Revolutions or campaigns? Tearing down the Berlin Wall in the study of mass mobilization

In recent years, a kind of “Berlin Wall” has emerged between the study of “revolutions” and “maximalist campaigns.” Although scholars in these two traditions analyze closely related phenomena, they use different terminology, bodies of literature, and empirical conventions. We argue that this separation is analytically costly and prevents fruitful dialogue. On one hand, this leads to the dismissal of the accomplishments of all four preceding generations of revolutionary theory by the students of “maximalist campaigns”/“organized resistance”/“civil resistance”/“dissident campaigns”/“civilian revolts,” without any justifiable rationale, which leads to the fact that those studies tend to produce rather theoretically shallow results. In the meantime, the revolution students’ ignorance of the findings of the “maximalist campaign” research does not let them understand how well the 21st-century revolutions have already been studied empirically. While revolutions and maximalist campaigns are not conceptually identical, we show that the two traditions study substantially overlapping sets of contentious episodes and arrive at comparable empirical results. For this reason, scholars in each camp should engage more directly with the other camp literature and, where appropriate, use datasets on both revolutions and maximalist campaigns for validation and robustness checks.