This chapter summarizes the main findings, arguments, and contributions of the book. It reviews the theoretical arguments and discusses promising avenues for further research on revolution and counterrevolution. Then it explains how the book’s findings speak to a number of scholarly and public debates. First, for scholars of violence and nonviolence, who have argued that unarmed civil resistance is more effective at toppling autocrats than armed conflict, the book raises questions about the tenacity of the regimes established through these nonviolent movements. Second, it speaks to scholarship on democratization, highlighting the important differences between transitions effected through elite pacts versus those brought about through revolutionary mobilization. Third, it offers lessons about how foreign powers can help or hinder the consolidation of new democracies. Next, the chapter discusses implications for Egypt and the broader Middle East, including the possibility that future revolutions might avoid the disappointing fates of the 2011 revolutions. The chapter ends by reflecting on what the book has to say about our current historical moment, when rising rates of counterrevolution appear to be only one manifestation of a broader resurgence of authoritarian populism and reactionary politics worldwide.

Chapter 1 introduces the main arguments, findings, and contributions of the book. Counterrevolution is a subject that has often been overlooked by scholars, even as counterrevolutions have been responsible for establishing some of history’s most brutal regimes, for cutting short experiments in democracy and radical change, and for perpetuating vicious cycles of conflict and instability. The chapter reveals some of the most important statistics from the book’s original dataset of counterrevolution worldwide. These statistics raise a number of puzzling questions, which motivate the theoretical argument about counterrevolutionary emergence and success. After previewing this argument, the chapter discusses the main contributions of the book, including to theories of revolution, democratization, and nonviolence; to ongoing debates about Egypt’s revolution and the failures of the 2011 Arab Spring; and to our understanding of the present-day resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide. It finishes by laying out the multi-method research strategy and providing an overview of the chapters to come.

The Chinese government and its officials often demand political services from companies in China. Chapter 1 examines the phenomenon of politicizing business, its institutional origins, and its consequences. It introduces two political services that have largely gone unnoticed: political contributions to visibility projects and supplements to the authoritarian state for the purposes of societal control. The former advances the careers of authoritarian officials, while the latter helps the state maintain social stability. Some of these political services resemble bribes; others resemble regulations.

The chapter then traces the institutional origins of business politicization to the authoritarian mechanisms used to control both government officials and the general public. To maintain these mechanisms, the Chinese state has preserved its authority to politicize business and has never granted full autonomy to companies during China’s economic reforms. The outcome is the retreat of the market. Political services demanded by the state often place private firms at a disadvantage compared with state-owned enterprises (SOEs), altering the competitive landscape of entire sectors. Ultimately, the politicization of business is a key factor behind the inconsistency between China’s nominally promarket policies and its frequent, seemingly arbitrary, antimarket actions.

Juristocratic reckoning is observable not only “from below.” Collective struggles that employed law animated by the idea that the state should be a vehicle of social justice have provoked a reckoning “from above.” This chapter suggests three dynamics: namely, authoritarian legalism, the dispersion of law, and the tribunalization of law. They reflect differently on the reaction by states and powerful economic actors to what the editors of this volume call “legal apotheosis” but which we would rather refer to as “organic constitutionalism” (Schwöbel 2010). Within these three pathways the chapter observes an active diminishment of the already limited possibilities of law to be mobilized for social justice. In the first modality – the incremental implementation of authoritarian legalism in India – legal measures have been systematically introduced in recent years to “legalize” a dual-law situation long in the making. In a second step, the chapter outlines the dispersion of law in relation to the borders of Europe, where the access to the laws that would nominally regulate these borders (e.g., asylum law) is thwarted by the creation of new legal zones and jurisdictional responsibilities. Third, the chapter observes the tribunalization of law with relation to the regulation of global capitalism, where seemingly egalitarian procedures increase asymmetries and “singularize” injuries. Taken together, the three cases point toward the emergence of a constitutional order that is averse to political conflict being carried out through law. The pathways described in this chapter have hegemonic tendencies; they ensure that political orders are authoritatively institutionalized through law but cannot be contested through it anymore.

This chapter turns to the relationship between the courts and the executive branch of government. The executive branch is ordinarily the most powerful branch of government, and when courts act to hold the executive to account, they are often at risk. The charged relationship between courts and the executive arises not only from the political tension that is generated by holding a powerful executive to account, but also from the different structural and functional characteristics of the executive and the judiciary. The chapter analyses these characteristics, noting that courts must act fairly and independently deciding the disputes that come before them and the executive must act to protect the state and its inhabitants and govern effectively. The chapter then illustrates the dynamic relationship between the courts and the executive by exploring three difficult contexts for that relationship: illiberalism and authoritarianism, emergencies and crises, and corruption by members of the executive branch.

Chapter 10 concludes by summarizing the argument of the book, outlining the contributions and implications of the argument, discussing its limitations, and, finally, reflecting on the ability of the argument to extend beyond the narrow scope condition of electoral autocracies.

Chapter 2 lays out the theory of the book, providing a broad overview of political science’s extant understanding of partisanship across diverse fields of study. It lays out the theory in three parts. First, it creates a framework for understanding how opposition partisanship and ruling party partisanship are unique social identities in electoral autocracies. Citizens who identify as partisans hold specific political beliefs that are common across all electoral autocracies (but not democracies). Second, it argues that these identities are produced at a grassroots level through a process of political socialization that occurs between friends and within families. Finally, the third part of theory argues that partisan social networks are fundamentally rooted within the unique political geography of electoral autocracies and elucidates a framework for understanding this geography, as well as its broader effects on beliefs about democracy and political legitimacy in such regimes.

Chapter 3 presents the case of Cameroon, a long-standing electoral autocracy in Central Africa. It provides a political history of the country, focused on the foundation, organization, and operations of Cameroon’s many political parties. It also elucidates the nature of Cameroon’s political geography, concluding with a section on the ways in which Cameroon may or may not be considered a “typical” case of electoral authoritarianism.

Why do some citizens of electoral autocracies choose to support the ruling party while others support the opposition? Chapter 1 explains the puzzle of partisanship under dictatorship, presents existing theories to understand public opinion in such regimes, and briefly summarizes the argument of the book and the data and methods used to test it. It concludes by discussing what we gain by understanding partisanship as a social identity as opposed to a materialist response to regime strategies.

This chapter is a short intellectual biography focusing on my interest and engagement in questions of political legitimacy over the years. The chapter is organized into three parts. I begin by discussing how the issue of legitimacy has been one of my key intellectual concerns ever since I started to do research on politics, initially in the context of the study of political and legal regimes in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). Next, I highlight my understanding of political legitimacy as a responsibility and what this means for the evaluation and judgment of politics. This understanding builds on one of my previous books, Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility. Finally, I focus on how, gradually, in particular in connection with my work with the United Nations (UN), I became interested in the question of political legitimacy at the international level.