5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Recent years a resurgence of publications theorize revolution from new perspectives, or revisit previous “generations” of scholarship, or deploy mixed methods to empirically examine 21^st century revolutionary uprisings. Several publications appear in recent Critical Sociology issues. Scholars seem to agree on the first three generations of scholarship, focusing on the great social revolutions, many entailed violence, from diverse perspectives (“natural history,” “social science,” “structuralism”), but they debate identification of a fourth, or even a fifth, generation of scholarship. In some accounts, fourth generation studies, largely examining post-Cold War and 21^st century uprisings, emphasize agency, unarmed uprisings, and democratic transitions. Fifth-generation scholarship blurs distinctions across revolutions, social movements, and protests, between social and political revolutions, and between failed and unsuccessful uprisings – thus presenting revolution as a (long-term) process rather than an episode with a measurable lifespan, and as occurring within a world-system rather than as a discrete state-centered phenomenon.

These studies raise several questions guiding our panel:

• How to distinguish “generations of scholarship” from “waves of revolution,” or clusters of revolutionary activity/episodes?
• Where do Wallerstein’s concepts of “world revolution” and “anti-systemic movements” fit?
• Where and how do class and gender, and capitalism, matter for analyses of revolutions and their causes and outcomes?
• If revolutions have evolved over time, how broadly can the concept be applied, and why?
• What types/forms of “regime change” – successful/unsuccessful, violent/peaceful, armed/unarmed – count as revolutions?
• Can we reconcile the frequency of revolutionary episodes during purported fourth and fifth waves with U.S. military intervention frequency?