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Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century pp 465–482Cite as

Serbian “Otpor” and the Color Revolutions’ Diffusion

Part of the Societies and Political Orders in Transition book series (SOCPOT)

Abstract

Filin et al. discuss the role of the Serbian youth revolutionary organization “Otpor” within the wave of color revolutions of the twenty-first century. The wave of revolutions in post-Communist and Middle Eastern countries at the beginning of the twenty-first century happened with the help of the Serbian urban youth organization “Otpor”, which successfully overthrew Serbian President Milošević in 2000. Otpor received help from the American government and Western NGOs. Then Otpor (later CANVAS) helped the revolutionary movements in many countries, teaching them the revolutionary techniques and tactics that had proved successful in Serbia. This intervention resulted in several successful revolutions in such countries as Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon, the Maldives, Tunisia, and Egypt; however, there were also some failures. The authors present an explanation of how and why Otpor intervened in these processes (or even influenced the formation of revolutionary organizations), and what results this intervention brought about—both the successes (which remain limited) and the failures. The authors conclude that against expectations, the development of those countries after their revolutions was often far from optimistic hopes, and in the case of Syria the attempted revolution led to a brutal civil war. The revolutions were more successful in countries with semi-democratic regimes, while the movements failed where there were strong authoritarian regimes like those in Belarus or Iran. The authors also discuss about the factors driving the revolutions, besides “Otpor”’s activity, as the weakness of their regimes in combination with a relatively free environment (free media etc.), the desire of urban educated youth for faster development and radical changes, in some cases, the influence of Western governments and the organizations they supported, etc.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. 1.

    On the situation with revolutions in the late twentieth century see Chapter “Revolutionary Waves and Lines of the Twentieth Century” (Grinin & Grinin, 2022). On general causes of the Color revolutions see Chapter “The Color Revolutions. Successes and Limitations of Non-violent Protest” (Mitchell, 2022), Chapter “Introduction. Changing yet Persistent: Revolutions and Revolutionary Events” (Goldstone et al., 2022a), and Chapter “The Arab Spring: Causes, Conditions, and Driving Forces” (Grinin & Korotayev, 2022b) in this volume. About the specific causes of revolutions in specific countries see Chapter “The Orange Revolution in Ukraine” (Khodunov, 2022b), Chapter “The Rose Revolution in Georgia” (Khodunov, 2022c), Chapter “Revolutions in Kyrgyzstan” (Ivanov, 2022), Chapter “Egypt’s 2011 Revolution: A Demographic Structural Analysis” (Korotayev & Zinkina, 2022), and Chapter “The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and the Birth of the Arab Spring Uprisings” (Kuznetsov, 2022, in this book).

  2. 2.

    For detail on these revolutions see Chapter “The Rose Revolution in Georgia” (Khodunov, 2022c), Chapter “The Orange Revolution in Ukraine” (Khodunov, 2022b), Chapter “Revolutions in Kyrgyzstan” (Ivanov, 2022), Chapter “Egypt’s 2011 Revolution: A Demographic Structural Analysis” (Korotayev & Zinkina, 2022), and Chapter “The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and the Birth of the Arab Spring Uprisings” (Kuznetsov, 2022, in this book).

  3. 3.

    The situation in Lebanon has worsened considerably after the influx of 1.2 million Syrian refugees (20% of the whole Lebanese population) after which the economic growth fell from 10% in 2010 to 1% in 2014, and unemployment skyrocketed to 34%. But this is an obvious external factor, without which the economic growth and social development would probably have been continued at a fast pace (Cherri et al., 2016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of the Modern East, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia

    Nikita Filin & Alexander Khodunov

  2. Department of Oriental Languages, Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia

    Vladimir Koklikov

Authors
  1. Nikita Filin
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  2. Alexander Khodunov
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  3. Vladimir Koklikov
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Correspondence to Nikita Filin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Scholar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, Arlington, VA, USA

    Prof. Jack A. Goldstone

  2. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Prof. Dr. Leonid Grinin

  3. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Prof. Dr. Andrey Korotayev

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Filin, N., Khodunov, A., Koklikov, V. (2022). Serbian “Otpor” and the Color Revolutions’ Diffusion. In: Goldstone, J.A., Grinin, L., Korotayev, A. (eds) Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86468-2_17

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