Over the last forty years the world has witnessed the emergence and proliferation of a new political phenomenon - unarmed revolution. On virtually every continent, citizens have ousted their authoritarian leaders by employing nonviolent tactics such as strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, and civil disobedience against them. At the same time however, similar movements elsewhere have been brutally crushed by autocrats determined to cling to power.

In this book, Daniel Ritter seeks to understand unarmed revolutions by posing two interrelated questions: Why do nonviolent revolutionary...