Name: 政治学者だけど「革命」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2026-01-09T18:19:27.000Z
Duration: 28 min 48 s
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I'm a political scientist at George Mason University.

Let's answer your questions from the Internet.

Golden Kumquat asks, what is the difference between a rebellion, a revolution and a civil war?

Very few people are proud to say they've started a civil war or rebellion, but

lots of people love to say I started a revolution.

Civil wars, rebellions, they're often part of revolutionary struggles, but by themselves they're just violent episodes.

It's the effort to change things for the better that makes a revolution special.

Philip is asking, it's a little known fact, but

did you know the French Revolution was largely about baguettes?

Well, Philip means that humorously, no doubt.

But he is right that the French Revolution was largely about the price of bread.

Shortages of grain and escalating bread prices are one of the main factors that brought French people into the streets of Paris.

And this has been really, really true of revolutions throughout history.

We have seen price spikes as an important factor in the Arab uprisings where bread prices reached among their highest level in the early 20th century.

Indeed, governments around the world worry about escalating grain prices because they do know that revolutions often start with the price of bread.

Elspiral asks, is Nepal having a revolution right now?

One of these Gen Z revolutions have forced the ruler to flee and a new ruler has been put in place with a mandate to create a more constitutional and accountable government.

The reason young people are spearheading revolutions in places like Nepal is that they are fed up.

Young people are protesting against the lack of basic services, electricity being shut off for hours every day, absence of things like fresh water.

They know that there are better options available and they're angry at governments that have been enriching themselves while doing nothing for the population.

Chris Holt one says me, who do you think has been the most significant figure in China since the Shanghai Revolution of 1911?

The hero of the Xinhai Revolution was Sun Yat Sen.

Several decades later, Mao came as the head of the Communist Party and created modern communist China and wanted to destroy anything in China that didn't conform to his communist vision.

So Mao is the creator of of the modern Chinese communist state.

But for me, the most important person in China since the Shanghai revolution is Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, the creator of China's modern economy.

He encouraged cities to sponsor local industries.

He encouraged farmers to improve their efficiency and farm for markets.

The reason that China today is the second largest economy in the world is because of Deng Xiaoping.

He set the framework for for China's economy to grow and grow.

And that, I think, is what really changed China's place in the world.

Jack C1126 Are there any revolutions that are mostly considered to have been bad?

Revolutions are the creation of human beings, and human beings are both virtuous and flawed.

However, there may be some agreement that one of the worst revolutions was the Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia.

That's where the communist dictator Pol Pot seized power and he unleashed a terrible reign of terror, really going after anyone who had any kind of relation to the Western imperialist world.

The Khmer rouge killed maybe 1 in 4 people in Cambodia during their short reign.

But other people point to the millions of people killed by Stalin or Mao's famine.

There are a number of competitors for that title of worst revolution ever.

Stalin's revolution strengthened the Soviet Union to withstand Germany's invasion and help helped defeat Nazism.

And Mao's horrible famines were followed by China becoming the world's second strongest economic power.

So again, revolutions have to be assessed carefully, separate the good and the bad.

That's probably up to the people of each country to decide how they look at their own past.

We have records from the end of the Old Kingdom in ancient Pharaonic Egypt that seemed to say there was something like a revolution that brought down the last pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom.

Ordinary people were dressing themselves up in finery, the rich were reduced to wearing rags, and

It does seem that the rule of the pharaohs was ended for a while and replaced by some kind of council of new rulers that goes back over 4,000 years.

But if you want to ask what is the oldest revolution of which we have a clear, unambiguous record, that would be the founding of the Roman Republic.

In 509 BC, Rome was ruled for most of the 6th century by a series of Tarquin kings.

The kings got more and more tyrannical and in 509 there was an uprising.

We call it a revolution because the Romans didn't just put their own king in the place of the foreign ruler.

They created an entirely new government, the Roman Republic, led by senators and tribunes of the people.

The first real republic in Europe remained the model for city republics.

Nessa Solar Guy asks, are today's conditions in the US similar to any historic revolutions?

A lot of the Maga followers claim that they're having a revolution.

They're going to transform America's government.

They want to create an America in which the President is the all powerful embodiment of the national will and in which the government ceases to be this large protected organization.

We talk about checks and balances to prevent any single person from gaining excessive power.

The institutions that we've had have largely failed for a lot of Americans.

It turns out that if you look at the real wages of non college educated men, they've fallen over the last 40 years.

And so it's understandable that people feel they're being left behind.

During the COVID crisis, it seemed like the government couldn't speak with one voice.

And so again, people felt the government's not protecting us.

So many people have just come to believe that America's democracy is just serving a small corrupt elite and is not looking out for ordinary American men and women.

Now that is exactly the belief that gives rise to revolutionary situations.

So it doesn't surprise me that we're seeing mobilize against the government, calling for it to be dismantled, calling for Democrats to be seen as enemies, or for Democrats to say that Republicans are trying to dismantle and overthrow the government.

That is to say, I don't think America's political institutions have been completely or permanently changed, but

we're very much in a revolutionary situation.

A question from the Anarchy 101 subreddit.

Can there be a revolution without violence?

Nonviolent revolutions have become much more common in the last quarter century.

They need to persuade military officers and soldiers that the revolutionaries are a more virtuous group representing the country, while the government that they are sworn to defend is actually a threat to the country and is really in it for itself.

The key is persuading the military to support the revolution.

That said, it's hard to have a purely nonviolent revolution simply because human nature is such that once emotions get stirred, some people are likely to turn to throwing bricks or even burning government buildings.

And of course, if government troops fire on crowds, you're going to have some deaths as well.

What's really critical is whether that violence overwhelms the peaceful protest.

Often if the violence becomes dominant, that discredits the revolutionaries and the military may feel more impelled to defend the government.

So it's a bit of a delicate balance and one of the tasks that nonviolent revolutions face is keeping to the nonviolent path.

Where do you think the next world historic revolution will happen?

I think Brazil, the reconstituted party there, is doing really stupendous work.

I don't think Brazil will be the next world changing revolution for the same reason that the American Revolution wasn't world changing.

That is Brazil is not centrally positioned right now in the world's global economy or politics.

If there is a world changing revolution, I think it's going to come in China, which is the last great communist power.

Xi Jinping is leading a country that's running into economic and demographic problems.

The economy is weakening, growth is slowing, people are hardly having children, and

that means China's workforce is going to decline quite a lot in the next 20 or 30 years.

So the combination of an increasingly kind of autocratic one man rule and an economy that is faltering and where people don't have faith in the future, that's a combination that has often led to revolutionary rebellion.

Sometime in the next 10 years, it's possible that the Chinese people will ask for a more accountable, a more democratic government.

And if that happens, that would have probably the greatest implications for the world of any revolution since the Chinese Revolution in 1949.

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政治学者だけど「革命」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan

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