Iron Cage of Liberalism

Over the last forty years the world has witnessed the emergence and proliferation of a new political phenomenon - unarmed revolution. On virtually every continent, citizens have ousted their authoritarian leaders by employing nonviolent tactics such as strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, and civil disobedience against them. At the same time however, similar movements elsewhere have been brutally crushed by autocrats determined to cling to power. In this book, Daniel Ritter seeks to understand unarmed revolutions by posing two interrelated questions: Why do nonviolent revolutionary movements in some countries topples their autocratic leaderships while similar movements elsewhere are brutally crushed, and why has the world witnessed a proliferation of unarmed revolution in the last forty years? Through a comparative historical analysis of the Iranian, Tunisian, and Egyptian revolution, he shows that close and friendly international relations between democratic states in the West and authoritarian regimes elsewhere constitute a parsimonious and plausible explanation for nonviolent revolutionary success. Looking beyond the immediate causes of revolutionary outbreaks, Ritter instead focuses on the contexts that explain successful civil resistance against repressive states. In an original conceptualization of revolutionary dynamics, he argues that Western-aligned autocrats eventually find themselves restrained by their strong links to the democratic world through a mechanism he refers to as 'the iron cage of liberalism'. Having committed rhetorically to the West's fundamental political discourse of democracy and human rights, the dictators in Tehran, Tunis, and Cairo found themselves paralyzed when nonviolent crowds challenged them with tactics and demands fully compatible with the political ideals the regimes claimed as their own.