Why Do Revolutions Tend to Become Less Violent? Some Explanations of the Global Trend

Comparative Sociology. 2025. Vol. 24. No. 6. P. 801–842.

Andrey Korotayev, Andrey Zhdanov, Julia Zinkina, Vadim Ustyuzhanin

Revolutionary events are increasingly likely to take unarmed forms. This trend has been observed over the past 120 years as a result of the World System transformation, wherein most societies increased their GDP per capita, experienced the spread of modern formal education, and moved from predominantly rural and very young populations to mostly urban and older ones, whereas autocratic regimes in most societies gave way to anocratic and democratic ones. This research employs binary logistic and principal component regression, as well as leave-one-out PCA to estimate the relative contribution of different modernization components to this trend, suggesting that a particularly significant contribution was produced by the explosive global proliferation of education and the pronounced shift toward more democratic political systems. Global economic growth also contributed to this trend rather substantially. In the meantime, the contribution of urbanization and global aging appears to be much less pronounced (though still statistically significant in most tests).

Keywords: education, modernization, binary logistic regression, revolutions, Non-violence, Sub-Saharan Africa, armed revolutionary insurgencies, unarmed revolutionary uprisings, principal component regression violence

Publication based on the results of: State Resilience and National Security of Russia in the Context of the World Order Transformation (2025)