Features
Are Protests Becoming the Norm? By Camilla Garzon When reading the news in previous months, it’s possible to see that several countries have been facing serious internal conflicts due to a rise of intense popular protests. Hong Kong, Lebanon, Catalonia: these are just some of the places where people have begun to contest the government by taking their grievances to the streets. Protesters in Hong Kong have blocked entire sections of the city for weeks, while in Chile the centre of Santiago was completed sealed off by the greatest protest rally since the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Climate change protests as well involve thousands of people around the world and don’t give any sign of fading away anytime soon. In this regard, Professor Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, who studies Social Change and conflict at Vrije University in Amsterdam, says that “the data
11 shows that the amount of protests is increasing and is as high as the roaring 60s, and has been since about 2009”. Even intuitively it would be quite easy to agree with Stekelenburg’s statement: since the early 2010, when a “movement of the squares” saw mass rallies in capital cities across the Arab world, the globe has been in a state of deep unrest. Every continent has been touched by protest activity since and, similar to the protests of the 1960s, small local acts have quickly moved towards becoming a proper global phenomenon. Despite the fact that protests are
“Local rebellions come to acquire a global echo that resonates in other parts of the world and inspire actions .” usually triggered by specific and local issues, such as the extradition law in Hong Kong or
raise of subway fares in Santiago, it can be argued that some common underlying issues bind today’s rebellions together. The financial crisis of 2008 had a significant impact on the lives of citizens in both developed and developing countries. Young people especially — those who came of age during the febrile years after the collapse — have come to regard precarious work and rising inequality as the norm, albeit a deeply unjust one. As the journalist Jack Shenker argues, the reality they are facing harshly clashes with the promises of the governing class: instead of support and attention, too many find their requests not being met with enough strength or being completely ignored. Therefore, amid social and economic failure, elites have been struggling to justify their power and have shown weakness and vulnerabilities that involuntarily encourage protest activity. These common underlying issues can generally help us to understand the current intense surge of protests: disillusionment; frustration with the current state of the political and economic system; the feeling that there is simply nothing to lose are all crucial features in any kind of popular rebellion. However, they don’t seem to be sufficient in explaining the reason for the close contemporaneity of the movements since, despite these similar triggers, there is no explicit coordination at a global level. Therefore, an interesting question we could ask ourselves should no longer be: “Why are protests happening now?”, but rather, “Why are all these protests happening now?” The first question would focus on the interplay of endogenous and global issues while the second one would make us think about connections: the difference between these approaches,
KCL Politics Society
