Resistance & Rebellion

The Russian revolution was the beginning of the modern age, says award-winning author Roland Chambers. He tells us what Solzhenitsyn imagined Lenin was like, and about the children’s author who led a double life as a spy in Bolshevik Russia.

Nelson Mandela was a most unusual and unusually astute leader, says journalist and author of Playing the Enemy, John Carlin. He chooses the best books to understand Nelson Mandela, who used forgiveness as a political tool, and South Africa, the country he brought peacefully out of apartheid.

Discussions about Tibet are often reduced to arguments about China's right to run it. Tibetologist Robbie Barnett says this obscures a much more subtle debate about what it means to be Tibetan in modern Tibetan society.

Dissent is not just about anger, but about having a rival articulation of the world, argues American historian Timothy Snyder. He recommends five books by European writers of the 20th century who lived in regimes that "not only monopolised violence but threatened it in an everyday sense" and tells us what today’s dissidents can learn from their experience.

In October 1911, China’s last imperial dynasty fell. The legacy of that revolution remains deeply ambiguous in today’s People’s Republic. China scholar Rana Mitter tells us about the country’s tumultuous changes from 1911 to the present day.

From Tunisia to Tahrir, Moscow to Manhattan, civil resistance is back. The British Academy president, and eminent student of people power, tells us how modern non-violent action began, and where it's most likely to succeed

We're richer and freer as a society than we used to be but it's now clear there are downsides too. The MP for Tottenham, where the riots began, says we've created a hyper-individualistic culture and explains how we must change it

History professor and co-editor of Dissent magazine, Michael Kazin, looks back at US leftist movements from abolitionism to Vietnam to see where OWS came from and what it can learn from the past.

Our political and economic systems are inadequate and failing. But what can we do? The author of a new book on the subject tells us what inspired his involvement in the Occupy movement and how a leaderless revolution could work

The historian reflects on the past 60 years of American involvement in Egypt and tells us, after the Arab Spring, what may make the coming years different