Political Elites in Afghanistan: Rentier State Building, Rentier State Wrecking

Abstract

The study of revolutions now deals as much with states and structures as it does with revolutionaries and their ideologies, in contrast to an older school, which sought their origins in the accumulation of individual grievances. This latter approach inspired many studies of revolutionary “counter-elites,” comparing them in particular to the ruling elites. The new importance placed on structural factors for the genesis and success or failure of revolutions does not render these older studies irrelevant, but it should change the way we understand their results.Revolutionaries,Theda Skocpol argued, are above all would-be state builders, and their origins show as much. In France, Russia, and China they “precipitated out of the ranks of relatively highly educated groups oriented to state activities or employments …[a]and from among those who were somewhat marginal to the established classes and governing elites under the Old Regimes.” ' Studies of many other countries have also found that revolutionary leaders combine an unusually high level of education with a modest social status that blocks their ascent to power under the prevailing regime.2 Revolutionaries are also more likely to have a cosmopolitan or international orientation that inclines them to be critical of their own societies. This orientation at least partly derives from the high incidence of foreign education and travel among them. Higher education and foreign travel provide revolutionaries with links to "fields of power" in the state and the international system.3