The Diffusion of Revolutions: Comparing Recent Regime Turnovers in Five Post- Communist Countries

The recent revolutions or near-revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine share the following characteristics: stolen elections triggered them, there were massive, nonviolent demonstrations, and the opposition united behind a single, often charismatic, leader. This article combines two theoretical perspectives on the recent revolutions in southeast Europe and Central Asia: a state failure perspective that focuses on the domestic characteristics that helps explain these events, and a diffusion perspective that focuses on the interrelatedness between these events by means of the interchange of financial resources, activists, and knowledge. It concludes that foreign interventions aimed at the democratization of unstable states might facilitate regime change by democratic or undemocratic means, but it is never a sufficient condition for regime change.