A Theory of Third World Social Revolutions: Iran, Nicaragua, and El Salvador Compared

Abstract

Existing theories of revolution are briefly presented and critiqued. Building on recent work, a new model is introduced in which the key variables are the effects of dependent development on social structure, the exclusionary nature of repressive, personalistic dictatorships, the elaboration of political cultures of resistance, and a dual crisis consisting of a simultaneous economic downturn and an "opening" in the world-system. The combination of these necessary and sufficient conditions predicts the outbreak of a successful social revolution. The model is then applied to the similar cases of Iran and Nicaragua and contrasted with the negative case of El Salvador.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.