Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions

Extract

Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions. By John Foran. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 410p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

John Foran's book draws faithfully from the rich literature on revolutions from the 1970s and beyond and extends this work in useful ways. It presents a well-crafted synthetic argument that finds a nice balance between international and domestic sources of revolution and between structural constraints and political agency. It also examines thoughtfully an extraordinary number of cases in a relatively compact form. The author develops his argument using the tools of Boolean algebra to explain 10 cases of revolutionary success and 29 additional cases of reversed revolutions, unsuccessful attempts, political revolutions that did not lead to social transformations, and revolutionary movements that never emerged despite conditions that might have been expected to generate such movements.