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Major protests have occurred around the world with increasing frequency since the second half of the 2000s. Given the superficial resemblance of such events to each other—especially the dramatic images of masses of people in the streets—the temptation exists to reach for sweeping, general conclusions about what is happening. Yet it is in fact the heterogeneity of this current wave of protests that is its defining characteristic. The spike in global protests is becoming a major trend in international politics, but care is needed in ascertaining the precise nature and impact of the phenomenon.

Characteristics of the Current Wave of Protests

Diversity of places. Unlike the last major global wave of protests that was associated with the spread of democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, protests are increasing now in every region of the world and in every type of political context.

Local triggers. The current wave of protests is triggered primarily by economic concerns or political decisions, not by transnational issues like globalization that animated some previous protests.

Long-term enabling causes. New information and communication technologies, troubled democratic transitions and democratic regression, economic change, and the growth of civil society organizations have created a global environment conducive to protests.

Not a new form of politics. The forms, methods, and aims of the current wave of protests do not overall represent a new form of politics, as some analysts have suggested. The idea of rebels without a cause does not apply very extensively across the array of recent protests; most demonstrations have specific grievances and aims.

Mixed Results

Limited democratization effects. Many nondemocratic governments faced with protests have been able to defeat them without making significant political concessions, yet the exceptions to this, like the experiences in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, are of notable importance.

Variable results when moving from protest to power. Although some protests have failed to translate protest energy into sustainable institution building or political contestation, others have led to the creation of new political parties or markedly affected subsequent electoral contests.

Blaming the foreigners. A striking element of the responses to recent protests is the frequency and regularity with which leaders now blame foreigners for the protests. This reflects, among other factors, leaders’ inability to believe that there exists in their countries genuine civic sectors with legitimate, independent voices.

Introduction

Major citizen protests are multiplying. Just in 2015, significant protests erupted or continued in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Brazil, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, Iraq, Japan, Lebanon, Macedonia, Malaysia, Moldova, and Venezuela. The list of countries hit by major protests since 2010 is remarkably long and diverse. It includes more than 60 states that span every region of the world (see Annex).

Many of these protests have been profoundly important events in the countries where they have taken place. They are often large-scale gatherings of citizens who are determined to challenge fundamental policies or structures of power. Protesters have been prepared to confront harsh treatment by security forces and sometimes brutal repression.

It is hard not to have the sense from these events that something major is afoot in global politics. It appears that a new era of political flux is emerging as citizens demand more from their governments and mobilize in pursuit of their demands. In places such as the Arab world, protests have had major ramifications for politics, economics, and security.

It appears that a new era of political flux is emerging as citizens demand more from their governments and mobilize in pursuit of their demands.

Getting an analytical grip on this protest wave is essential for policymakers and political observers. Yet a lack of deep understanding—and, in some cases, active misunderstanding—is apparent in some Western media and analytical accounts of these events. Protests tend to resemble one another in certain basic ways, and this encourages simplistic analogies across very different contexts. They are photogenic events that naturally attract intense media attention at peak moments. This attention fades quickly when protests pass, leaving differences in motivations, implications, and results inadequately examined. Observers tend to focus on a few of the most striking protests and draw general conclusions that are then applied rather too sweepingly to the overall body of events. As a corrective, it is necessary to step back to view the overall landscape of protests and probe its many diversities and complexities. This paper attempts such an account.

Our starting question is the most basic one: Does the recent spate of protests actually represent an increase in frequency compared with the past? Certainly, the recent wave of protests has been unusually widespread and intense in some places. The Arab world, for example, has not for many decades experienced the degree of unrest that began to erupt in 2011. But is there really an overall increase when one takes a global perspective? The ever-growing ability of electronic media to get inside protest events and bring them to the attention of global audiences could be giving a false impression about overarching trends.

Turning to the question of causes, we examine both near-term triggers and longer-term enabling conditions. Some observers spotlight the anticorruption dimension, highlighting citizens’ anger at systemic corruption and their willingness to go to the streets over it. Other observers focus on the punishing reality of economic austerity in many countries following the 2008–2009 financial crisis—many see economic problems as the common thread running through different protests. So, we ask, what near-term drivers and what longer-term political, economic, technological, and other changes are contributing to the protest surge?

Protests take many different forms. Some thoughtful analysts highlight the emergence of protests led by apparently spontaneous, largely leaderless social movements with little attachment to traditional political groupings or ideologies. Much protest activity today seems to be fueled by new communication technologies yet embraces little vision of institution building or specific goals beyond a rejection of existing elites and established power structures. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, “Indeed, ‘The Square’ — as the place for these newly networked political forces to gather, collaborate and pressure for change — is truly disrupting both traditional politics and geopolitics.”¹ In this view, many of the recent protests represent a kind of antipolitics, with profound implications for conventional thinking about political organization and change.

This is an arresting argument, but is it accurate?

While conventional wisdom about the protest wave is not entirely incorrect, many of the most common ideas about it are applied too generally.

Also important is the question of outcomes—the effects that protests are having on the political lives of the countries in which they are occurring. Many of the hopes embodied in the Arab Spring protests have not come to fruition. Little change is apparent in other countries that have experienced protests, such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burundi, and Russia. Some observers detect a basic pattern of protest ineffectiveness: new protest movements seem to succeed in stirring up street activity but fail to translate protesters’ energy into sustained political engagement and change. Again, a powerful fact if true—but is it?

While conventional wisdom about the protest wave is not entirely incorrect, many of the most common ideas about it are applied too generally. A central theme of our assessment is that the heterogeneity of protests around the world is one of their fundamental characteristics and that the temptation to reach for sweeping conclusions about what is happening can lead to a distorted view. The spike in global protests is becoming a major trend in international politics, but greater care is needed in ascertaining the precise nature and impact of the phenomenon.

Are Protests Increasing in Frequency?

Making rigorous quantitative comparisons across time regarding the frequency of protests is difficult due to the lack of a common measuring standard of precisely what kind of activity is being counted, not to mention the difficulty of simply tracking protests in some places. In China, for example, some 180,000 protest events occurred in 2010 alone.²² Of course, many of these were small events focused on microlevel issues such as a corrupt mayor or an unfair ruling by a village council.³

Our interest is in major protests, ones that have potentially significant national-level implications for a country. Most such protests are relatively large, involving thousands of protesters, and last well beyond just a day or two. Yet it is not possible to define a straightforward numerical threshold—in some authoritarian settings, a relatively small number of protesters, even just several hundred people out on the streets of the capital denouncing the government, will resonate loudly and may constitute a highly significant political event. For example, the antigovernment protests in Azerbaijan in 2011 and 2012 never involved more than a few hundred people at any one time yet had major political reverberations.⁴ Likewise, the so-called Jasmine protests in 2011 in a number of large Chinese cities, where only handfuls of people turned up inspired by the Tunisian revolution, were enough to cause the government to ban sales of the flower and call a high-level review of social-order policies.⁵ Conversely, in some democratic contexts, especially in countries where protests are relatively common, a protest event of several tens or even hundreds of thousands of people may not be of great consequence or prove politically unsettling.

Nevertheless, despite the absence of exactitude in measurement, data from the past several decades do point to a fairly clear pattern of increasing frequency. Major protests multiplied in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with what is commonly called the third wave of democracy, but then decreased significantly throughout the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s. Protests began to accelerate again in the second half of the 2000s and have reached a new peak in the past five years.⁶

After an intense swell of protests in 2011, which were concentrated in the Arab world and Southern Europe, it appeared that the protest surge then began to ebb. But events of the last few years have confirmed a wide rise in major protests. In its State of Civil Society Report 2014, the global civil society organization Civicus talks of a “second wave” of dissent—after a concentration of revolts in 2010–2012, there was a lull as protest leaders regrouped and sought to assess successes and failures, and then a new burst of civic energy in 2013 and 2014.⁷

Several surveys and data-collecting initiatives provide an outline of this rise in global protests. The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), a large-scale data-gathering project, reveals that “protest intensity”—calculated as the number of protests in a given month divided by the total number of all events recorded that month—increased from 2010 to 2012 and has now stabilized at an ongoing level significantly higher than during the 1990s and 2000s. The 1980s saw the last relatively high level of protest intensity, with mobilizations linked to the final days of the Cold War.⁸

In similar vein, an extensive survey carried out by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation reports a steady increase in the overall number of protests during the last decade. By this study’s measurement, in 2006 there were 59 significant protests across the world; in 2013, almost double that number was recorded in just the first six months of the year.⁹ The average size of protests has increased from 2006 but began to climb at a steeper rate in 2010.

Protests have hit not just a significant number of authoritarian countries but many semiauthoritarian states and democracies as well.

By region, the greatest number of protests has taken place in higher-income countries, followed by Latin America, then East Asia, then sub-Saharan Africa. The number of protests in North Africa and the Middle East has fluctuated more than elsewhere, with the most dramatic spike of any region in 2011. A major Economist Intelligence Unit report on global protests lists 69 states that experienced new protests between 2009 and 2013.¹⁰

Compared with the last major wave of protests in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the current surge differs in at least two important dimensions. First, it is occurring in every region. The political tumult of the end of the Cold War period affected a wide range of countries, but it did not involve significant protest activity in some major regions, including the Middle East, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe. Second, the current wave affects every major regime category—protests have hit not just a significant number of authoritarian countries but many semiauthoritarian states and democracies as well. In contrast, the surge of protests several decades back was most dramatic in authoritarian contexts.

As in the previous era, regional contagion effects are clearly evident in the current protest phase. The wildfire-like spread of protests in the Arab world in 2011 was an unusually vivid example in this regard. Arguably, the recent and ongoing multiplication of protests in Africa against proposed extensions of presidential terms beyond existing limits is another example of regional contagion. Whether strong contagion exists across rather than within regions is less clear—although just as the dramatic events in Central Europe in 1989 resonated widely elsewhere, so the startling events of the Arab Spring in 2011 also inspired many civic activists in other parts of the world, such as the former Soviet Union, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and East Asia.

Short-Term Triggers

Why is this protest wave happening? In looking at causes, we distinguish between near-term triggers of protest and longer-term enabling conditions. Determining the triggers—even just of a single protest in a single country—is difficult. Protests may be sparked by a specific concern and initially focus on that but then swell as a result of other issues that matter to unhappy citizens. Within any large-scale protest, different participants are likely to be motivated by very different worries, and even just one individual protester may be propelled by a kaleidoscope of angry motivations.

Moreover, analysts and observers often view protests through the prism of their own specialist field. Democracy enthusiasts, for example, are quick to label large antigovernment protests as pro-democracy events. Corruption specialists are equally prone to see anger with corruption as the fundamental driver. Economists will seize on economic explanations for protests that political scientists are more apt to interpret as driven primarily by political factors.

Western analyses of the 2011 Egyptian protests that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak exemplified this phenomenon of multiple projected lenses. As observers scrambled to account for these startling, almost entirely unpredicted events, competing explanations flourished—that the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square reflected Egyptians’ pent-up desire for social justice, quest for dignity, anger over corruption, hunger for democracy, frustration with economic inequality, and other yearnings.¹¹ The same complexity prevails in accounts of the Ukrainian protests in early 2014—with different analysts focusing on poor governance, repression, the lack of the rule of law, economic conditions, governmental policy toward European integration, and other factors.¹²

Within this complexity, protest triggers can be divided into a few basic categories. Some drivers are primarily political, such as a rigged election or the unconstitutional extension of a president’s term in office. Others are chiefly socioeconomic—whether very specific events, such as the removal of a fuel subsidy or the ejection of a particular social group from a piece of land, or more systemic trends, like sharp economic decline or rising inequality. And in between are triggers related to governance issues that combine political and economic elements, above all corruption, which entails the abuse of political power but also relates directly to economic conditions and fairness.

Recent large-scale protests in authoritarian contexts, such as those in Hong Kong in 2014 or in Syria and Libya in 2011, have been driven principally by political conditions. Protests have flared in many countries recording relatively high rates of economic growth. Socioeconomic troubles have sometimes been present, but usually less consequentially than political ones. Socioeconomic misery was, for example, a partial driver of the Syrian protests, yet just one part of the larger anger about the repressive, punitive, unaccountable Syrian state.

Political factors also appear to have been the main cause of most recent protests in semiauthoritarian contexts.¹³ In a number of cases, specific political issues served as triggers bringing out protesters angry about the broader climate of repression and corruption. Economic factors appear to have played only a secondary role in many of these cases, such as in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Malaysia, Russia, and Ukraine—though in Venezuela, economic discontent has been a forceful motivation driving recent protests.

In contrast to the protests in authoritarian and semiauthoritarian countries, recent protests in democratic states have generally been sparked by socioeconomic issues. These include 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. These protests, initially at least, focused on a desired policy change, rather than on change in an overall governing system.

However, where democratic systems display chronically problematic governance, economically driven protests often evolve to adopt a more political and systemic focus. For example, the 2015 Brazilian protests over corruption in the oil sector have widened into a general anger toward the political elite. A similar evolution from socioeconomic to political concerns occurred with demonstrations in Nigeria in early 2012.

It is notable how frequently corruption now unleashes protests, whether in authoritarian, semiauthoritarian, or democratic countries. The 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. As has been extensively documented and analyzed by corruption specialists, public awareness of corruption and anger about it have grown massively in the world during the past twenty years.¹⁴

Attention on this issue has become a way of talking about the arrogance of power generally, with angry citizens invoking the corruption label to describe any number of things that infuriate them about power holders—the way they tend to act with impunity, abuse citizens’ rights, misuse state power, treat citizens with disrespect, centralize power, and much more. In this broader sense, the emphasis on corruption in protests in many parts of the world reflects a general pattern of civic anger about how state power is exercised.

Finally, the triggers of protests have become more country-specific. The recent wave is less related to transnational issues than were some protests of decades past. The eruption in the early 1990s of antiglobalization protests gave rise to interest in what two analysts called “transnational collective action.”¹⁵ Such actions for a time appeared to be the most interesting and meaningful trend in civic protest. This has now changed.¹⁶ While recent protests in different countries often grew out of similar issues, like corruption, most were strongly rooted in national political debates and concerns.

The era of transnational antiglobalization demonstrations has given way to much more localized protest. Most protests today are against very tangible and actual hardships and problems—decidedly different from the earlier global justice movement that mobilized internationally against relatively generic evils of capitalism and globalization, and different from the antiwar focus of the generation that lived through the 1955–1975 Vietnam War. Protest against free trade—which was a primary catalyst for transnational social movements in the 1990s—today accounts for only a very small share of all mobilizations.¹⁷

Long-Term Enabling Factors

This analysis of triggers provides a better understanding of the major near-term impulses fueling recent protests. But to fully understand the protest wave, it is also necessary to consider the longer-term enabling factors at work, which encompass various elements of change—technological, economic, and political. Four such factors stand out.

First, the sweep of change in communication technologies facilitates protests in multiple ways. Such technologies make much more information available to people, giving them a greater awareness of how others are asserting themselves against entrenched power holders in other countries and of how their own political and economic conditions compare with those of others.¹⁸

It is notable how frequently corruption now unleashes protest, whether in authoritarian, semi-authoritarian, or democratic countries.

These technologies, especially social media, create channels of communication among citizens and informal meeting places that greatly spur the creation of associational networks, as manifested in both formal and informal organizations.¹⁹ Technological advances also facilitate specific techniques that help make protests easier to organize, such as communicating instantly among large numbers of people; capturing and sending out visual evidence of activities and events; including governmental violence in response to protests; and easily accessing useful logistical information for potential protesters, like transportation routes and conditions. Even without succumbing to the temptation to view new technologies as revolutionary drivers of protest, and while acknowledging that such technologies also serve as tools for power holders to suppress protest in new ways, it is important to recognize the overall enabling effects of communication technologies for protests.²⁰

Second, global economic trends have been contributing to the protest wave in two different ways. Considerable economic growth in many parts of the developing and post-Communist worlds in the past ten to twenty years has brought with it the rise of new middle classes. These middle classes develop expectations beyond material goals and gain access to education, travel, communication technologies, and other resources that give them new perspectives and capabilities. It is striking that protest movements in numerous places, such as Azerbaijan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand, Turkey, and Ukraine, have been concentrated not among the poor but instead among the middle and upper-middle classes. In some countries, economic growth has been fostered by policies that result in socioeconomic exclusion of large numbers of citizens and glaring new inequalities, creating a broad bedrock of potential support for protests. The protests in Tunisia and Egypt in 2010–2011 reflected this phenomenon.

In contrast to this pattern of economic growth in many parts of the developing and post-Communist worlds, economic stagnation and sudden downturns in some countries have also contributed to the rise of protests. In Western democracies, especially in Europe, the 2008–2009 financial crisis aggravated and underscored the longer-term phenomena of persistently slow growth and the stagnation of the middle class, conditions that have underlain protests about socioeconomic issues in these countries.

Third, the larger cycle of democracy’s global advance is part of the story. A wave of protests contributed to the onset of attempted democratic transitions in dozens of countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of those states have been grappling with difficulty during the last ten to fifteen years to bring their transitions to fruition by genuinely engaging, inspiring, and benefiting ordinary citizens. Opinion surveys show that citizens in most countries struggling to make democracy work prefer it to other political systems but are dissatisfied with how democracy functions in practice.²¹ Therefore, in a turn of the overall wheel of cause and effect, many of these countries have again become fertile soil for protests.

The larger trend of global political development in the past generation has increased citizen expectations that governments should be accountable to their people in meaningful ways.

Moreover, the internalization of the norm of democracy in these states is strong enough that their citizens are also willing to protest when their governments abridge democratic rights and principles. Turkey is a good example in this regard. Despite its considerable economic successes, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government provoked protests in 2013 by overreaching its political powers and violating the democratic expectations of many Turkish citizens.

Even in those countries that stayed mostly outside the third wave of democracy, the larger trend of global political development in the past generation has increased citizen expectations that governments should be accountable to their people in meaningful ways. While the Chinese and Russian governments have been able to persuade many of their citizens that Western democracy would not be right for their countries, they cannot escape rising citizen demands for governmental accountability. It is telling that while developmentalists around the world are unable to agree on whether democratic norms are genuinely universal and should be supported through development aid, they have converged strongly in the past ten years around the need to make governments more accountable.²²

Fourth, another enabling condition is the tremendous growth of civil society organizations around the globe in the past two to three decades, especially in those parts of the developing and former Communist worlds where civil society was previously so weak. This growth is due not just to the widespread mushrooming of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Rather, civil society in all its many forms has expanded—professional associations, informal groups, religious organizations, labor unions, village cooperatives, indigenous organizations, women’s groups, financing collectives, student groups, and others.

And this expansion has occurred not only in those countries moving out of authoritarian rule that have managed to make significant democratic progress but also in those that have ended up with hybrid regimes, whether semiauthoritarian or of other configurations. Only in the very small number of countries suffering under genuinely despotic rule is there an absence of significant formal and informal citizen-based organizational life.

The existence of such organizations and activities is certainly not a guarantee that protests will occur. As discussed below, the relationship between civil society groups and protest movements is complex, and some movements operate outside most established civil society networks. And the rise of protests itself contributes to the growth of new civil organizations. But it is important not to overlook the way the broad, long-term organizational development of civil society in many developing and post-Communist countries has contributed to the new protest wave—whether by providing channels for citizens to express their grievances, institutional mechanisms to aggregate discontent, or opportunities for expressing dissatisfaction publicly.

New Forms of Protest?

How should the forms of civic action that make up the protest surge of the past five years be understood? Some analysts argue that the contemporary wave of civic mobilization represents something new and different in the forms, methods, and aims of protests. Some go so far as to suggest the current surge signals an emergent new form of politics itself. Assessing the strength of this line of argument is crucial to coming to grips with the overall phenomenon.

A Vision of the Unprecedented

Those observers who contend that something new and different is at work in the protest wave tend to highlight the idea that the demonstrations around the world are leaderless, spontaneous movements devoid of clear aims and relatively unconcerned with proposing solutions to problems or offering well-worked-out political manifestos.²³ They argue that protest has become almost