You Say You Want a Revolution. Then What?

Say you’re a revolutionary who has just overthrown the despotic leader of your nation. You feel good—but you can’t relax just yet. “People don’t know what happens next,” says sociology graduate student Doğa Kerestecioğlu. “A lot of the time revolutionaries are fighting hard, with a common goal to break down the state, but then their common goal disappears and they have to deal with many opposing views on what the new state should look like.”

Kerestecioğlu, a Teece Family fellow, investigates crises of all sorts, from financial to political. His research made him wonder how revolutions spread and how to provide stability afterward. In his dissertation, he’s examining situations when the state broke down so completely that the people had to accept an entirely different idea of authority and values afterward. In all three cases—France 1789-1905, Mexico 1910-1940, and Turkey 1920-1938—the overthrown governments had been closely linked with a religious authority. “If people have been following their ruler because they think he has a God-given right to rule, how can you build a new authority that goes against that?” he asks.

Kerestecioğlu has identified three stages of the aftermath. The new governments immediately needed resources to rebuild—and the one entity with a lot of material wealth was the church. “The revolutionaries realized in order to take these resources, they had to frame it in such a way that made it legitimate,” he says. “So they said, I can take it from the church because the power is not given to me by God, it is given to me by the people.”

This was followed with legal reforms and changes to the people’s daily lives. This included building a new constitution but also developing national rituals. “Rituals play a very important role in legitimating, especially with ideology,” says Kerestecioğlu. “If people participate in ritual together, they feel solidarity. So the government started phasing out church rituals and tried to replace them with other things.” In France they began to celebrate Bastille Day, while in Turkey the new government forced the people to wear certain clothing and moved their day off from Friday to Sunday to prevent them from going to Friday’s prayers.

The third step was teaching the next generations. “In the end, to bring longevity, you want to educate them,” says Kerestecioğlu. “So the education itself becomes not neutral. It’s not just about being literate but it’s about imposing an identity on people.” In many cases this was another role the new governments took over from the church.

Kerestecioğlu found that the new state’s structure and longevity depended on the initial step: how much church property there was and how much could be seized by the new regime. In France the post-revolutionary government was able to seize most of the church property; after this the church was never again a real threat, leading to the separation of church and state. In Mexico, where a lengthy process was required to take church property, the church remained a strong presence, eventually resulting in a civil war: “It was a formidable opponent that could wage war on them, could be actually physically armed against them.”

In Turkey, however, the church didn’t have many material resources left following the First World War. Instead, “The government co-opted the Islamic authority in the country. They created their own Islamic Directorate and used the networks of the mosques, and all imams became employees of the state.” The directorate then would issue fatwas like “A good Muslim is a modern, secular Muslim,” which furthered the secular state.

None of these insurgencies actually began as a secular revolution. “Ideology does not tend to play a big role as a causal mechanism in revolutions,” says Kerestecioğlu. “States break down and then you get a revolution. Ideology plays an important role in the aftermath because people don’t know what happens once the state is gone. And there’s a lot of revisionist history that happens afterward.” Historical fiction and non-fiction also tend to ignore what happens after the crisis. “The rebels take the leader down and it’s very emotional and they bring freedom and everything is assumed to be new and great,” he says. “People pay less attention to what happens after because it’s boring and depressing. Bringing freedom is a messy business.” 

Looking back provides perspective and recognition. “If you look at what happened in history, you can see the same patterns now,” says Kerestecioğlu. “You don’t know when a crisis is going to come. When it comes, it’s useful to have an idea about what to do next.

“I’m very interested in how states become stable in the end,” he says. “In all of these cases there was a period of martial law and periods of very high oppression. So how do we finally end up with a state that’s legitimate to its citizens?”