Occupying Public Spaces and Democratized Dialogue: Protests in the 21st Century
One after another, they fill front-page headlines — Tehran, Tahrir, Wall Street, Puerta del Sol, Gezi Park, Euromaidan, Hong Kong.
Some of these protest movements have disappeared, crushed either by terrified governments or hijacked by competing political forces; some still exist, albeit in a smaller form that makes few headlines. Several ultimately sparked some of the worst international crises on our global agenda today.
And the protest sentiment is not going away anytime soon.
Protests — like all social movements — come in waves.
The last time the world saw such a high number of protests was 1989, bringing down the Berlin Wall and — according to scholars like Samuel Huntington — cementing democracy’s Third Wave. But the end of the Cold War was not, as Francis Fukuyama argued in 1989, the end of history. As far as citizen protests go, history was quiet during the Pax Americana years, seeing spikes in protest activity around the Iraq War and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.
According to Kalev Leetaru, creator of the GDELT Project, “the elevated protest activity of the past three years is only noticeable because it comes on the heels of two decades of relatively reduced protest action.” Using data collected from various news sources in nearly 100 different languages over the past 30 years to measure protest activity month by month, this “protest intensity” measurement corrects for the exponential rise in media outlets in recent years. Our general sense that there are so many more protests now than ever before may be somewhat of an illusion. However, while this may measure the number of protests, it does not measure their impact. In a map by Haisam Hussein of Lapham’s Quarterly showing political revolutions through time, it is clear that the number of highly politically significant protests has reached an all-time high in the past decade.
Where It Began
Just as the revolutions of 1848 set the template for protests in the century and a half following, there was one protest that kicked off the current wave with a new template: viral, horizontal, with no figure as a sole leader, but rather loosely organized around gathering in an urban public space to collectively express disaffection and citizenship.
That protest was not in Tahrir Square, but rather a movement two years earlier and nearly 2000 km further east — in Tehran.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier’s November/December 2014 print edition. Excerpt republished with permission.
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Originally published at diplomaticourier.com.
