and 2013 coup – a paradigmatic recent case of successful counterrevolution. As a democratic revolution that occurred largely through nonviolent mass protest, Egypt’s revolution hews fairly closely to the moderate-unarmed ideal type (though, as I explain in Chapter 5, there are some features that arguably place it more to the center of the spectrum). Given that the vast majority of successful counterrevolutions have occurred following these types of revolutions, Egypt represents a good case with which to evaluate the mechanisms in the theory. To this end, I use techniques of process tracing and event analysis to demonstrate that Egypt’s counterrevolution only became possible when revolutionaries squandered their initial capacity to hold the old regime’s military in check and presented these generals with an opportunity to rebuild their popular support.

Chapter 5 focuses on the elite side of this story. It shows that Egypt’s revolutionary leaders failed to manage their post-revolutionary governance trilemma, ultimately leading to the irreparable rupture of their coalition and the alienation of their primary foreign patron (the United States), which together fatally weakened their capacity vis-à-vis the military. The chapter is based on approximately 100 interviews with politicians, activists, and government officials conducted from 2016 to 2019. Many of these interviews were with prominent figures who have rarely spoken about their experiences during the revolution, and they train a light into several “black boxes” that have remained relatively opaque to researchers until now: Mohamed Morsi’s presidential administration, the counterrevolutionary Tamarod movement, and the Egyptian military. I analyze these interviews using processing tracing methods, which entails tracing particular events via intervening causal mechanisms to an outcome of interest in a specific case (Tilly Reference Tilly2001; Gerring Reference Gerring2008, Reference Gerring2010; Falleti and Lynch Reference Falleti and Lynch2009; Beach and Pedersen Reference Beach and Pedersen2013; Waldner Reference Waldner2015). Interviews are often used in process tracing studies because they provide insight into the incentives and interests of key actors; the logic and rationale behind strategic decisions; and how watershed events were interpreted. In this spirit, I use my interviews to substantiate several of the key causal mechanisms implied by my theory: (1) that Egypt’s revolution was always a likely candidate for counterrevolutionary emergence, due to the coercive capacities of the former regime and their interests in resisting civilian rule; (2) that, nevertheless, revolutionaries began the transition with considerable leverage over the former regime, grounded in their ability to threaten a return to mass mobilization and their backing from the United States; (3) that poor management of the governance trilemma caused the revolutionary coalition to fracture and Washington to begin questioning its support; and (4) that these developments created opportunities for the military to bolster its domestic and foreign support and sapped revolutionaries’ capacity to resist a coup. Further, because several of the alternative explanations have also been invoked to make sense of Egypt’s failed transition (i.e., the strength of the military and cleavages in Egyptian society), I also use the process tracing to consider how the qualitative evidence aligns with these other theories.

Chapter 6 complements this elite narrative by unpacking the role of popular mobilization in the 2013 counterrevolution. Drawing on techniques of event analysis, I show how Egypt’s revolutionary forces failed in managing the final piece of the governance trilemma: consolidating the revolution’s social support. Instead, as the transition dragged on, everyday Egyptians, including many who had originally backed the revolution, grew disillusioned with the never-ending turmoil and unmet promises, and their bitterness eventually transformed into overt opposition to the new government and support for a counterrevolutionary mass movement. The empirical basis for this chapter is an original hand-coded protest dataset that covers the final eighteen months of the post-revolutionary transition. It includes information on approximately 7,500 protests, marches, strikes, roadblocks, and mass attacks from January 1, 2012 to July 3, 2013 that were reported in the major Arabic-language Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. These data reveal two key dynamics. First, we learn the extent to which social mobilization persisted after Mubarak’s ouster. Indeed, the data paint a picture of a post-revolutionary period that is awash with discontent and unrest, much of it over nonpolitical issues like the deterioration of the economy, soaring crime, infrastructure shortfalls, and unmet labor demands. Second, this discontent came to be directed against the new revolutionary government and ultimately provided the social base for the counterrevolutionary movement that swept the military back into power. These analyses demonstrate a crucial point emphasized in the theory: That successful counterrevolutions are often backed by a genuine mass movement of citizens who have grown weary of the chaos and disappointments of the revolution and long for the stability of the pre-revolutionary days.

Chapter 7 is the final empirical chapter, and it returns to the level of the global and historical. The chapter examines six additional cases of revolution, which exhibit full variation on the range of counterrevolutionary outcomes: Libya’s and Tunisia’s 2011 revolutions (no counterrevolution), Cuba’s 1959 leftist revolution and Venezuela’s 1958 democratic revolution (failed counterrevolution), and Thailand’s 1973 democratic uprising and Hungary’s 1919 communist revolution (successful counterrevolution). Methodologically, the chapter deploys a version of large-n qualitative analysis (Haggard and Kaufman Reference Haggard and Kaufman2016; Goertz Reference Goertz2017; Goertz and Haggard Reference Goertz and Haggard2023), as well as classic techniques of controlled comparison and process tracing (on the combination of these methods, see Slater and Ziblatt Reference Slater and Ziblatt2013; Falleti and Mahoney Reference Falleti, Mahoney, Mahoney and Thelen2015). In keeping with this method, these are mostly “typical” cases – i.e., they are well predicted by the theory – which allow me to demonstrate that the mechanisms in the theory align with the causal processes actually observed in the cases. Further, most of the cases also provide strong analytical leverage when compared to Egypt’s revolution.

I first look at two revolutions that occurred in part of the same “Arab Spring” wave as Egypt, but where counterrevolutions nevertheless did not emerge: Tunisia 2011 and Libya 2011. These cases also exemplify the theory’s two paths to counterrevolution nonemergence: In Tunisia, the new revolutionary government faced a military establishment whose interests were not deeply threatened by civilian rule, and in Libya, the coercive capacity of the former regime was largely destroyed through armed conflict. Next, I analyze two Latin American revolutions – one radical-violent and one moderate-unarmed – that demonstrate the two ways in which revolutionaries can maintain their capacities and defeat counterrevolutionary threats. Following Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the new regime put down multiple counterrevolutions using its powerful revolutionary army. In Venezuela, following the 1958 democratic revolution, the government enjoyed none of these coercive resources, yet nevertheless managed to thwart multiple counterrevolutionary coups through a preservation of revolutionary unity and a return to mass mobilization. This latter case, along with several others that I briefly discuss, is particularly important because it shows how democratic revolutionaries can head off counterrevolutionary challenges staged even by powerful and well-armed old regime actors. Finally, I show that in two cases that are otherwise quite dissimilar to Egypt’s – Thailand 1973 and Hungary 1919 – a very similar set of mechanisms (e.g., coalition fragmentation, broad societal disaffection) undermined the capacity of the new revolutionary governments and created opportunities for counterrevolutionaries to return to power.

Chapter 8 concludes the book by reviewing the main arguments and findings and reflecting on their implications for public policy and several active research debates. It also considers the future of counterrevolution and its connections to contemporary dynamics of authoritarian resurgence. Counterrevolution is but one manifestation of reactionary politics writ large, and several of the book’s arguments – i.e., about how counterrevolutionaries capitalize on uncertainty, about their willing embrace of mass politics – can help us to make sense of why tyrants, dictators, and authoritarian populists are on the rise around the world today.