The limits of modern revolutions: global constraints on domestic change

The scholarship on revolutions, while vast, mainly focusses on the variety of domestic and international factors that instigate or sustain revolutionary movements rather than whether revolutions meet their stated social objectives beyond initial regime change. However, in examining supposedly successful revolutions decades later, when the afterglow of the struggle has subsided, the majority of aims for social transformation remain unachieved and often abandoned by the former revolutionaries themselves. In order to make sense of the limited success of social revolutions, this article proposes two sets of tensions between the international, on the one hand, and the domestic and local, on the other, that constrain and hamper revolutionaries in the aftermath of initial revolutionary success. First, though successful revolutionaries capture the instruments of domestic state power, to achieve revolutionaries’ aims for wide social transformation necessarily requires change in international social, political, and economic forces. Hence, the mismatch between domestic control and international forces limits revolutionary success. Second, successful revolutions depend on narratives full of imminent possibility and radical transformation, but the reality of post-revolution social change is slow and non-linear. This mismatch between narrative and international process hampers the achievement of revolutionary aims. We illustrate this argument with two exploratory examples in the Haitian Revolution and from the Colour Revolutions.