4 big factors behind the trend
On our minds: Our new era of global unrest. |
The Global Protest Wave, Explained |
It's not your imagination, and the last few months are not an outlier: Mass protests are on the rise globally. |
They've been growing more common, year over year, since the end of World War II, now reaching an unprecedented level of frequency. |
And if it might seem difficult to find a common thread — anti-corruption rallies in Lebanon, separatist demonstrations in Spain, pro-democracy marches in Hong Kong, protests against inequality in Chile and over election results in Bolivia, to name just the most recent — that's not a coincidence. |
Because this is all being driven by more than just the proximate causes of each individual uprising. The world is changing in ways that make people likelier to seek sweeping political change by taking to the streets. |
Before we explain those changes and how they have created an era of global unrest, there's one other trend you should know about. |
Protests are also becoming much, much likelier to fail. |
Only 20 years ago, 70 percent of protests demanding systemic political change got it — a figure that had been growing steadily since the 1950s. |
In the mid-2000s, that trend suddenly reversed. Worldwide, protesters' success rate has since plummeted to only 30 percent, according to a study by Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard University political scientist who called the decline "staggering." |
"Something has really shifted," Ms. Chenoweth, who studies civil unrest, told us. |
To understand that shift, here are four major changes behind our new normal of mass global protest and what it reveals about the world. |
(1) Democracy is stalling out |
Democracy's once-steady growth around the world has stalled, and is maybe beginning to reverse. |
For the first time since World War II, the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is exceeding the number moving toward democracy, according to a recent study by Anna Lürhmann and Staffan Lindberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. |
The causes of this change are complex and still disputed. Nationalist attitudes are rising, with voters increasingly electing would-be strongmen. International pressures to democratize have relaxed. Global corruption has helped entrench broken political systems. |
Whatever the cause, one thing has not changed. Bottom-up pressures that usually manifest as public demand or at least desire for democracy, such as rising middle classes, are still building, as they have throughout the modern era. |
But now that people aren't getting democracy, it's as if a release valve has been closed. That built-up pressure is getting released as explosions of mass outrage. And because within-system avenues for change, like voting in elections or lobbying elected officials, are seen as less and less reliable, people seek change from outside the system, with mass protests. |
Whereas dictators used to rise overnight, in coups or self-coronations, they now emerge gradually, accumulating power bit by bit, in a process that can trigger yearslong cycles of protest. |
But most governments are stalled somewhere between democratic and authoritarian — countries like Lebanon or Iraq, which have elections but unresponsive parties. |
Those middle-ground countries, where citizens have enough freedom to expect and demand change but not to get it, may be the most susceptible to repeated popular revolt. |
Such countries can become "stuck in a low-level equilibrium trap" between unrest and reform, Seva Gunitsky, a University of Toronto political scientist, wrote in a recent paper. |
These "shallow democracies," he wrote, can be "responsive enough to subvert or pre-empt protests without having to undertake fundamental liberalizing reforms or loosen their monopoly over political control" — all but ensuring cycle after cycle of public outrage and disappointment. |
(2) Social media makes protests likelier to start, likelier to balloon in size and likelier to fail |
Initially greeted as a force for liberation, social media now "really advantages repression in the digital age much more than mobilization," Ms. Chenoweth said. |
A theory advanced by Zeynep Tufekci, a scholar at the University of North Carolina, posits that social media makes it easier for activists to organize protests and to quickly draw once-unthinkable numbers — but that this is actually a liability. |
The ease with which social media allows activists to rally citizens to the streets, Ms. Chenoweth said, "can give people a sense of false confidence; 200,000 people today is not the same as 200,000 people 30 years ago. Because it's lower commitment." |
She cited, as a comparison, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, a student civil rights group that played a major role in the civil rights movement. |
In that pre-social media era, activists had to spend years mobilizing through community outreach and organization-building. Activists met near daily to drill, strategize and hash out disagreements. But those tasks made the movement more durable, ensuring it was built on real-world grass-roots networks. And it meant that the movement had the internal organization both to persevere when things got hard and to translate street victories into carefully planned political outcomes. |
Social media allows movements to skip many of those steps, putting more bodies on the streets more quickly, but without the underlying structure to help get results. |
This sets societies up for recurring cycles of mass protest, followed by a failure to achieve change, followed by more social media-spurred protest. |
At the same time, governments have learned to co-opt social media, using it to disseminate propaganda, rally its sympathizers or simply spread confusion. |
That is rarely enough for governments to quash all dissent, but it doesn't need to be. To prevail, they need only create enough doubt, division or detached cynicism that protesters fail to achieve a critical mass of support. |
Pro-government social media campaigns don't even need to be all that sophisticated; governments have plenty deep pockets to compensate. |
(3) Social polarization is way up |
There is a truth about protest movements that often gets missed. |
We often think of mass protests as representing "the people." It's how participants describe them. And it gives their protests a degree of democratic legitimacy. |
But the truth, in almost all cases, is that they are primarily driven by a particular social class or set of social classes. |
That doesn't make the protests any less legitimate. Yes, there will certainly be attendees from across social strata. And the protesters might be right in positioning their demands as serving all of society. |
But any movement, especially at first, is usually animated by a social class collectively demanding changes that will serve that class or, maybe just as often, demanding to reverse changes that have hurt them. (When enough social classes join in, particularly poorer strata that are historically less likely to protest, you have a revolution.) |
In Hong Kong, for instance, the movement really is primarily about protecting democracy and the rule of law from Beijing's encroaching, authoritarian influence. But that movement is driven primarily by middle-class students and professionals who have had their place in society disrupted by changes in the structure of Hong Kong's economy (for example, a drastic rise in rent prices for people too wealthy to qualify for subsidies) and by rapid immigration from mainland China. |
Here's why that matters for understanding the spate of global unrest: Social polarization is increasing worldwide. People are more polarized along racial, class and partisan lines. As a result, they are likelier to cling to their sense of group identity and to see their group as under siege — compelling them to collectively rise up. |
As with democracy's stall-out, there are lots of likely reasons for the rise in social polarization. Economic disruption. Rises in immigration worldwide. Backlashes against the post-World War II liberal ideals of multiculturalism and equality. |
As people harden their sense of group identity, they grow much more focused on any perceived differences between "us" and "them." |
The result is often a sense of conflict between "the people" and "the system" — a recipe for populist backlashes in countries where people still trust institutions enough to bring change through elections, and anti-system uprisings seemingly everywhere else. |
(4) Authoritarian learning |
The world's strongmen, would-be strongmen and outright dictators appear to have noticed the rise in civil unrest, and especially protesters' success at forcing change. |
Nonviolent protests became, to the world's authoritarians, a threat just as dangerous as any foreign army, if not more so. |
In the mid-2000s, they began to fight back with what Ms. Chenoweth called, in a 2017 paper, "joint efforts to develop, systematize, and report on techniques and best practices for containing such threats." |
Network analysis practices and tools, for example, help governments identify the handful of activists and organizers who act as nodes in a social movement. Jailing or threatening those individuals can be even more disruptive than a full-scale crackdown, with less risk of provoking wider backlash. |
And, Ms. Chenoweth said, governments learned to watch one another for lessons on tools and tactics, and even to openly share them. |
There is a term for this direct and indirect lesson-sharing: authoritarian learning. |
These cat-and-mouse strategies for frustrating and redirecting popular dissent without crushing it outright are a major reason that protests' success rate has plummeted. |
But such strategies also don't really defeat dissent outright — so they may be helping to ensure future cycles of protests, maintaining the high global rate. |
Protest movements don't reliably achieve rapid and transformative political change in the ways that they used to. But they are also no longer violently crushed as frequently, Ms. Chenoweth found. |
Their underlying grievances remain, as do their ability and willingness to flood the streets in outrage in recurring cycles of disruptive but nontransformative unrest. It isn't the ideal outcome for any government, but it's ultimately a victory. So while this may look like the era of people power, it is maybe more accurate to describe it as an era of angry frustration. |
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