“Popular Culture and Politics” seek to understand the influential force of popular culture, which can be optimized and utilized to transform the country’s sociopolitical future. As a social institution that arose from the forces of colonization, popular culture has a specific social role to play in that process. Characterized with an elastic capacity to instigate social ideas, popular culture in Nigeria can be used to bring about transformational changes and revolutionary thinking that can shape the Nigerian environment. Although the general belief is that popular culture serves as entertainment with no significant social benefits, that is not entirely the case. This study reveals the existing interconnection between politics and popular culture, highlighting the significance and the different approaches that can actively target a better Nigerian future through popular culture. Nigerian popular culture can use its transformational capacity to inspire desirable changes in the country’s political trajectory. It can be seen beyond its traditional role of entertainment, where it currently receives minimal national recognition. When the people who create cultural materials understand the power that they wield as a social institution, and when they use that power objectively, they can enact a revolution without violence.

Chapter 5 analyses the impact of the third macro-political factor in Rwanda’s path to genocide: the assassination of the president. The death of Habyarimana, who was by far the longest-serving sub-Saharan African head of state to have been killed-in-office, created a massive and sudden political opportunity. This chapter explains how and why the ensuing power vacuum and power struggles ultimately played out in favour of extremists at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels in Rwanda. As before, decisions taken by elite actors strategically interacted and the contestation escalated once more in the absence of constraints at the domestic or international levels. At the national level, extremists quickly prevailed over moderates to capture the state because they possessed superior coercive capabilities. At the local level, violence broke out at different moments in part because it took time for local power struggles to resolve in some communities. Extremists and opportunists eclipsed moderates once the centre fell and sometimes with the support of extra-local forces. However, in part, violence onset varied because it also took time to break social bonds in ethnically more cohesive communities. Once extremists captured the state at the local level, they built small groups of supporters, drawing on their social networks. These critical masses then mobilized the wider community using ingroup policing and peer pressure.

Chapters 3 discusses how the Third Front was constructed. It shows that the Party militarized the Third Front by hiding projects in secure locations, speeding up construction in the face of military pressures, and requiring participants to emulate the Red Army’s strategy of local self–reliance. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, Mao intensified the militarization of the Third Front when he urged ousting capitalist roaders who ostensibly supported changing China into a Soviet–style revisionist state. I maintain that this last form of militarization transformed enmity towards Cold War foes into a struggle against domestic forces, a strategy Mao had successfully deployed in previous instances. Assaults on capitalist roaders were undertaken to attain numerous political objectives. Some workers aired grievances about poor living conditions. Others demanded the right to go home. As for Party leaders, they claimed that critics of the Third Front were allied with foreign agents. The CCP made use of this latter assertion to restore political discipline and revitalize the Third Front when the Soviets appeared poised to attack in 1969. The same Maoist discourse created obstacles to the Third Front’s success by attacking experts and slow development.

Revolutions are traumatic experiences for individuals, their communities, and the larger society of which they are a part. This chapter focuses on society, analyzing those trends and dynamics within post-revolutionary societies that give the entire polity – not just the state but non-state actors as well – thepeculiar characteristics that they acquire after revolutions. The chapter examines the changing nature of state–society relations in the aftermath of revolutions. In specific, the chapter focuses on how the emerging leaders of the new state impose their own vision of the revolution on social actors, not all of whom may share the same vision. New state leaders often suppress or altogether eliminate nonconformists while at the same time continuing to keep the momentum of revolutionary mass mobilization going. This has consequences for the emerging political culture, which is often polarized, revolves around zero-sum assumptions, and is therefore anti-democratic. The ingredients for political opposition are abundant and often extremist, though the prospects of yet another revolution are dim.

This chapter examines the causes and processes of spontaneous revolutions, focusing on how state crises and weaknesses provide space and opportunity for localized expressions of political anger and other sparks for social movements. If, as encouraged by increased state vulnerability, missteps, and elite defections, these social movements grow into something bigger, a spontaneous revolution can ensue. These revolutions are initially without ideology and their leaders and outcome are not predetermined. The French revolution of 1978, the Russian Revolution of February 1917, and the Iranian revolution of 1978 can be classified as spontaneous revolutions.