The Psychology of Radical Social Change : From Rage to Revolution

Since 2011 The World Has Experienced An Explosion Of Popular Uprisings That Began In The Middle East And Quickly Spread To Other Regions. What Are The Different Social-psychological Conditions For These Events To Emerge, What Different Trajectories Do They Take, And How Are They Are Represented To The Public? To Answer These Questions, This Book Applies The Latest Social Psychological Theories To Contextualized Cases Of Revolutions And Uprisings From The Eighteenth To The Twenty-first Century In Countries Around The World. In So Doing, It Explores Continuities And Discontinuities Between Past And Present Uprisings, And Foregrounds Such Issues As The Crowds, Collective Action, Identity Changes, Globalization, Radicalization, The Plasticity Of Political Behaviour, And Public Communication. -- Edited By Brady Wagoner (aalborg University, Denmark), Fathali M. Moghaddam (georgetown University, Washington, Dc), Jaan Valsiner (aalborg University, Denmark). Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Cover 1 Half title 3 Title 5 Copyright 6 Dedication 7 Contents 9 List of Figures 11 List of Contributors 12 Foreword 13 1 Toward a Psychology of Revolution 17 Part I Roots of Revolution 25 2 The Conservative Crowd? How Participation in Collective Events Transforms Participants’ Understandings of Collective Action 27 3 Economic Inequality and the Rise of Civic Discontent: Deprivation and Remembering in an Irish Case Study 45 4 The Globalization-Revolution Paradox: No Revolutions in Capitalist Democracies 70 5 From the Age of the Crowd to the Global Age 102 Part II Evolution and Involution in Social Transformations 117 6 Social Engineering and Its Discontents: The Case of the Russian Revolution 119 7 Political Plasticity and Revolution: The Case of Iran 138 8 The Velvet Revolution of Land and Minds 156 9 Wordsworth’s Insurgency: Living the French Revolution 175 10 Between the Guillotine and the Velvet Revolution: What Is at Stake? 185 Part III Representations of and in Revolution 203 11 Image Politics of the Arab Uprisings 205 12 Constructing Cultural Pathology: The December 2008 Upheaval in the Greek Press 234 13 Restoring Cultural Identity Clarity in Times of Revolution: The Role of Historical Narratives 268 14 The Shark and the Octopus: Two Revolutionary Styles 291 Index 307 Since 2011 the world has experienced an explosion of popular uprisings that began in the Middle East and quickly spread to other regions. What are the different social-psychological conditions for these events to emerge, what different trajectories do they take, and how are they are represented to the public? To answer these questions, this book applies the latest social psychological theories to contextualized cases of revolutions and uprisings from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century in countries around the world. In so doing, it explores continuities and discontinuities between past and present uprisings, and foregrounds such issues as the crowds, collective action, identity changes, globalization, radicalization, the plasticity of political behaviour, and public communication. -- Provided by publisher Develops a social psychological approach to revolutions through analyzes of cases from around the world and during different historical periods