Revolutions: Integrating the International

This chapter examines the relationship between revolutions and international relations. This relationship should be strong: revolutionaries often stress the international components of their struggles, while revolutions feature a range of international processes, from the spread of revolutionary strategies to the close relationship between revolutions and war. Yet, in practice, revolutions are not well studied in the discipline of International Relations (IR). This chapter explores the reasons for this neglect and suggests ways of better integrating the study of revolutions with IR. Its main contribution is the advancing of an ‘inter-social’ approach to revolutions, one that both describes and analyses the relationship between revolutions and the international ‘all the way down’.