A large book about people power-style rebellions entitled Asia's Unknown Uprisings is unlikely to be well received by the scholars who have spent much time studying them, producing a large literature in the process about popular insurrections against undemocratic regimes in the Philippines (1986), South Korea (1987), Burma/Myanmar (1989), China (1989), Thailand (1992/1973), and Indonesia (1998), even if it is true that mass movements against dictatorship in Bangladesh (1991) and Nepal (1990) have been much neglected. There is also a growing comparative literature on the topic—for example, Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall's A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2000), my own Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2004), and Kurt Schock's Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)—which all offer analysis of a number of Asian cases. Nonetheless, George Katsiaficas's title can perhaps be justified if one considers that these Asian uprisings were more spread out chronologically; he even goes back to a Taiwanese uprising in 1947, although his actual focus is on uprisings including and since Philippine “people power” of 1986. This time lapse means that these popular revolts did not attract the concentrated worldwide media attention that more “time-compressed” 1989 (to 1991) rebellions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as well as the Arab Spring uprisings since 2011 have.

If it is also understood that Katsiaficas is a long-time activist who was originally interested in the “global movement of 1968” and later the South Korean case of a popular uprising against dictatorship, then the author's goals are more understandable: to offer an overview to a general audience interested in understanding the regional character and importance of these popular revolts in Asia. To a certain extent, he does bring together these differently timed (and also culturally and politically quite diverse) anti-dictatorship rebellions through ten country-specific and six comparative chapters. Those interested in particular uprisings will find the chapter summaries generally useful, although country experts should be warned that some chapters are stronger than others—I found the Philippine and Indonesian chapters relatively weak while the Nepal and Bangladesh ones were stronger. Readers should also beware of clichéd phrases like Mubarak's “pharonic rule over Egyptians,” which are often substituted for systematic analysis.

But the most interesting reading in this book is the author's comparative take on these revolts. I found the chapters on organization and movements (chap. 13) and on class aspects of rebellion (chap. 14) quite helpful. But chapter 11, “People Power and Its Limits,” is weaker. The chapter claims that popular revolts against dictators in Asia and elsewhere have “helped to incorporate more of the world into the orbit of Japanese and U.S. banks” (p. 360). Besides the conspiratorial tone, the author does not make a serious attempt to ground this point analytically. Successful “people power” uprisings in Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991 were generally followed by the rise of “neoliberal” policies in the region, if for no other reason than it was freed from Soviet-dominated state socialism. But the point is that the original aims of “people power” need to be analytically separated from what may well have been unintended outcomes (as Vaclav Havel used to be fond of pointing out). In Asia the picture is more complicated still, with successful state-led capitalist dictatorships being overthrown in South Korea and Taiwan, and less successful uprisings in the Philippines and Indonesia. What followed was an economic “liberalization” in all four countries, although to different degrees. The link between the two could be explored, but it is not seriously pursued even in the country-focused chapters. Instead of systematic argument, the author engages in what many would consider simple polemics.

A further problem in the book is Katsiaficas's revival of the concept of the “eros effect,” which he developed in an earlier study of the 1968 student rebellions. He defines it, loosely following Herbert Marcuse, as:

This is reminiscent of Aristide Zolberg's concept of “moments of madness” in revolutionary situations. But Katsiaficas offers only a brief illustration of this in the South Korean case in which Choi Jungwoon found an “absolute community” of Gwangju citizens who believed themselves equal and united by bonds of love in a revolutionary situation. Introduced late in the book and not systematically elaborated or applied to the case studies, the concept appears more of an afterthought than a leitmotif of the book.

But the author does not stop here. Rather, he claims that “the connective threads running through grassroots movements around the world are often intuitively woven together” (p. 372), which he sees as a reason for the “snowballing” (Samuel Huntington) of popular revolts in Eastern Europe in 1989 or in the Arab Spring. The problem of course is that in Asia popular revolts did not quickly diffuse from one place to another, with the only obvious exception being the reformasi revolts of 1998 in Indonesia and Malaysia. Culturally more divided and ruled by different kinds of nondemocratic regimes, Asian popular uprisings against dictatorships were more separate from one another than they have been in other regions with greater cultural and/or political similarity, such as Eastern Europe and the Arab world. Thus, the reader is left wondering what, if anything, unites these diverse anti-dictatorship revolts in Asia except perhaps, as the author also often stresses, the simple desire for greater freedom.