No Other Way Out

No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991 is a book written by Jeff Goodwin. It analyzes revolutions through the state-centered perspective.

In No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991, Goodwin offers another comparative study on revolutions focusing on the second half of the twentieth century from 1914 to 1991. According to Goodwin, “revolutionary movements are not simply or exclusively a response to economic exploitation or inequality, but also and more directly a response to political oppression and violence, typically brutal and indiscriminate”. This idea is Goodwin’s main thesis throughout the book and he further expands on it. Goodwin believes that understanding revolutions is “worthwhile not only because of the enormous importance of these movements for the national societies in which they occurred, but also for their effects on the configuration of power and beliefs in other societies and thus on the international balance of power as well". This comparative study on revolutions is worthwhile because it is different from all the others that exist. First, Goodwin uses a unique set of revolutions and revolutionary movements to analyze, making this analysis interesting and very instructive. Second, Goodwin analyzes not only those revolutions that were successful; he also includes failed revolutionary movements that did not succeed. By analyzing these failed revolutions, Goodwin is able to analyze the reasons why some revolutions occur and others simply deteriorate. Goodwin’s goal for his analysis on revolutions is “to discover the general causal mechanics that do the most to explain the origins and trajectory of several important revolutionary movements". Before beginning to analyze revolutions Goodwin’s guess is that, “the diverse political fortunes of the revolutionary movements in peripheral societies during this era were not fortuitous nor randomly distributed, but were the result of general causal mechanisms” (2001:8).

Goodwin offers a definition of several important key terms that he will use throughout his analysis. To commence, he acknowledges that there are two different definitions for revolutions. For the first definition, the term revolution can “refer to any and all instances in which a state or political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular, extra constitutional, and/or violent fashion” (Goodwin 2009:9) With this interpretation, there needs to be a mobilization of people against the state. The second definition states that “revolutions entail not only mass mobilization and regime change, but also more or less rapid and fundamental social, economic, and/or cultural change during or soon after the struggle for state power” (Goodwin 2001:8). Goodwin chooses the concept from the concept of the first revolution since it is more general and includes many more revolutionary movements.

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