The violence in Sasun was interpreted differently after investigations by missionaries, by foreign consuls, and by the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. The Ottomans relied almost exclusively on a single legitimist report that became the state’s measure of "truth." To retain a monopoly of legitimate narrative, the Ottoman state utilized various forms of censorship – banning newspapers from abroad, forbidding any independent discussion of Sasun in the Ottoman press, preventing peasants from the area from traveling, and eventually banning all foreign journalists. At the same time, news of the massacres spread through word of mouth, and rumors of the Sasun violence increased tensions throughout the Ottoman Empire. When news of the violence reached London through missionary networks in mid-November 1894, it ignited a much larger debate about the British government’s support for the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II, a support understood by many as complicity. The same missionary networks in the United Kingdom and the United States that had taken up abolitionism in the early nineteenth century now focused their activist energy on the Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire.

Instead of ushering in an era of enduring peace and partnership, the end of the Cold War was followed by a decade of turmoil, with wars in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, and Chechnya, political violence in Moscow, and controversy over the eastward expansion of NATO. The disappointments and turbulence stemmed in part from the personalities and political choices of top leaders, including the erratic and increasingly autocratic Boris Yeltsin, the skeptical and stingy responses of George H. W. Bush to the reform and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the way Bill Clinton unreservedly embraced Yeltsin while also antagonizing him by deciding to enlarge NATO and wage war against Serbia. As this chapter shows, though, American–Russian relations in the 1990s were also roiled by widely shared popular attitudes, including American triumphalist mythology about how the Cold War ended, unrealistic Russian expectations of massive US aid and respect despite Russian corruption, mismanagement, and weakness. The bright promise of the end of the Cold War was marred both by arrogant American unilateralism and by a Russian slide into depression and authoritarianism.

This chapter introduces the central puzzle driving the study: Why are Tunisian unions militant and political in their protest behavior, while their Moroccan counterparts remain apolitical and moderate? It outlines the book’s core argument, emphasizing how authoritarian policies of labor exclusion or incorporation shape unions’ interests and capacities by influencing their relationships with political elites and their internal organization. The chapter reviews the current state of research on the topic, situating the study within broader debates on labor politics, authoritarianism, and regime change. It concludes with a justification of the case selection and an overview of the empirical methods guiding the analysis.

This chapter focuses on the Democrat Party’s final years in power (1958–60), which followed a debt restructuring agreement with creditors. During these years, Democrat Party leaders attempted to implement unpopular economic policies while still holding on to power. Their main tactic was to create the “Homeland Front,” a mass political organization. Though many people joined willingly, the Democrat-led government relied on high-pressure tactics and propaganda to ensure participation. It also increased pressure on its opposition through both legislation and extralegal actions such as mobilizing mobs to attack opposition leaders. These methods were, I argue, part of a more general shift toward illiberal, less democratic norms of governance among American Cold War allies in the late 1950s. By 1960, however, the Democrat Party’s authoritarian actions had alienated important domestic groups, including academics, bureaucrats, and military officers, which led to its removal from power. Rather than explaining the origins of the May 1960 coup, this chapter reveals how hollowed out the democratic political order had become by the time military officers finally launched their operation.

This concluding chapter reflects on the relationship between transitional justice, power, and law at the current global conjuncture of the alleged end or “eclipse” of liberal democracy and human rights and the rise of rightwing authoritarian populism and fascism. It recapitulates the major interventions of the book that critically interrogate the binary of liberalism and authoritarianism and the abstract idealization of the virtues of transparency and the right to know in dominant transitional justice and human rights politics. The chapter organizes the concluding reflections under five headings that draw attention to the making of rightwing authoritarian populist legalism and transitional justice; the problem of Eurocentrism; capitalist and nation-state-centric politics of transitional justice; and reflections on the alternative notions of truth and political responsibility that the book has developed as part of its attempt to envision socially transformative justice beyond moral autopsy and heated political struggles.

Epilogue reflects on the recent public discussions in Poland about ways to dismantle the legacy of rightwing authoritarian populist legalist rule and to “restore” democracy and the rule of law. These discussions raise critical questions about political strategy that has wide resonance beyond the national borders of Poland. In particular, they bring into focus the relationship between law, authoritarianism, democracy, and transitional justice, at the alleged ends of rightwing authoritarian rule from an international and historical perspective. In light of these discussions and the insights accumulated in this study, the epilogue suggests an alternative way of conceiving the means and ends relationship and formulating the question of social transformation and justice beyond the imaginary of “restoration” of democracy and the teleological vision of transition.

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.