Introduction

Why, just over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is there no more talk of democratic revolutions? As euphoric eyewitness accounts indicate, the hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who filled the streets of Manila in 1986 and Prague in 1989, or Jakarta in 1998 and Belgrade in 2000, to topple dictators through popular protests, thought themselves part of democratic revolutions.1 Yet academics have been more skeptical. With few exceptions, peaceful uprisings from “people power” in the Philippines to the “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia have not been added to the academic canon of revolutions.2