One thing that both Revolution Squared and The Rise of the Masses convey is how renewed attention to mass contention may usefully advance our understanding of revolutions and other political events. Said does this by foregrounding the vital role in Egypt’s revolution of ordinary people too often discounted in political analyses. For my own part, I look to varied places and times, seeking out common dynamics in the “spontaneous” mass mobilizations that have long featured in revolutions and social movements. To riff on Theda Skocpol’s characterization of her state-centered generation of scholarship, both of our books are instead efforts at “Bringing the Masses Back In” to our analysis of revolutions and contentious politics.

But might the dynamics of revolutionary mass action have a different pattern to those of other kinds of mass protests and uprisings? Said asks this question in his review, and wonders whether we could add to Affinity-Convergence Theory (ACT) with models for each form of contention. There are certainly some dynamics that seem almost intrinsic to revolutions (see, e.g., the case of “Movement Split,” where the overthrow of a regime almost always creates a fracture between full-fledged social revolutionaries and those who only sought regime change; Benjamin Abrams, “Movement Split: How the Structure of Revolutionary Coalitions Shapes Revolutionary Outcomes,” Public Choice 200, 2024). However, I believe that insofar as the behavior of mass participants in contentious episodes is concerned, the socio-cultural and political context of contention triumphs over matters of processual patterns or event-structure. There is, for example, greater difference between 1789 France and 2011 Egypt than between 2011 Egypt and the 2011 United States—notwithstanding that France and Egypt involved revolutionary upheaval, and the US hosted a social movement.

Said’s review also calls attention to an area of mass action that few have studied: the dynamics of demobilization. In the closing chapter of The Rise of the Masses, I observe two particular aspects of demobilization ripe for further study: “spontaneous demobilization,” in which mobilized people cease their participation in collective action of their own accord; and “conditions of divergence,” in which people find themselves structurally, cognitively or physically inhibited from coming together for a contentious cause. To understand what happened in Egypt post-2011, we should also consider a third: “mass demobilization,” the binding of people to activities that facilitate political order. We see instances of such a phenomenon not only in Egypt, but across the vast range of human history and culture. It is precisely this mass demobilization, the revenge of order upon social forces, that I will address in future writing.

One area of intersection in our work to which Said calls attention is the impact of spaces on contentious politics. I have tended to prioritize the physicality of spaces in my analysis of convergence conditions, whereas Said firmly places “digital spaces” as one of three central manifestations of public political space. Placing our works in dialogue, Said observes that there may be room to refine a conceptualization of online, digital spaces of convergence, and how they help protesters overcome the challenges of digital repression. Such a suggestion is tantalizing, yet I suspect it could pose a stimulating challenge. While online spaces are indeed metaphorically, emotively and experientially spatial, they also exhibit cybernetic dynamics that are radically different from physically instantiated spaces. Though we think of ourselves as visiting “forums,” “walls,” “platforms,” and “channels” of communication, behind these spatialized metaphors are authorized exchanges of information with databases mediated by programs and technologies that curate what can be seen, said, and done.

This exchange has been deeply stimulating, and I would like to thank Atef Said for such an engaging and productive dialogue. It has been a pleasure thinking together.