The essence
To answer this question, it is necessary to understand the essence of popular rebellion. Popular rebellions revolve around mobilisation power. American sociologist Talcott Parsons likened uprisings to "A Run on the Power Bank". Popular rebellion succeeds if a defiant mass swamps a regime's instruments of repression. Regimes only have so many police officers, prison cells, torture chambers etc. When the masses keep crowding the streets despite of repression, the regime collapses.Originally Posted by davidbfpo
This means that our attention should not focus on the crowds, but on the organizations that mobilize and sustain them. Raising a crowd of a hundred thousand people and maintaining its presence on a city square is an exercise in communication, transportation, finance, and logistics. The organization that leads this undertaking will almost invariably take the forefront when the regime crumbles.
Take Iran, though all factions of the population participated in the 1978 revolution (Liberals, Socialists and the Shi'i clergy), the clergy took the forefront because of their organizational infrastructure (mosques where they could adress groups of people, charitable branches that could manage distribution of food and water, financial reserves from religious fundraising, etc.) A similar thing happened in Iraq in the wake of OIF. In 2003, Moqtada al-Sadr took control of the remains of the organization that organized the (failed) 1991 Shi'i uprising. This organization allowed him to organize the first free Shi'i pilgrimage in southern Iraq, mobilising half a million people. Similarly, the 1987 Intifada put the organization that was able to sustain it logistically (the Muslim Brotherhood, which evolved later into Hamas) to the forefront.
In summary, for an effective response to a 'popular rebellion' in the early stages, we should NOT focus on the rebellion, but on the organization that SUSTAINS it.
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