The colored revolutions seem a long time ago. The term, which refers to revolts that overthrew incumbent authoritarian leaders in postcommunist countries, such as Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, was very much in vogue in the first decade of this century and was adopted by would-be democratic revolutionaries in other countries like Belarus and Azerbaijan. Despite much initial excitement, disappointment with the colored revolutions is widespread. Even if the results in the “successful” cases were better on the whole than in unsuccessful cases, problems with corruption and poor political performance continued to dog these countries long after the revolutions. Moreover, remaining authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin in Russia were quite adept at rebranding colored revolutions as a foreign-inspired political technology, managing to discredit the whole concept of peaceful or “velvet” revolutions. Consequently, when street protests in Armenia overthrew authoritarian incumbents in the spring of 2018, protest leaders and participants were keen to distance themselves from the concept of colored revolutions entirely.

Nevertheless, whatever the politics of branding, the lessons that can be learned from the colored revolutions about the possibilities of peaceful protest in challenging authoritarian leaders are as important today as ever. As the Arab Spring, events in Ukraine (again), Armenia, Nicaragua, and many other cases show, we live in an era where authoritarianism may be resurgent, but it is also by its very nature vulnerable to nonviolent (as well as violent) challenges from mass protest. Understanding the contours of that challenge remains a key problem for scholars of comparative democratization and authoritarian regimes.

In this context, Olena Nikolayenko’s new book on the role of youth movements in Eastern Europe and the former USSR in the period of the colored revolutions represents a valuable contribution to our collective knowledge of what shapes the success and failure of peaceful protest in authoritarian regimes. The central challenge at the heart of the book is to understand why efforts to mobilize and organize young people to challenge authoritarian leaders are successful in some places and unsuccessful in others.

To answer this important question, Nikolayenko considers a broad range of theoretical and empirical materials, grounding her approach in highly disciplined comparisons across successful and failed cases and thinking about how the analysis might apply in out of sample cases, too. The theoretical approach is very much in the social movements tradition and builds upon an extremely thorough and useful consideration of that literature in both sociology and political science. In the end, she convincingly demonstrates that mono-causal, “clean” explanations of success and failure are to be distrusted. While emphasizing the importance of tactics and tactical innovation, Nikolayenko deftly embeds her argument in a narrative about the role of structure in shaping the possibilities for creativity and change.

The great strength of this book are the accounts of the individual cases built upon a large number of interviews in a broad range of countries. These firsthand accounts—often now with the benefit (and perhaps the curse) of substantial hindsight—provide a valuable repository for scholars of other challenges to dictatorial rule who are looking for comparative research to enlighten their own thinking. Nikolayenko marshals these accounts in a rigorous way, helping to illuminate the comparative lessons of the colored-revolutions experience.

Some of the lessons for movements are, understandably, not terribly surprising. Movements that target different elements of the younger generation specifically tend to fare better, as do those that coordinate well with the rest of civil society. Humor is a useful tool in attracting youth support. Other elements are perhaps less obvious. Where young women play a more prominent role in movements they tend to do better, even in these cases where young people’s view of gender roles are markedly patriarchal.

Another great strength of the book is the recognition of the interaction of movements with the regimes they are attempting to displace. While there are many similarities between regimes in their approaches to heading off challenges, there are also some interesting differences in regime tactics. For example, some regimes—like Ilham Aliyev’s in Azerbaijan—copy Putin’s licensing strategy in which semiautonomous youth counter-movements are entrusted with the task of mobilizing pro-regime forces. Others, like Alexandr Lukashenko’s in Belarus, keep closer control, trusting the ruling party’s own youth wing to take care of the task.

There are, necessarily, some limitations to the analysis. Nikolayenko self-consciously limits herself to the factors that shape the success of youth movement organizing and does not consider all of the factors that shape the success or otherwise of revolutions. This is a prudent decision, of course, though it tends to obscure the fact that many of these elements are likely to be the same. Focusing on movements alone, rather than on the broader political processes of which they are a part, also tends to reduce the role of structural factors in the account, placing tactics front and center. This decision leaves the reader wondering about endogeneity. Of course, this is a ubiquitous and usually insoluble problem, but Nikolayenko’s account would benefit from addressing it more explicitly.

There are also blindspots that come from focusing on the colored revolutions. The peaceful nature of the movements in the cases studied means that Youth Movements and Elections in Eastern Europe necessarily hews too closely theoretically to the convention in the literature of making a strict distinction between nonviolent protest, on the one hand, and violent challenges to incumbent authoritarians, on the other. In general, too thick a line is often drawn by scholars for normative reasons between violent and nonviolent confrontations. Events themselves, by contrast, often mix the two—for example, the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 was both a nonviolent protest and an armed seizure of power. Moreover, recent scholarship suggests that protests that include at least some sorts of violence might be more successful in promoting democratization (see, for example, Mohammad Ali Kadivar and Neil Ketchley. “Sticks, Stones, and Molotov Cocktails: Unarmed Collective Violence and Democratization” Socius 4(1), 2018).

These quibbles aside, Nikolayenko has produced another important book. Her analytical breadth and empirical depth combine to create a highly informative account that will be greatly valued by scholars and advanced students of protest, social movements and postcommunism.