State Disintegration and Urban-Based Revolutionary Crisis

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Abstract
The purpose of this article is to assess the usefulness of the theoretical insights generated by Theda Skocpol's theory of revolution in explaining the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions. The major contention of this study is that she has formulated a useful framework for understanding social revolutions. However, given the manner in which she links her analysis to specific historical context, her propositions need to be modified in order to be applied to more recent revolutionary cases. Her analysis can become more applicable to the contemporary world by (1) locating it in the changing balance of class forces occasioned by combined and uneven development of capitalism on a world scale, (2) developing an understanding of the internal dynamics of states in peripheral formations, and (3) introducing a broader understanding of ideology. These modifications will enable us to explain the changing coalescence of oppositional groupings as manifested in the changing importance of intermediate classes, and to single out a particular type of state as distinctively susceptible to revolution.

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