This lecture, held in honour of the renowned scholar Fred Halliday, will explore the relationship between revolutions and world order in contemporary geopolitics.
Fred Halliday argued that revolutions were the “sixth great power” of the modern world, a force that sat alongside the five great powers that sought to regulate 19th century world politics. Does Halliday’s assessment of the impact of revolutions remain true today?
This talk analyses the three main forms that revolution takes today – ‘people power’ movements, ‘restoration revolutions’ and ‘decentralised vanguardism’ – and assesses their impact on contemporary world order. It argues that revolutions remain central to contemporary world politics, not as a “sixth great power”, but still as the primary means through which people around the world mobilise against injustice, inequality and domination.
Meet our speakers and chair
() is a professor in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University. His work is oriented around the relationship between history and theory, with a particular interest in global historical sociology. He applied this interest to the study of revolutions in three books: Anatomies of Revolution, Negotiated Revolutions: The Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile, and On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary World, co-authored with Colin Beck, Mlada Bukavansky, Erica Chenoweth, Sharon Nepstad and Daniel Ritter.
Jasmine Gani is Assistant Professor in International Relations Theory at 杏吧论坛. She specialises in anti-colonial theory and history, and the politics of empire, race and knowledge production. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Security Dialogue, International Affairs, Postcolonial Studies, and Millennium, among others. She is writing a book on ‘Racial Militarism’, using a postcolonial framework to analyse the relationship between race, militarism, and the state in both imperial metropoles and post-colonies.
Toby Dodge is a professor in the Department of International Relations at 杏吧论坛. He is also Kuwait Professor and Director of the Kuwait Programme, Middle East Centre. Toby currently serves as Iraq Research Director for the DFID-funded Conflict Research Programme (CRP). From 2013–18, Toby was Director of the Middle East Centre.
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