This chapter describes the 2010–11 revolution that kick-started Tunisia’s democratic transition and the initial transitional year that followed. It illustrates the two major axes of polarization that would define Tunisian democracy: one between the old regime and the revolutionaries, and the other between the secularists and the Islamists. It then describes the initial attempts to bridge these divides through compromise and consensus. Interim Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi initiated major compromises on the revolution’s demands of anti-corruption, security sector reform, and political lustration, finding consensus between the old regime and the revolutionaries. Meanwhile, the winning Islamist and secular parties in the 2011 elections likewise chose consensus, agreeing to govern in a grand coalition. These choices to share power and find common ground facilitated Tunisia’s early transitional years, allowing the political elite to rein in polarization and uncertainty and avoid spoilers that may otherwise have thwarted the transition to Tunisia’s first-ever democratically elected government in December 2011.

Historical sociology (HS) is not a typical approach to International Relations (IR). Rather, it is a fascinating scholarly tradition that offers rewarding conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools to the student of IR. HS explores how past events, formations, and developments shape contemporary political units, actors, and ideas. It examines how and why actors – such as regimes, political movements, or individuals – interact within constraining contexts to generate intended and occasionally unintentional consequences. HS frees the analysis from seemingly timeless concepts such as ‘state’ or ‘anarchy’. This chapter explores HS in two main sections. Section 2.1 explores the sociological origins and main tenets of HS by engaging key founding theorists in this tradition. Section 2.2, the case study, examines the social origins of the 1952 revolution in Egypt and its impact on its foreign policy. The section illustrates how social factors, which originated in the eighteenth century, and colonialism coupled with changes in the international balance of power in the post-World War II period contributed to the revolution and, subsequently, a revision of Egyptian foreign policy in the period 1952–1970.

What happens when change isn’t a choice but a necessity? Chapter 5 delves into a reactive perspective on change, where transformation is sparked not by vision or planning but by disruption, crisis, and external shocks. From natural disasters to economic meltdowns, this perspective shows how adversity often forces organisations to confront reality, adapt quickly, and sometimes reinvent themselves. Concepts like resilience, robustness, and punctuated equilibrium illuminate how change can emerge in bursts – abrupt, unpredictable, and deeply consequential. Rather than seeking control, this approach highlights survival, learning, and strategic renewal in volatile environments. It also reframes risk and uncertainty not as enemies but as powerful catalysts for reinvention. At its heart, this chapter challenges us to ask: in moments of rupture, who steps up – and what kind of change becomes possible?

This chapter clarifies the problem that the anarchist constitution is designed to address: violence. Adopting a realist perspective, we analyse it as war and find the framing in the work of Tolstoy, Proudhon and Kropotkin. Contrary to claims of modern realist critics, who think of anarchism as utopian idealism and atavism, we demythologise the conception of anarchism as transcendent peace. We use the survey of their accounts of war to discuss the remedies each proposed to manage the violence of politics. The second section explores decentralised federation, the organisational architecture of the anarchist constitution. Using Proudhon’s conception as a template, we show how it was modified after the Paris Commune. We examine two distinctive modes of commune organisation, one syndicalist and the other municipal, and outline two strategies for change, one evolutionary and the other revolutionary. The first derives from Proudhon’s idea of jus gentium and the second from Bakunin’s internationalism. For both, federalism promotes constitutionalising ‘from the bottom up’, in local, regional and potentially global settings.

This epilogue concludes the book by reflecting on emerging opportunities and challenges in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights six unfolding revolutions: life sciences, information and communications, complexity theory, data science, education and rights-based activism. The latter is particularly important, as the potential of all the other revolutions to improve the health of all depends on it. Finally, we reaffirm our commitment to clear thinking for effective action: In our turbulent world, knowledge remains the most powerful force for enlightened social transformation.

How does the archetype of collective subjectivity in Iran’s 1979 revolution illuminate contemporary debates about revolutionary politics? This concluding chapter examines a pattern of thought across three texts published in 1978 as the uprising in Iran gained momentum. The texts crystallize trends in fields of study that frame how most scholars received the 1979 revolution: the comparative historical study of revolution across the social sciences, political theories of agonism and democracy, and critiques of Orientalism in Middle East Studies. The pattern reveals a binary in assessments of unruly politics between incorporation and irreducible difference. This book’s discussion of an insurgent witness disrupts the binary. To see it, and the truth of historical events in Iran, requires a recalibration of inherited frames of analysis and hence a change in perceptions of revolutionary politics.

Contemporary political theorists tend to understand popular assembly in terms of embodiment in the present, part of an effort to temper linguistic determinism in prevailing theories of collective action. These accounts go too far. Instead, symbolic acts of memorialization may facilitate collective identity in the present. This technique emphasizes narrative recitation and judgment in a manner that may foster both disruption and preservation. Thus, the unfolding of mass demonstrations in late 1970s Iran accorded with descriptions of a collective subject in the image of Zaynab bint Ali. This feature of Iranian history recalls and departs from theories of popular assembly as self-witnessing, also described in scholarly debates as collective self-regard.

This short introductory section surveys theories of revolutionary subjectivity as an intermediary disposition. In contrast to prevalent views, it suggests a spectral form that resists transparency as its condition of appearance. This vision, it is suggested, emerged through vernacular iterations of canonical ideas in 1960s and 1970s Iran.

What was Pahlavi Iran’s role in the 1974 declaration of the New International Economic Order? How does this history, largely ignored and dismissed, alter political theories of decolonization? The Pahlavi state’s diplomatic efforts from 1968 until the 1979 revolution were a reflection of Iran’s semi-colonial history. Iran occupied an intermediary posture alongside peers who espoused anticolonial visions of nondomination more recognizable as revolutionary. The state’s posture is illegible in regnant theories of decolonization. To see it, scholars must adopt methods attuned to imprecision. Pahlavi state diplomacy thus set the stage for a popular transnational revolutionary movement, which would assume an intermediary posture of its own.

This chapter reconstructs Ali Shariati’s discussions of Islam as an “intermediary doctrine” (maktab-e vāseteh), in light of his speeches about the Karbala paradigm, used as inspiration for insurrection. For Shariati, to be intermediary is to assume a central position in global affairs. But the term intermediary also signals a groundless condition on account of which human beings exercise their capacity for choice. Its enactment recalls the status of the human being in Islamic theology. It also approximates eternal truth. The chapter presents Shariati’s method as intermediary, consistent with his notion of an intermediary doctrine. Read together, these ideas reveal a concept of revolutionary subjectivity as intermediary. Shariati crafts an archetype for revolutionary action around the figure of Zaynab, the daughter of Fatima and Ali, the first Shia Imam. Shariati invites audiences to think and act in accordance with the model he performed, which mirrored Zaynab’s actions in response to the battle of Karbala, a founding myth for Shia Islam. As befitting Zaynab’s role in Shia memorialization, later historical events would exceed Shariati’s designs.

This chapter reconstructs uses of indirection to organize street protests against the Pahlavi regime. I focus on a vernacular tradition that gained traction in the 1960s through which leftist and Islamist activists hid their political objectives behind nonpolitical veneers. In 1968, Iranian activists transitioned from using nominally nonpolitical institutions for cover to more fluid, and hence more potent, uses of informal “nonpolitical” practices in public. The transition began with mourning ceremonies for the popular wrestler Gholamreza Takhti. In conflating public expressions of loss with action, activists were able to hide in plain sight, leveraging confusion to facilitate popular assemblies. Their actions planted a seed, a contentious repertoire that blossomed into a cycle of protest a decade later. This chapter describes the terms according to which the transition occurred. It theorizes changing significations of the word senf (guild) from a noun into an adjective, senfi. Thus, practices associated with intermediary bodies (institutions conventionally seen as “premodern” and hence transitional) gave shape to an intermediary ethic central to revolutionary action.

Global histories of the 1970s tend to presume a division between revolution and counterrevolution, described as a transition from hope to despair. Prevalent frames of analysis obscure aspects of history specific to Iran. Part I poses an alternative. It asks whether definitions of revolution and counterrevolution overlap and, in turn, whether avenues for revolutionary action may arise through loss.

This chapter proposes an approach to social science inquiry suited to the Iranian case and, more broadly, to the silences that constitute revolutionary mobilization and memorialization. With reference to a partial archive of interview data with people who experienced the mass uprisings of late 1978 and early 1979, and analytical statements they made in interviews about their experience of popular assemblies, the chapter shows how individual accounts from opposing ideological positions and social classes converged around a shared concept of collective identity in the image of Zaynab bint Ali. The chapter weaves between interviews conducted with pro-Khomeini Islamists active in Iran during the late 1970s (all of whom were men) and interviews conducted with women from leftist groups or unaffiliated members of the population as well as stories from a women’s daily magazine published at the time. It shows that narrative reception and judgment play an important role in revolutionary action, the representation of which augurs a comparative methodology for social science inquiry about revolution in the Global South.

During the first half of 1978, mourning processions were held in Iran for activists felled in prior demonstrations. The device occasioned subsequent political protests, fostering a series of horizontally organized demonstrations that lasted six months. Accounts of what transpired, published in pamphlets at the time, are replete with exhortations for others to join. The documents extend discursive patterns found in courtroom appeals and defenses made by leftist activists over the course of the twentieth century. In this language, we find visions of a collective revolutionary subject configured as an individual worthy of empathy and observation, recalling overlaps between human rights advocacy and guerrilla warfare. The discursive pattern challenges divides between materialism and culture in the study of modern Iran. Analyses of the revolutionary process in Iran make recourse to pragmatism, and yet they elide the importance of language and culture displayed here. This chapter argues that a pragmatic sensibility corresponds with adaptations of the Karbala paradigm in Taziyeh processions. To the extent that the former reflects individual investments in self-preservation, the latter cultivates investment in communal self-preservation through memorialization.

The second decade of the twenty-first century saw emergent social movements challenge the authority of the Islamic Republic. The pattern prompted competing notions of revolution in public debates about Iranian politics. This introductory chapter posits questions regarding the subject of revolution in the debates. It identifies a shared rhetorical pattern between competing parties, who, despite their differences, construe revolutionaries as partisans. The chapter proposes an inquiry into the 1979 revolution, recovering an unexamined archetype of collective action to reframe polemics. The archetype of an insurgent witness describes the millions of people who joined mass demonstrations from December 1978 until the fall of the Pahlavi state on February 11, 1979, as both partisans and spectators. The idea departs from prevalent templates in social science studies of revolution, political theories of agency in revolutionary contexts, and extant studies of modern Iran. To see it more clearly, we may consider a perspectival comparison with Taziyeh mourning processions, in conversation with Ali Shariati’s insurrectionary speeches about the Karbala paradigm.

This chapter argues for custom as the predominant historical and experiential form in 1859 and looks at its treatment in J. S. Mill’s On Liberty, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and Eliot’s Adam Bede. In Dickens, custom acts as a measure of the violence of the revolution; in Mill and Eliot, it is at the heart of their examination of identity and culture. Mill sees the ‘despotism of custom’ as essentially opposed to progress and individual liberty, but for Eliot, it is at the heart of community and needs to be recognised and accommodated by her most exemplary characters; it is a historical category that is commonly available and universally participated in. It enables all citizens equally to access the discourse of the historical and the experience of ‘society as incarnate history’. Eliot argues implicitly in Adam Bede that custom is fundamental to all human experience.

A renewed focus on “the common” in contemporary political theory, as it gained momentum in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is a direct response to the failure of community in political theory. I argue that Hardt and Negri develop what we can understand as an “insurgent democracy of the common.” On the one hand, such an insurgent democracy of the common seeks to preserve the revolutionary potential of democracy. On the other hand, this democracy of the common also tends toward political romanticism: the legitimacy of “the common” depends on a political subjectivity tied to a paradoxical nostalgia for failed revolutions. As such, the democracy of the common entails an escape from the realities of the political world that undercuts its emancipatory potential. This becomes particularly obvious in the hope that Hardt and Negri place in social movements of resistance, but also in their critique of neoliberal capitalism.

In contrast to liberal democracy, which translates constituent power into processes and institutions of representation and government, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri place a premium on constituent power: inspired by social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, they argue that the constituent power of a multitude should not be translated into the constituted powers of a state. Doing so would deprive the multitude of its revolutionary and radically democratic potential. Pure constituent power seeks to repeat in perpetuity the exception of the revolutionary founding moment of democracy. That Hardt and Negri rely on increasingly theological models in their account of constituent power and revolution highlights the antidemocratic tendency of their conception of “constituent governance.” A political theology that seeks to make the exception permanent is not compatible with democracy. The enactment of pure constituent power in the democracy of the common inevitably leads to what Carl Schmitt described as “sovereign dictatorship.” Hardt’s and Negri’s “constituent governance” is an arbitrary form of governance without any checks and balances.