Abstract

This talk offers a sociology of the armed-struggle revolutionary organisation, covering the period from the late 18th century to the present. It concerns itself with this phenomenon in its widest scope, both globally and from left to right and from secular to religious. What are the sociological characteristics that all these organisations have in common? The condition of life-and-death struggle with the state imposes similar patterns of operation upon these organisations, irrespective of their ideological inclinations. The revolutionaries, who tend to be in the weaker position vis-à-vis the state, are forced to mobilise all available resources. Their organisations will be framed as hybrids of three orientations: an apparatus of professional revolutionaries; an emotional community sustained by ideology, battle comradeship, and ritual; and an instrument of physical force nurturing a heroic organisational ethos. Several organisational formats have been in use, none of which completely satisfactorily solves the problem of the balance between political and military tasks, a problem that was tackled very differently in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Speaker

Erik van Ree (1953) has an MA in sociology. PhD in history (Socialism in One Zone. Stalin’s Policy in Korea, 1945-1947, Berg Publishers 1989). He was an assistant professor at the Eastern Europe Institute/European Studies University of Amsterdam) from 1990 until 2020. He is the author of a few dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and of The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin. A Study in Revolutionary Patriotism (Routledge, 2002), Boundaries of Utopia. Imagining Communism from Plato to Stalin (Routledge, 2015) and The Revolutionary Organisation. Armed Struggle from the Late Eighteenth Century to the Present (Brill, 2025). Today he is a research associate at the Germany Institute Amsterdam.

Convenor

Dr. Maxim Kupovykh