An article in the History News Network got my attention
A few lines caught my attention:
- “For the first time the researchers found that the greater the development gap….the more likely a country has experienced non-violent and violent mass demonstrations for regime change…”
- “Events in the Arab Spring and in the Euro-Maidan demonstrations in the Ukraine, show that the frustrated desire to catch up with the frontier era can extend to the political sphere, particularly with repressive regimes.”
Well, this is probably very interesting work and I probably need to scare up a copy. The “for the first time” claim caught my attention in light of the work by Ted Gurr and Feierabend & Feierabend in the 1960s, which I am familiar with. I have posted on their work before. Of course, what Gurr and the Feierabends’Â work showed was that (and this is paraphrasing from my memory):
- Poorer countries had more political violence that richer countries.
- Really poor countries had less political violence than developing countries (poor countries that are getting richer).
- Political violence went up when the economy went down.
The sense I have from the Gurr and Feierabend’s work is that the least stable countries are those that were developing economically and then stalled or went into recession. This, of course, is the scenario with Russia (and others like Venezuela)Â and possibly may become the scenario in China.
