Debating the Color Revolutions: An Interrelated Wave

In contrast to the arguments of those who study the color revolutions as an interrelated phenomenon, Lucan Way’s highly structural account considers the failure of authoritarian consolidation causally sufficient, something that obviates the need to explain opposition mobilization against the state and its role in the collapse of these regimes. Yet for scholars who take the politics of mobilization seriously, such arguments fail on several accounts. First, authoritarian weakness alone cannot address the contingencies involved in the process of mobilization. Second, it cannot explain why these revolutions assumed similar forms across diverse contexts. And third, it does not tell us why attempts at revolution rapidly proliferated across so many different contexts during a compressed period of time.

Authoritarian weakness alone cannot explain why the mobilization process during the color revolutions assumed similar forms across varied contexts.