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Since the Cold War ended, foreign support has been identified as an important factor in facilitating democratization. However, in certain parts of the world Western enthusiasm for democratization has been highly uneven, particularly when regime change has been achieved through nonviolent revolutionary mobilization. This article introduces the concept of 'ambivalent allies' and argues that ambivalence may be highly detrimental to new democracies emerging from nonviolent resistance. Ambivalent allies signal public support for a democratic transition while remaining quietly skeptical about the desirability or viability of the new regime. These misleading signals cause democratic leaders to deprioritize the maintenance of their diverse coalitions, choosing instead an exclusivist approach that alienates their domestic partners. They therefore end up doubly exposed to counterrevolutionary threats, lacking both a broad domestic support base and strong foreign backers. The article illustrates this argument through an examination of Egypt's 2011 revolution and 2013 coup, drawing on approximately 100 interviews with Egyptian political leaders and foreign diplomats. It shows that the USA's ambivalence toward the transition contributed to the coup by giving the elected government headed by Mohamed Morsi a false impression that it had strong foreign backing, and that it could afford to marginalize the secularist wing of the original revolutionary coalition. Egypt's experience is then compared to two cases in which new governments survived counterrevolutionary threats: Burkina Faso in 2014 and Madagascar in 2009. The study contributes to our understanding of how international support may facilitate or undermine democratic consolidation following nonviolent revolutions.

What type of revolutions are most vulnerable to counterrevolutions? I argue that violent revolutions are less likely than nonviolent ones to be reversed because they produce regimes with strong and loyal armies that are able to defeat counterrevolutionary threats. I leverage an original dataset of counterrevolutions from 1900 to 2015, which allows us for the first time to document counterrevolutionary emergence and success worldwide. These data reveal that revolutions involving more violence are less at risk of counterrevolution and that this relationship exists primarily because violence lowers the likelihood of counterrevolutionary success—but not counterrevolutionary emergence. I demonstrate mechanisms by comparing Cuba's nonviolent 1933 uprising (which succumbed to a counterrevolution) and its 1959 revolutionary insurgency (which defeated multiple counterrevolutions). Though nonviolence may be superior to violence when it comes to toppling autocrats, it is less effective in bringing about lasting change and guaranteeing that these autocrats never return.

Why do ethnic minorities who have been cut out of power choose, in some contexts, to take up arms and, in other contexts, to take to the streets? This question might seem an obvious one to ask, and yet it has rarely been posed in quite these terms – in large part because ethnic politics research has concentrated far more on violent resistance than its nonviolent alternative. We have reams of pages on the roots of ethnic insurgency, violent secessionism, and ethnic civil war but far less on why and how marginalized ethnic groups might mobilize using unarmed strategies of civil resistance. Manuel Vogt's impressive new book makes this point well – and offers a succinct and parsimonious explanation to answer the question of why an ethnic group might choose one path over another.

Refugees are often considered to be among the world's most powerless groups; they face significant structural barriers to political mobilization, often including extreme poverty and exposure to repression. Yet despite these odds refugee groups do occasionally mobilize to demand better services and greater rights. In this paper I examine varying levels of mobilization among Syrian refugees living in camps and informal settlements in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan in order to explain how marginalized and dispossessed groups manage to develop autonomous political strength. I explain the surprisingly high levels of mobilization in Jordan's Za'atari Camp compared to the relative quiescence of refugees in Turkish camps and Lebanese informal settlements as the product of a set of strong informal leadership networks. These networks emerged due to two unique facets of the refugee management regime in Jordan: the concentration of refugees in the camp, and a fragmented governance system. In Turkey and Lebanon, where these two conditions were absent, refugees did not develop the strong leadership networks necessary to support mobilization. I develop this argument through structured comparison of three cases and within-case process tracing, using primary source documents from humanitarian agencies, contentious event data, and 87 original interviews conducted in the summer of 2015.

This article discusses three recent books that analyze patterns of political conflict and regime change in postcolonial Asia and Africa using a social forces approach to political analysis. The social forces tradition, originally pioneered by Barrington Moore, studies the social origins and political consequences of struggles between social groups whose members hold shared identities and interests. The works under review examine, respectively, the varied regime trajectories of Southeast Asia's states, divergent regime outcomes in India and Pakistan, and the institutional origins of social cleavages and political conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Although historically the social forces paradigm has focused on conflict between class actors, the author argues that these three works fruitfully extend the social forces approach to encompass struggles between nonclass social groups, including those defined along the lines of ethnicity, religion, nationality, region, and family. This pluralized version of the social forces approach is better suited to studying patterns of regime change in Asia and Africa, where the paradigm has been less frequently applied than it has been to cases in Europe and Latin America.

How do reform-oriented social movements in authoritarian states get off the ground? I argue that authoritarian regimes can actually facilitate social movement mobilization by making it easier for movement leaders to form opposition coalitions. When authoritarian states experience a political opening, certain structural aspects of these regimes will ease the process of coalition formation. I describe three ways in which these states facilitate mobilization: (1) they offer a straightforward set of least-common-denominator goals; (2) they establish incentives for existing organizations to get involved; and (3) they enhance the role of protest events in building cohesion. To make my case, I analyze the Egyptian Kefaya movement, a social movement whose diverse members had never meaningfully worked together before and whose nine months of sustained street protests defied expectations that it would collapse under regime repression.

How do reform-oriented social movements in authoritarian states get off the ground? I argue that authoritarian regimes can actually facilitate social movement mobilization by making it easier for movement leaders to form opposition coalitions. When authoritarian states experience a political opening, certain structural aspects of these regimes will ease the process of coalition formation. I describe three ways in which these states facilitate mobilization: (1) they offer a straightforward set of least-common-denominator goals; (2) they establish incentives for existing organizations to get involved; and (3) they enhance the role of protest events in building cohesion. To make my case, I analyze the Egyptian Kefaya movement, a social movement whose diverse members had never meaningfully worked together before and whose nine months of sustained street protests defied expectations that it would collapse under regime repression. Adapted from the source document.