The Armenian uprising represents one of the few genuine examples of a popular and peaceful transition of power that this century has seen.

Armenia’s revolutionary moment grew from true grassroots momentum, exemplified and embodied by its almost biblical origin story, when Pashinyan began walking from the town of Gyumri in the north down towards Yerevan, arriving in the capital 17 days later with a cast of thousands who had joined him along the way. Only a year on, it might still be jumping the gun to pronounce it a success, but the relative calm in the country, along with the subsequent free and fair elections in December 2018 (a noteworthy feat in itself for a country long dogged by electoral manipulation) bode well. “One can be reasonably sanguine,” lifelong revolution-watcher John Dunn, professor of political theory at the University of Cambridge, told me. “It’s too early to tell if it has been a success, but equally, time enough has passed to know that it won’t be abject failure. I would be much more optimistic about Armenia than any other revolution of recent times.”

If this continues, Armenia—a nation of three million, squeezed and suppressed by its neighbors during a bloody past half-millennium—may soon count itself among the very few countries of this century to produce an effective and lasting bid for democracy, succeeding where many others have failed. And as the dust begins to settle on the Velvet Revolution, it seems helpful to ask why that might be—particularly in an era increasingly defined by would-be dictators.

In some ways, Armenia had a lot going for it to begin with. Unlike the states of North Africa, the Middle East, and eastern Europe, the sparsely populated and craggy Caucasian nation turned out in this particular instance to be of little geopolitical interest to anyone else. Where Libya quickly found itself under a hail of American, French, and British bombs, and Ukraine’s eastern border was soon invaded by unmarked Russian vehicles, the Armenian revolt was largely left to its own devices. Added to that, when it comes to collective agitation, Armenia is a nation with pedigree, and a long tradition of cultural and political bohemianism. Since the 1980s, Armenians have consistently shown themselves willing to take to the streets of the capital and protest, at first on issues of self-determination under Soviet rule, and later in response to renewed authoritarianism seeping back into the system once the Soviet Union had collapsed. The most significant of these came in 2008 when the machinations of then-president, Robert Koncharian, to shoehorn his ally Serzh Sargsyan into power led to mass marches and, later, the death of eight protestors. It was a national tragedy, but one that galvanized a generation of agitators, not least Pashinyan, who was jailed for his role in “organizing mass disorders.” According to Tigran Mkrtchyan, former head of press under Sargsyan and now ambassador to the Baltic states, it gave the people the “legal literacy and political maturity” that would prove so useful a decade later.

But the triumph of Armenia’s revolution also, and perhaps primarily, came down to decisions taken on the ground during those eleven days of protest in 2018 and in the first few weeks following Sargsyan’s resignation. For a start, Pashinyan—the figurehead and coordinator—avoided escalation from peaceful to violent protest at all costs. Organizers deliberately did not create a central locus for the protests, which prevented the authorities from being able to directly grapple head-on with the movement, as protestors milled around the small city in constant and fluid procession. The tent city at Maidan in Kiev, by contrast (ultimately effective, but not without costs in human life and limb) enabled violent police crackdowns, in the same way as the protest camp in Khartoum is currently the site of mass-killing at the hands of the security services.