Right to Protest

Global Protests

Global Protest Tracker reveals that, despite the seemingly unfavorable conditions for protests, mass demonstrations have begun to return at a notable rate and scale in the past months

• United States, protested the killing of Black Americans like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers.
• Colombia, Protests since November 2019 against proposed economic and political reforms
• Pakistan, opposition parties come together in public discontent
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has tracked anti-government protests worldwide since 2017. In that time, more than 100 significant anti-government protests have been erupted worldwide, leading to fall of 30 government or leaders

Reasons for rise in global protests

• Socioeconomic issue: tax hikes in Greece, austerity policies in the United Kingdom, indigenous rights in Chile, subsidy cuts in Nigeria, wage issues in South Africa, the cost of living and housing prices in Israel, and gender-based violence in India.
• Corruption: trigger is often set off by a specific revelation about the actions of particular politicians but then quickly cascades into a much broader wave of revulsion toward the whole governing system
• Political facts: specific political issues bringing out protesters angry about the broader climate of repression and corruption. Example, protest in Hongkong.
• New communication technologies and media platforms: They enables movements in different countries to learn from and engage with each other. The leaderless pro-democracy protest movement in Thailand is connected to similar efforts in Hong Kong
• Growth of civil society organizations around the globe in the past two to three decades

Characteristics of the Current Wave of Protests

• Diversity of places: protests are increasing now in every region of the world and in every type of political context
• Local triggers: primarily by economic concerns or political decisions, not by transnational issues like globalization etc
• Absence of coherent policy messages:  seek a different way of doing politics, rather than simply offering a standard series of policy recommendations
• Organisationally minimalistic: even ‘leaderless’, heavily dependent on social media and wary of any alliance with ‘old’ forms of civic and political organisation.
• Blame the Foreigners: emphasis on a foreign role in protests highlights the difficulty many leaders in accepting that their own citizens are turning against them.
• Many protests are not long-term campaigns but short-lived revolts.

The world started 21st century with expectations that the political character of this century would be largely democratic, as countries throughout the developing and post-Communist worlds worked steadily to fulfill the widespread democratic aspirations. But recent rise in global protest highlighted tremendous global political uncertainty. So, a more granular understanding of protests’ aims, forms and impacts is needed.