Why Are There so Many Revolutions in the 21st Century?

Scholars in the 1980s argued that the age of revolutions was over. They reasoned that revolutions involved efforts to overthrow autocratic monarchies, empires, dictatorships, or colonial governments, and that all of these kinds of regimes had either disappeared, or were in the process of disappearing, as democratic forms of government spread throughout the world.

Yet they were seriously mistaken. Revolutions have continued to occur with great frequency in the first quarter of the 21^st century. Even major social revolutions have occurred: ISIS’s briefly successful effort to create a new Caliphate in Syria and Iraq, the ongoing effort of the Houthis to reshape the government and replace the elites of Yemen, and the successful effort of the Taliban to throw off the pro-Western regime in Kabul and create a new Afghanistan under strict Islamic rule are clearly cases of social revolution. In addition, political revolutions have proliferated, from the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 up through the Arab Revolutions of 2010-2011 and the revolutions that forced out leaders in Ukraine (2014), Armenia (2018), Sudan (2019), Sri Lanka (2022) and Bangladesh (2024), to mention just a few of the forcible overturning of governments since 2000.

This paper will argue that there are three main causes that have promoted the unexpected resurgence of revolutions in the 21^st century: (1) the return of dictatorships as democracies proved unstable and the earlier wave of democratization was reversed; (2) the effects of global capitalism and punitive monetary policies, which put developing nations into debt while enriching corrupt leaders; and (3) the spread of models of civic, non-violent actions as an effective mode of revolution.