This article discusses three recent books that analyze patterns of political conflict and regime change in postcolonial Asia and Africa using a social forces approach to political analysis. The social forces tradition, originally pioneered by Barrington Moore, studies the social origins and political consequences of struggles between social groups whose members hold shared identities and interests. The works under review examine, respectively, the varied regime trajectories of Southeast Asia's states, divergent regime outcomes in India and Pakistan, and the institutional origins of social cleavages and political conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Although historically the social forces paradigm has focused on conflict between class actors, the author argues that these three works fruitfully extend the social forces approach to encompass struggles between nonclass social groups, including those defined along the lines of ethnicity, religion, nationality, region, and family. This pluralized version of the social forces approach is better suited to studying patterns of regime change in Asia and Africa, where the paradigm has been less frequently applied than it has been to cases in Europe and Latin America.

中文翻译：

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社会力量与政权更迭

本文讨论了最近的三本书，它们使用社会力量的政治分析方法分析了后殖民亚洲和非洲的政治冲突和政权更迭的模式。最初由 Barrington Moore 开创的社会力量传统研究了成员拥有共同身份和利益的社会群体之间斗争的社会起源和政治后果。所审查的作品分别考察了东南亚国家不同的政权轨迹、印度和巴基斯坦不同的政权结果，以及撒哈拉以南非洲社会分裂和政治冲突的制度起源。尽管从历史上看，社会力量范式一直关注阶级行为者之间的冲突，作者认为，这三部作品卓有成效地扩展了社会力量方法，以涵盖非阶级社会群体之间的斗争，包括那些按照种族、宗教、国籍、地区和家庭定义的社会群体。这种多元化的社会力量方法更适合研究亚洲和非洲的政权更迭模式，在这些地区，这种范式的应用不如欧洲和拉丁美洲的案例那么频繁。