Ten years in the making, this magisterial work—the second of a two-volume study—provides a unique perspective on uprisings in nine Asian nations in the past five decades. While the 2011 Arab Spring is well known, the wave of uprisings that swept Asia in the 1980s remain hardly visible. Through a critique of Samuel Huntington’s notion of a “Third Wave” of democratization, the author relates Asian uprisings to predecessors in 1968 and shows their subsequent influence on uprisings in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. By empirically reconstructing the specific history of each Asian uprising, significant insight into major constituencies of change and the trajectories of these societies becomes visible. This book provides detailed histories of uprisings in nine places—the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia—as well as introductory and concluding chapters that place them in a global context and analyze them in light of major sociological theories. Profusely illustrated with photographs, tables, graphs, and charts, it is the definitive, and defining, work from the eminent participant-observer scholar of social movements.
What People Are Saying
“Through Katsiaficas’s study of Asia’s uprisings and rebellions, readers get a glimpse of the challenge to revolutionaries to move beyond representative democracy and to reimagine and reinvent democracy. This book shows the power of rebellions to change the conversation.” —Grace Lee Boggs, activist and coauthor ofRevolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century “In Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, George Katsiaficas inspires readers with an exciting yet scholarly examination of the rise and interlinking of mass revolutionary waves of struggle.” —Bill Fletcher Jr., coauthor ofSolidarity Divided “George Katsiaficas has written a majestic account of political uprisings and social movements in Asia—an important contribution to the literature on both Asian studies and social change that is highly-recommended reading for anyone concerned with these fields of interest. The work is well-researched, clearly-argued, and beautifully written, accessible to both academic and general readers.” —Carl Boggs, author ofThe Crimes of Empire: The History and Politics of an Outlaw Nation “George Katsiaficas is America's leading practitioner of the method of 'participant-observation,' acting with and observing the movements that he is studying. This study of People Power is a brilliant narrative of the present as history from below. It is a detailed account of the struggle for freedom and social justice, encompassing the different currents, both reformist and revolutionary, in a balanced study that combines objectivity and commitment. Above all, he presents the beauty of popular movements in the process of self-emancipation.” —James Petras, professor of sociology at Binghamton University
About George Katsiaficas
George Katsiaficas is author or editor of eleven books, including The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968, the first book to place sixties movements in their worldwide context. Together with Kathleen Cleaver, he co-edited Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. His book, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, was co-winner of the 1998 Michael Harrington Award for best new book in political science. In 2010, the May Mothers’ House—widows and mothers of men killed in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising—awarded his service and commitment. A longtime activist for peace and justice, he was a student of Herbert Marcuse and twice granted Fulbright fellowships. Currently, he is based at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, MA.