By Erica Orange & Jared Weiner, The Future Hunters, and Eshanthi Ranasinghe, Exploration & Future Sensing, Omidyar Network
Around the world, we see two major, seemingly opposite shifts happening simultaneously. On the one hand, established democracies are experiencing the rise of prolific nationalist, populist, or authoritarian movements. This is well-chronicled. Tribalism remains a powerful force everywhere; in recent years it has begun to tear at the fabric of liberal democracies in the developed world, and even at the postwar liberal international order. We see features of this manifesting in places as dispersed as the US, UK, much of continental Europe, Brazil, Australia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and many more countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2019 Global Democracy Index fell to the worst average global score since its inception in 2006, in a “democracy recession” that shows scores of nearly every region of the world either decline or stagnate.
On the other hand, traditionally less democratic countries are experiencing social unrest and political counter-movements. In Hong Kong, protests are being driven by increasingly disillusioned youth populations anxious over the looming impacts of the Chinese government’s overreach into their autonomy and civil liberties. Violent protests in Lebanon are aimed at reforming a corrupt and sectarian system of government. Tunisia’s authoritarian government, which has been dying a steady death thanks to pragmatic consensus building across diverse and opposing political groups, has seen 10,000 protests every year since 2016. In Chile, ranked as a “flawed democracy” by the EIU before 2019, violent protest triggered by a 30 peso ($0.04) metro fare hike of all things, has driven a widespread push for political reform. In 2019, mass protests erupted across Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Ecuador, Haiti, Guinea, Bolivia, Iran, Brazil, Columbia, Venezuela, India, Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, and more.
But what does this mean? Protests in authoritarian or hybrid (states with both autocratic and democratic characteristics) regimes are nothing new — is this part of the natural ebb and flow of political movements as we’ve always seen, important but otherwise isolated and unrelated? Or are we witnessing a global revolution? Will the new democratic leaders of the next decade come from more autocratic countries? Will we see a switch in the liberal order, countries like Chile leading the way as paragons of democracy, while countries like the US fall behind to hybrid autocracy? And are these opposing trends, rising autocracy in democracies and rising democracy in autocracies, or actually one in the same — rising social unrest at a global scale, regardless of government, driven by popular discontent and disillusionment with corruption and inequity in political institutions and economic systems, and with social media to enable, power, coordinate, and amplify the protest? We cannot be sure, of course. But when studying the drivers, interesting patterns emerge among less democratic countries.
In a world more interconnected and globalized than ever before, and also more unequal and volatile (see later sections), citizens are clinging dearly to those identities they feel most inherently define them, and make them feel seen. This fuels the rise in tribalism, and in turn social unrest, we see manifesting globally. In many multiethnic autocratic and hybrid states, powerful figures of one group rise to power, excluding other groups in turn. The examples are too exhausting to count, and not limited to “less democratic” countries. In Syria, President Assad, a member of the Alawite minority, exerts authority over a country that is 74 percent Sunni. Sunnis in Iraq are still fighting for representation. The risk of rebellion increases dramatically when joined with economic inequality along ethnic lines, sometimes remnants of entrenched “ divide and conquer” tactics used by colonizers decades earlier, to create infighting and deter coalition building and rebellion. Germany and Belgium gave the already powerful Tutsi minority political authority over the majority Hutus in Rwanda. The British did something similar with the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. And though the resulting civil war outbreaks are years old (a decade, in Sri Lanka’s case), the feeling of normative threat to one’s identity and culture can remain, fueling later tribalism and infighting with even other groups. It is tinder waiting for a spark. Ethnically diverse but still some- what stable countries most at risk of future violence are said to be Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan, and the Republic of the Congo, all developing countries with histories of conflict, where minorities face both discrimination and exclusion from power.
And, across the Middle East, Kurds are pushing for long-denied rights, and collaborating across national boundaries. This could profoundly reshape the entire region. Kurds in the four traditionally distinct parts of Kurdistan — Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq — are looking to become one single Kurdish nation. Taken together, all of this highlights a drive toward greater representation that cuts across many less developed regions of the world.
The prosperity, or vulnerability, of global populations is a primary catalyst of social unrest. But inequality is a more complex concept than it once was. It can fall along many different continua: economic, demographic, reproductive, climate and water, information, algorithmic, or digital/media literacy. And while economic insecurity as a contributor to political unrest is well-captured, especially when accompanied by structural vulnerability, we share a couple of less-talked about aspects of inequality and their connection to social unrest in less democratic countries.
Climate & Water Inequality: Climate-related conflicts and displacements have already impacted politics in many nations. A report by the UN Human Rights Council outlines an impending “climate apartheid,” characterized by an even greater rift be- tween global haves and have-nots. The report predicts 120 million people will be thrust into poverty by 2030 by cli- mate change. It further highlights how the poorest 3.5 billion people in the world account for only 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the richest 10 percent is responsible for half. One of the gravest areas for concern when it comes to climate inequality is access to water. Countries that are home to one-fourth of Earth’s population face a risk of running out of water. By 2030, the number of cities in the “extremely high” stress category is expected to rise to 45, and encompass almost half a billion people.
Information Inequality & the Internet Shutdown: “Information poverty” has long been a major impediment to global development. Greater internet access correlates with improved outcomes across a variety of measurable categories (e.g., health and education). Growing a poor nation’s mobile inter- net use by 10 percent correlates with an average 2 percentage-point increase in GDP, and electronic channels have been effective in making governments more responsive to citizen concerns. However, access remains unequal, with women and those who live in rural areas lagging in internet use, limiting access to economic opportunities and government services (though local markets are already driving bottom-up solutions to this).
That said, unequal internet access doesn’t necessarily correlate to social unrest — in fact, some would argue the opposite. This mentality has led many countries to instate forced internet cuts during periods of social unrest, lasting a few days to “digital sieges” that go on for months, as we’ve seen in Syria, India, Sri Lanka, and Cameroon (there were an estimated 188 shutdowns in 2018 alone, and they are getting longer each year). But while it may be true social media apps have fueled violent unrest via misinformation — and also aided peaceful protest — it has not been proven that the removal of these tools results in a reduction in violence. In fact, several researchers have found the opposite — that “shutting down social media does not reduce violence, but rather fuels it.”
One factor resonates clearly across less democratic countries experiencing social unrest — the decline in trust. The 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer results showed that, even with a relatively strong global economy and near full employment, “none of the four societal institutions that the study measures — government, business, NGOs, and media — is trusted.” There is a growing sense that economic and political systems are built to benefit the few over the many. Edelman reported income inequality as affecting people’s trust more than economic growth. The EIU found “protests were driven by frustration with a government that was seen as corrupt and self-serving, and unwilling or unable to tackle the political and socioeconomic inequalities facing its people.” As an example, in Latin America, mass protest across Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti, and Venezuela, was driven by things like electoral fraud, corruption, and austerity measures. “All expressed distrust in the political class and dissension from governments’ policy decisions.”
We are currently witnessing the largest global youth population ever. There are 1.8 billion people between the ages of 10 and 24, and this number is growing. Over the next 13 years, almost 2 billion people will become part of the world’s youth cohort. In most developing countries, children and adolescents make up the majority of the population. This global youth bulge has already begun to ignite political unrest, and that dynamic will likely accelerate.
Youth populations have always been more idealistic than their older counterparts, but today’s youth cohort is also the most connected in history. Global youth are nearly twice as networked online as the general population. And in the least developed countries, they are three times more likely than the general population to go online. That leads to the exponential cross-pollination of culture, arts, media, entertainment, knowledge, ideas, and networks — as well as aspirations and demands for their countries, and tools and tactics to organize, hold their leaders to account, and protest (see the New Climate Narrative trend for the climate demonstration of this). As ideas, tools, and networks spread online, it becomes a natural corollary for youth populations to coordinate and demand more from those in positions of authority. Edelman captured this new sentiment well as a global shift to “taking the future into their own hands.”
According to a recent Oxford report, the number of countries engaging in social media manipulation more than doubled to 70 in the last two years. There is evidence of at least one political party or government entity in each of those countries spreading disinformation (via bots, fake social media accounts, and hired trolls) to discredit political opponents, bury opposing views, interfere in foreign affairs, or, as researcher Anita Gohdes asserted in 2015, “surveil, manipulate, and censor the digital flow of information in their own country.”
Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp remain top social networks and tools for disinformation. Russia is reported to have been testing new disinformation tactics in a big Facebook campaign in parts of Africa ahead of the 2020 US presidential election. Malign foreign powers have weaponized the infrastructure that underpins democratic societies, hacking the internet, media, and voting databases to sow disinformation. Other states are gravitating toward this high-impact, low-cost strategy. Weeks before Mexico’s 2018 presidential election, there was a surge in Twitter bot accounts sharing inaccurate stories. The majority of news sources shared by bots originated in Argentina, Iran, and Venezuela (as well as Russia).
Even as we describe the flow of this information linearly, we suspect it is far from that in reality. Experts still can’t model how misinformation moves and impacts outcomes like election results or political protest, but we suspect as 70 countries deploy bots, fake accounts, and trolls to spread misinformation and discontent, they have no idea what new issues—in what geographies—may be picked up and amplified in the process, or even boomerang back to impact an unrelated issues domestically. The result is engineers volatility and weaponized protest, alongside genuine effort.
And while, for now, foreign meddling operations remain largely in the purview of state actors and their proxies, other actors will enter the fray as new technology and AI lower barriers to entry. One of the easiest ways for non-state actors to manipulate public opinion will be through the use of increasingly sophisticated “deepfakes” — highly realistic and difficult-to-detect digital manipulations of audio or video. The most worrisome future deepfake applications may be in politics and international affairs. And social media is fertile ground for proliferating deepfakes.
Secessionism: Secessionism is on the rise. In 1915, there were eight movements seeking their own independent state. In 2015, there were 59. Even though more groups are trying to break away, fewer are resorting to violence, but rather protest and civic engagement. Secessionists are increasingly connecting with one another, often with the help of NGOs like the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. UNPO provides a forum for groups, including many secessionists, which lack official representation in major international organizations.
Predicting Political & Social Unrest—An Imprecise Science: Ultimately, even the most expert observers will have a hard time projecting where social unrest will flare up next. Coups and revolutions present unique challenges for forecasters. One of the most advanced forecasts comes from One Earth Future (OEF), an NGO that publishes a predictive model, CoupCast. Factors in that model correlating most strongly with the risk of a coup include: the rate of economic growth; how long a regime has been in power; how long since a country’s most recent coup; and whether it has faced extreme weather. Understanding how difficult it is to forecast where, when, and how this type of unrest might manifest next, there are still several questions we should consider. Since democracy appears to be in global decline, what new political models for reform may exist in the near future? Will they be hybrids or offshoots of conventional democracy? Or even autocracy? Or are we overdue for a new model that we haven’t even conceived of yet? Will social media ultimately prove to be a greater tool for citizen organization or suppression?
Growing tensions within multiethnic states, increasing inequality, declining trust, a youth bulge throughout the developing world, and engineered volatility, are all serving to ignite social unrest and cross-cultural conscious- ness, especially in countries with aging leaders that do not represent their young constituents. Most significantly, taking a few steps — whether in a democracy, autocracy, or something in between, the current state of social unrest doesn’t look all that different. Dictators are in as much trouble as democratic leaders, As we look to this next decade, more political upsets are on the horizon. “People have come to understand that their destinies are linked but their anger and activism is still framed in reformist claims. The new is built on the wreckage of the old, but we have no idea yet how the new might materialize.”
This is Trend #3 of 5 in Omidyar Network’s Exploration and Future Sensing 2020 Trends to Watch. View the full series here.
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