Revolution

Nimer Sultany

Re-printed from The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory, eds. Richard Bellamy and Jeff King (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Original text adapted and excerpted for the Thawra blog by the Editorial Collective of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism.

WHAT IS REVOLUTION?

Revolution denotes a sudden surge in popular mobilisation that leads to rapid change in the political and social order. This mass movement displays a collective political agency committed to changing the extant order and may or may not seize state power. It is often violent, although violence is not essential. It characteristically advocates egalitarian and democratic ideals and includes both political and social elements.

Generally, revolution is distinguishable from other forms of protest and change because it is not mere rebellion. Unlike reform, revolution does not seek internal change within the political order, but seeks to restructure the political order itself (Nkrumah 1996; Luxemburg 2006). Unlike civil disobedience, revolution does not presuppose the regime’s legitimacy and makes no appeal to its underlying principles or unfulfilled ideals. Unlike a coup d’état, which often changes leaders without altering the body politic, revolution disrupts the continuity of state sovereignty and draws upon popular involvement (Takriti 2019a; Mayer 2000).

Revolutions are captivating because they require popular mobilisation envisaged as a collective agency empowered to change the status quo. Counter-revolutionary literature conceptualises revolutions as historical events in which humans are swept away by the tide of history (Ozouf 1989). Yet, revolutionaries celebrate human agency in making history and consider persons as conscious actors who seek to transform their conditions and control their destiny. Whereas counterrevolutionaries often lump revolutionary and fascist masses in a single “totalitarian” category, “revolutionary masses have nothing in common with the submissive, manipulated, disciplined, controlled, disempowered crowds of the fascist and Nazi rallies” (Traverso 2021, p. 12).

What underlies revolutions, then, is a particular attitude to history and reality. Revolutions “make possible the social reconstruction of reality, the reordering of things-as-they-are so they are no longer experienced as given but rather as willed, in accordance with convictions about how things ought to be” (Darnton 1989). The “givenness of things” (history, tradition, authority) is contrasted with the “conviction that the human condition is malleable, not fixed, and that ordinary people can make history instead of suffering it” (Darnton 1989).

The emergence of “the people” as a political agent is a hallmark of revolutionary movements. This is particularly clear in the anti-colonial context. Amilcar Cabral (1966) argues, “the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, its return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which it was subjected”. In the Algerian context, Frantz Fanon (2018, p. 582) similarly argues that the:

essence of any revolution of some depth … is to bring movement to the masses, to enliven them by catalysing their energies, by setting them off on the conquest of their rights. Set in motion, they break with the structures that had kept them riveted to their immobility and passivity; they trigger the collapse of the system of oppression, reducing it to dust. Within this gigantic movement they become aware of themselves, of their strength and their creative capacity finds the means of its realization.

This requires accounting for both objective and subjective elements in conceptualising revolutions as an act of will in concert with others. Rosemary Sayigh (2007) emphasises both in the Palestinian context—the “organisational structure” and the “state of consciousness”—because the revolution mobilises the masses and centralises them to enable them to break their chains. In addition to creating a quasi-state structure (a parliament and a government in exile), the Palestinian Revolution engendered a sense of collective empowerment by turning stateless refugees into political agents and militant fighters, by constructing a national consciousness amongst diasporic communities and developing an internationalist outlook and a network of solidarity (Nabulsi & Takriti 2016; Irfan 2020).

A revolution, then, is not merely a description of socio-political transformations that ensue from a historical event or a project of social engineering that a revolutionary regime embarks upon (Sewell 1996; Darnton 1989). It also denotes a consciousness that identifies a gap between human potentiality and actuality, and seeks to overcome this gap by changing the oppressive order that frustrates potentiality (Calvert 1967). “For this consciousness, liberation is a ‘never-ending process’ that cannot be limited to the achievement of national independence” (Said 1993, p. 274). 

Revolution is rarely confined within national boundaries. Unlike rebellions, which are often “endemic and territorial”, revolutions may be “epidemic and cosmic,” producing the effect – and fear – of contagion (Mayer 2000, p. 11). The French Revolution was “ecumenical” and the global reach of its radical message exceeded the American Revolution’s (Hobsbawm 1996a, pp. 74-75; Arendt 1963, pp. 55-56). Europe’s 1848 was “the first potentially global revolution” with its impact detected in Latin America (Hobsbawm 1977, p. 22). The October 1917 Russian Revolution was even “far more profound” and consequential than the French Revolution as it “produced by far the most formidable organized revolutionary movement in modern history” (Hobsbawm 1996b, p. 55). Anti-colonial liberation movements were “worldmaking” and not merely concerned with “nation building” because they connected local struggles and wider imperial political and economic structures (Lee 2010; Getachew 2019). The 1979 Iranian Revolution was a “transnational revolution” both because it was embedded in global networks and because it generated far-reaching regional and international impact (Keshavarzian & Mirsepassi 2021). The Arab Spring evolved as a regional dynamic and inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement that swept the United States.

Revolution is a dialectical concept that includes its negation, counter-revolution (Ritter 1984). Given the global reach of revolutions, one therefore must account for the recursive pattern of counter-revolutionary intervention. In many cases, these interventions seek to maintain colonial and imperial domination, such as the British counter-insurgency operations to defeat the Dhufar revolution in Oman. Since 2011, Syria, Libya, and Yemen are three examples of foreign interventions diverting the course of the revolution into a prolonged civil war. The recursive pattern of counter-revolutionary mobilisation that is often supported by foreign interventions, and the disorder and carnage they lead to, are not a necessary attribute of the revolutionary movement itself nor do they necessarily follow from revolutionary goals and motivations. But it does suggest that revolution and counter-revolution are inseparable and need to be examined together (Mayer 2000). 

CRITIQUE OF EXISTING PARADIGMS OF REVOLUTION

Mainstream historical, sociological, and political examinations of revolution are often stymied by historical exclusions and theoretical myopia. The problem is twofold: a comparative method that excludes or dismisses experiences outside the Global North, and a theoretical apparatus that justifies this dismissal. 

For example, many assessments of revolution rely on a paradigm that postulates a distinction between political and social revolutions. This paradigm presents the American Revolution of 1776 as an exemplar of political revolution that concerns itself with the establishment of government under law. In contrast, the French Revolution of 1789 is presented as an exemplar of social revolution that additionally seeks to tackle social injustice. What follows from this distinction is an attribution of success and non-violence to political revolution, and failure and violence to social revolution, making the US an exceptional case (Burke 1993; Arendt 1963; Palmer 2014; Wood 1993; Ackerman 2003). While a framing within “Western Civilisation” (Palmer 2014; Wood 1993) is not always explicit, the paradigm generally ignores or dismisses major Global South experiences, many of which were social revolutions, such as the Haitian Revolution, twentieth-century anti-colonial revolutions (Arendt 1963; Palmer 2014), and the Arab Spring (Ackerman 2019).

The deficiency of this paradigm construction is not merely methodological, but also substantive and normative. It reduces the plurality of revolution. It ignores revolution’s dialectical nature by separating its assessment from counter-revolution, thus exaggerating the role of violence in revolutions it disfavours, and obscuring the role of violence, slavery, and colonialism in the revolutions it favours. Finally, it presents certain types of revolutionary constitutions (those which are “political,” not “social”) as ones that legitimate the polity despite the contestability of the revolutions that generated them, and notwithstanding the incoherence and instability of these constitutions. Moreover, this paradigm elevates counter-majoritarian revolutionary constitutions as a product of an exceptional act of founding that need not be repeated (or radically revised) despite that constitutional order’s deficiencies, instability, and injustices.

An additional problem with mainstream analyses of revolution is the imposition of a success criterion, whether via capturing state power or the creation of a new constitution. While revolutions often aim at capturing political power, that may not be achieved in all cases. This then raises the question of whether “failed” collective mobilisations should be included as  revolutions. This “state-centrism” excludes anti-colonial revolutions in the “Third World” (Takriti 2013, p. 6), many of which failed to capture state power. The existence of a constitution is also an insufficient criterion, since “successful” revolutions do not necessarily produce constitutional documents (e.g., the Glorious Revolution), and some “failed” anticolonial movements produced constitutional documents, such as Libya 1918, Syria 1919, and Morocco 1921 (Sultany 2017a). In extreme cases, this narrative of failure of constitutionalism is deployed in explicitly orientalist terms that depict Arab and Islamic constitutional history as a failure emanating from a cultural failure to join modernity (Kedourie 1992), or it is assumed that the normative role of constitutions is absent in the Arab world (Brown 2001; for criticism see Sultany 2017a). 

No success criterion should be stipulated as a definitional prerequisite for defining and identifying a revolution. Revolutions are not mere events, but a dialectical relation between an event and a process: an event that initiates a process, and a process that seeks to complete that which was initiated by the event (Kouvelakis 2003). 

A final problem burdening traditional analyses of revolution is the assertion that revolutions provide a “new beginning” (Arendt 1963), and “constitute a structural and ideological break from the previous regime” (Pincus 2009, p. 31). The assessment of rupture is often premised on a distinction between legality (after founding) and legitimacy (of founding). This distinction is reflected in the dichotomy between the legitimating power of the people at the moment of founding (constituent power) and the legal constraints imposed on the people after the establishment of the new order (constituted power). Revolutionary rupture is portrayed in the scholarly framing of revolutionary constitution-making as an ex nihilo creation, where the people’s constitution-making power unfolds, unhindered by pre-existing constraints (Klein & Sajó 2012). This revolutionary constitution-making requires a change in the identity of the sovereign, abolition of the existing constitution, and enactment of a new one (Arato 2000a; Schmitt 2008). The paradigm that privileges political revolutions and excludes social revolutions also idealises constituent power. In contrast, Fanon and Nasser’s anti-colonial invocation of a post-independence social revolution, and economic and racial analyses of the American Revolution are attempts to capture this sense of gap between the ideal and reality of constituent power. 

Sociologically, revolutionary rupture notwithstanding, the revolution inevitably absorbs a large part of the pre-existing legal system (Berman 1983; Schirazi 1997; Sultany 2017a). Moreover, it maintains institutional continuity – given the fact that the jurists who managed the old system maintain for the most part their position in the new system. Consequently, the existence of continuity in revolution and the existence of rupture (contradiction, incoherence, and gaps) in legality frustrate attempts to construct a clear-cut opposition in which revolution is associated with rupture and legality is associated with continuity. 

Bernal (2017, p. 90) argues that the problem with dominant debates is that they represent founding as a theoretical problem rather than a political one and marginalise the people’s constituent power in the process. Constitutional theory needs to move beyond idealised binding origins and mythologised singular acts of founding. The limited and limiting debates in constitutional theory serve an ideological function in which their parameters wish away contradictions at the basis of the political-legal order and quiet an enduring anxiety about its legitimacy (Kennedy 1979; Sultany 2012). “Legitimacy,” then, functions to legitimate unjust political-legal orders (Sultany 2019).

TOWARD A MORE CRITICAL REVOLUTION

The dominant paradigm of revolution seeks to contain revolutionary movements and aspirations to the establishment of “government under law” and decries social revolutions that go beyond this goal. This dominant view stands in contrast to a more critical perspective that recognises that human liberation is a work-in-progress because one form of exploitation or injustice may replace another.

A critical perspective acknowledges the intertwinement of the social and political in the reality of revolutions. “Every revolution”, Marx (1978b, p. 131-132) writes, “dissolves the old society and to that extent it is social. Every revolution overthrows the old power and to that extent it is political”. For Marx, a social change without capturing political power is illusory because it cannot be realised without overthrowing the old powers, and a political change without dissolving the old society is merely a competition between different classes over access to the state (Marx 1978b, pp. 131-132). 

The intertwinement of the social and political generates tensions of which many revolutionaries are acutely aware. For instance, anti-colonial Arab revolutionaries like the leader of Egypt’s 1952 revolution, Gamal Abdel Nasser, argued for the need to simultaneously achieve two revolutions: a “political revolution”, in which the nation “recovers its right to self-government”, and a “social revolution” that seeks to establish justice for all social classes. This task is challenging, he maintained, because the former requires national unity, whereas the latter entails disunity and social struggle (Abdel Nasser 1955, pp. 24-25).

Moreover, a critical perspective recognizes that the social effect of revolutions is not simply a stage that follows the political stage. When citizens seek to overthrow the political order that governs them they simultaneously seek to change themselves. This is because they are part of the regime that they seek to overthrow. A revolution does not simply destabilise the “state” and its institutions but also the “social basis of the state,” because it not only changes the networks of power and privilege that enable the regime, but also the popular support that its hegemony maintains (Jessop 2016). 

Critical study of constitutions recognises the richness of revolutionary traditions, the contradictions that revolutionary experiences generate, and the ultimate openness of the legal order to transformation. Idealising some revolutions and their constitutional experiences is a poor guide to the study of constitutions because it both masks the shortcomings of existing liberal constitutions and presents a non-realistic yardstick for the assessment of other constitutions. A comparison that idealises western revolutionary constitutions and discounts non-western ones is not fruitful either, because it presents no real assessment of either side of the comparison. What is required is not merely the inclusion of more experiences from the Global South than is often allowed on account of factual pluralism. Rather, there is a need to recognise these experiences as contributors to global theory, that is, as productive sites for theoretical elaboration. 

The legitimacy, stability, and durability of the constitutional order, even in liberal democratic states, are neither secure nor settled. Counter-majoritarian structures continue to deny the many the ability to rule, and wealth distributions privilege the few at the expense of the many. Capitalist political economy widens social inequalities, perpetuates poverty, and ruthlessly exploits nature for private profit. It thereby foments social unrest and endangers human survival. Social protests like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Extinction Rebellion foreground the simmering tensions that lie beneath the liberal constitutional order in advanced capitalist states and its long-standing inability to realise social, racial, and climate justice. The rise of far-right populism across the globe in the past decade further exemplifies social malaise and showcases the fragility and manipulability of constitutional orders. Despite this fragility, injustice is resilient. Even where revolutions like in the Arab Spring succeed in toppling the constitutional order, the status quo reasserts itself.

Revolutions challenge rationalisations of objectionable practices and undermine the mediation of contradictions. As such, they often carry an emancipatory potential because they aspire to create the conditions that would enable human flourishing. This potential is not realised in all cases. This unresolved nature of the question of freedom, democracy, and justice opens the door for further resistances and revolutions.

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