An analysis of the overlooked role of the peripheral vanguard in the context of a network theory of collective action.

Navid Hassanpour is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He studies politics in hybrid regimes - collective action and elections under authoritarianism leading to social revolutions or stable electoral institutions. During the past two years he worked at Princeton University, New Jersey and Columbia University, New York, and his ongoing research in Tehran, Saint Petersburg, Istanbul and Beijing examines the inception of electoral institutions at the era of constitutional revolutions and the logic of their pursuing transformations.

1. Mobilization from the margins; 2. Decentralization of revolutionary unrest: dispersion hypothesis; 3. Vanguards at the periphery, a network formulation; 4. Civil war and contagion in small worlds; 5. Peripheral influence, experimentations in collective risk taking; 6. Decentralization and power, novel modes of social organization; Appendix.