Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

REVOLUTION • 587tian revivalism associated also with millennialism, are all examplesof resurgence movements. Resurgence movements have variouslysucceeded or failed in preserving a community and its way of life. TheKu Klux Klan and militia movement are examples of movementsseeking to restore pre–Civil War norms of white supremacy, statecenteredfederalism and antiforeigner nativism. The various Sikhmilitant groups and Kurdish militant nationalist movements, suchas the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, seek to create new nation-statesbased on their respective religious or ethnic communities.Nationalist movements, such as those of Zionism in the period1897–1948 and Irish nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, haveoften involved attempts to revive the original language, place-names,and culture of the national group in order to boost the distinctiveidentity of the national group and to reinforce its claims to territoryand the right of self-government: Jewish settlers in Palestine optedto revive Hebrew as the primary language of the Jewish communityin Palestine in preference to English, German, Yiddish, Ladino, orother languages being used by Jews as a lingua franca throughout theworld. Similarly, the Irish nationalist movements sought to revivethe use of the Gaelic language in preference to English as a means offostering an Irish identity distinct from the British identity shared bythe peoples of Great Britain but failed to displace the use of Englishas the primary language within Ireland.REVOLUTION. A transformation of the political system of a societyin which the majority of the people in the affected society withdrawtheir recognition of the legitimacy of the prerevolutionary politicalsystem in favor of the system that replaces it. Revolution differs froma coup d’état insofar as a coup need only replace the main personalitiesgoverning the state without otherwise changing the state systemor the basic political and social institutions of the nation. Revolutionsusually involve some political violence, even in those movementsthat seek to use only nonviolent civil disobedience, since the defendersof the existing regime usually will violently resist attempts tooverthrow that regime.Several theories of revolution have been proposed, ranging fromthe historical-materialist thesis of Karl Marx and his followers tothe theory that revolutions are the result of ideological movementsamong the intellectual elites, who have grown alienated from the