Guggenheim Q&A: Prof. Mark Beissinger

Mark Beissinger, the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics, is one of the recipients of the 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Beissinger received the award in the field of Political Science for his work on social movements and imperialism in Russia and the post-Soviet states. The Daily Princetonian sat down with Professor Beissinger to learn more about his research interests and his view on Russia today.

The Daily Princetonian: Your work has primarily focused on topics concerning the Soviet Union. What sparked your interest in this field of work? Where has it led you, particularly as it relates to “A Revolutionary World: The Growth and Urbanization of Global Mass Revolt,” for which you received the Guggenheim Fellowship?

Prof. Mark Beissinger: My work up until maybe about six or seven years ago primarily focused on the Soviet Union, but more and more I’ve been engaged in global study of revolutions around the world. That’s been sparked in part by events in the region of the former Soviet Union, particularly the revolutions in Ukraine. So I was asked a number of years ago to speak at a conference of historians at Yale about the relationship between violence and revolution. I had written something about the spread of nonviolent resistance movements … I had a hunch that revolutions were becoming less violent over time, but there was no data to be able to show that. So I went out and tried to collect some data about deaths and revolutions over the course of the last century. That kind of sparked my interest in a broader study about how revolution has changed over the last century. And I put together a data set of revolutionary episodes from 1900 to the present, about 350 of them, and I’m using that to look at trends and topics like violence and revolution and the success rate of revolution, the incidence of revolution, what happens after revolution, and so on. So that’s the nature of the Guggenheim project. It emerged out of my work in the Eurasian region, but it’s much more global … Now I do have another dimension of that project, which is at the individual level. So when I was in Ukraine I was able to get a very unusual survey that allowed one to identify not only who participated in the Orange Revolution, but who supported the Orange Revolution and didn’t participate, who opposed the Orange Revolution, who mobilized as a counter-revolutionary, and who was apathetic. And the survey included about 350 other details on people’s lives such as what language they speak at home, what their political attitudes were, how tall they were, what did they weigh, what did they drink, did they smoke, did they go to the gym, how frequently, did they own a computer, did they use the internet, and so on. So it gives us a level of detail about participation in a revolution that we’ve never had … Basically about individuals we’ve tried to scrape information from lists of people who were arrested or who died or individual stories, but this gives us a kind of systematic view of how people who participate in a revolution compare with those who didn’t … So, based on that I lobbied my colleague Amaney Jamal who runs the Arab Barometer survey to do a similar type of thing to the extent that we could in Egypt and Tunisia after those two revolutions. And now I’ve also been able to get similar information for the 2013-2014 revolution in Ukraine … So I have this very individual level, very fine-grained information about who participates in contemporary revolutions. The project that I’m doing has to do with the fact that revolutions as a mode of regime change have been growing more frequent over time, actually significantly more frequent. So although we don’t think necessarily of our world as more revolutionary, in some ways we have many more, significantly more, revolutions today than occurred either in the first half of the 20th century or during the Cold War. Plus they have shifted in nature. So they’ve moved away from social revolutions, which aim to transform class structure, to what I call urban civic revolts. This is kind of the center of the book and the Guggenheim project. The urbanization of revolution and what does that mean for the political processes underpinning revolt, the frequency of revolt, the social forces involved in revolt, and so on. So, the communication systems and the networks that underpin revolt, they’re quite different. They are all of selective incentives because these revolts are not occurring where the state is weak, but exactly where the state is the strongest, that is in the cities.

DP: How do you approach researching a topic such as this one? What do you look for in a subject? Do you find your research on-location is more useful than the research you do domestically?

MB: Finding a topic is the hardest thing, I think, for most researchers. Finding a good topic, or I should say more finding a question. I think it’s looking, really, for puzzles, things that stand out that seem to run counter to what you think might be the case. Sometimes when you look back at them they seem obvious, but to many people they don’t necessarily. So I think for me, that’s kind of the way in which I often go about thinking. Start with a topic, but then look for the puzzle in the topic.

DP: So what was the puzzle in this project?

MB: The puzzle in this topic was the fact — I guess there are two puzzles. First of all, the fact that revolutions are becoming more frequent over time. That’s kind of the key puzzle that seems to motivate a lot of what I’m doing. And then what is driving that? And there it seems to be driven by the fact that by global urbanization, the massive movement of people — you know if you look in 1900, about 10 percent of the world was urban. Today it’s 53 percent. Most revolutions were more, up until about 30 to 40 years ago, rural based, or involved peasants somehow. Even if they were urban in the early part of the 20th century, they usually took place in predominantly rural societies. So now that’s not the case. So I guess identifying the puzzle and trying to see what drives the answer to the puzzle, that’s kind of how I’ve gone about doing it.

DP: Has your study of the Soviet Union shaped how you perceive the current situation in Putin’s Russia?

MB: I should make it clear I do still work on the Soviet Union and still write about Russia, Ukraine, and other states in the region. I’ve been involved in the study of Russia and the societies in that region for a long, long time. So the early work in my career that I’ve participated in had to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and with the mobilization that occurred during the Soviet Union.

DP: In addition to being a professor of politics at the University, you also serve as the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. What are your goals for the future of this institute and the students who participate in it?

MB: Well actually I’m stepping down as the director, so Stephen Kotkin is going to be the new director. So I’ve run it for seven years. I think the way in which I viewed the role of PIIRS has been to view it as value added to the University, not to duplicate what takes place in departments, but to bring people together in ways they otherwise would not necessarily ordinarily interact. To provide students with opportunities that they wouldn’t necessarily ordinarily have, such as the Global Seminars. So we run a number of programs in addition to the regional studies programs that bring people together along thematic lines, across departments, and across areas focused on particular issues. So these are all the ways which I think PIIRS can add value to the University without trying to substitute for what’s already going on here. And I think that that’s basically the direction that my successor is going. So PIIRS is a critical link in the internationalization of the University, not only in providing students with opportunities to go abroad, but also in terms of bringing people from abroad here, in terms of fostering research about the rest of the world, sometimes in innovative ways. And running certificate programs for undergraduates as well on international topics. So we’re the major funder for undergraduate students for research abroad as well, particularly in the summer in language training. So I think we’re a critical link in the University’s broader strategy of internationalization. We’re not the only part of that strategy, but I would say more the academic link in some ways.