book project

Action and Inheritance: Mobilizational Paths to Revolutionary Transformation

Book project, in progress

What did the rural revolutionary conflicts of the twentieth century do to the societies they swept through? This book argues that revolutionary mobilization—the wartime recruitment of ordinary people into revolutionary political organizations—was a fundamental and overlooked source of durable social change after revolutionary conflicts. In cases where revolutionaries took power, mobilization was at the heart of the “communist route to modernity,” pulling rural people unevenly into new organizations, networks, and identities that transformed their relationship to the state. This altered principal-agent relationships that had vexed colonial and pre-modern states. We see traces of these effects even where revolutionaries were defeated. Mobilization was modernization.

Even as urbanization progresses across the developing world, rural areas remain central to the most pressing questions of political and economic development: they are home to the majority of the world’s poor, they are the sites of lucrative natural resources, and in democracies they are often pivotal to electoral success. In many parts of the world, understanding these critical issues necessitates accounting for the legacies of rural revolutionary conflicts from decades ago. Furthermore, some of the historically most durable autocratic regimes have emerged from revolutions.Drawing on original genealogical data collected through community partnerships in heavily mobilized parts of Laos and Thailand, the book illustrates how mobilization during violent conflicts reshaped inequalities, social networks, and relationships between states and societies across generations. Mobilization conferred skills and networks that persisted long after conflicts ended. These were transmitted through families and communities to descendants who never experienced the revolution directly, facilitating an expansion of the scope of interactions between states and societies.

The book develops this argument through a paired comparison of revolutionary victory and defeat: Laos, where the communist Pathet Lao prevailed, and Thailand, where the Communist Party of Thailand was defeated. By examining both winners and losers, and both successful and failed revolutions, the book conceptualizes mobilization in rural revolutionary conflicts as a transformative force in its own right, which shaped politics in two different institutional settings. The theoretical framework then provides traction on a wide range of global cases.