- Protests are rocking governments in all continents
By Abdul Rasool Syed
The world is simmering with a spree of protests that have engulfed the world from Middle East to Asia and South America to the Caribbean. The Middle East has convulsed with so much dissent that some are calling it a second wave of the Arab Spring.
The reasons of these on-going protests are myriad. Most of these agitations have been triggered by socio-economic and political factors. On the top of these stimulants, inducing protests are economic disparities. According to Oxfam, the world’s 26 richest individuals own as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population. Billionaires grew their combined fortunes by $2.5bn a day in 2018, while the relative wealth of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people declined by $500m a day. In addition, Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, a professor who studies social change and conflict at Vrije University in Amsterdam, says that the data shows that the amount of protests is increasing and is as high as the roaring 1960s, and has been since about 2009. “Not all the protests are driven by economic complaints, but widening gulfs between the haves and have-nots are radicalising many young people in particular”.
Therefore, it can safely be deduced that income inequalities leading to ever widening gap between haves and have-nots is the prime reason behind most ongoing uprisings against different governments of the world. Apart from this, it is also a general perception that behind these demonstrations is an invisible hand– that is, of the IMF and World Bank, other landing institutions and those who pull their strings.
An analysis of the ongoing conflicts shows they have engendered an extremely precarious situation in most parts of the world.
In Lebanon, protest is represented by cross-section of society, spanning the religious and political divides that sparked 15 years of civil war in Lebanon starting in 1975. Around 1.3 million people, or 20 per cent of the population, are thought to have attended the largest demonstration so far.
Protests and revolutions are defined by idealised slogans, he says, but systematic change is harder work
The government, an unsteady coalition, is divided and dysfunctional, unwilling or unable to invest in the country’s crumbling roads, upgrade its electricity grid (power cuts are still a daily problem), overhaul the waste collection system or address ballooning youth unemployment, among a litany of other issues.
One of the triggers for the latest protests was a 20-cent tax on WhatsApp calls that the government announced as part of a suite of austerity policies to bring the country’s extremely high public debt burden under control.
Under these unwarranted circumstances, Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Saad Al-Harriri, had to resign saying that he had hit a “dead end” in trying to resolve the crisis.
In Chile, “Chile despertó!” (Chile awoke!) is the main slogan chanted by as many as one million Chilean protesters that thronged the capital Santiago, from all backgrounds and cities. Initially, the demonstrators were led by young people including students from across the city, but eventually people belonging to all sections of society from all over the country joined in.
The Chilean protests started in mid-October, triggered by a hike in public transport fares, but later snowballed into riots, arson and looting which has resulted in heavy casualties so far.
In Catalonia, the reason for the protests is more political than anything else. There are two separate camps of people protesting in Catalonia — People angered over the conviction of several Catalan independence leaders, and those opposing Catalonia seceding from Spain. The current protests were sparked over a Supreme Court ruling that gave nine leading separatist politicians and activists lengthy prison sentences, following an illegal and unsuccessful attempt to secede from Spain in 2017. More than 500 people have been hurt, nearly half of them police officers, in clashes since the October 14 verdict.
Hong Kong too is witnessing very strong protests. The people flooded to roads and streets against a proposed extradition bill that would allow suspects to be transferred to mainland China and tried there. That bill has been withdrawn and now protesters are demonstrating against alleged police brutality and against the government for its handling of the crisis. They also oppose growing Chinese influence over the city.
In Iraq, unemployed youth is at the core of the ongoing anti-government protests. The protests have rocked Baghdad and Iraq’s southern provinces, with protesters demanding reforms to fight corruption and unemployment, and calling for a total overhaul of the country’s political system.
Critics say one of the country’s biggest challenges is to calm the conflict before security in the region spirals out of control. Experts are concerned that there is no clear alternative to the current political leadership in Iraq– if they stepped down, the vacuum could lead to an even worse situation.
Extinction Rebellion is also one of the most potent movements that have shaken most part of the world. It is a worldwide movement that describes its protests as non-violent civil disobedience. The protest movement, also known as XR, has members in over 60 cities worldwide; the protests are against inadequate action on climate change.
Protests first began in April 2018 in London after a small group met in Bristol to discuss how to achieve what one early member called “radical social change”. It started as part of the Rising Up network, which describes itself as being born out of the Occupy movement, and includes among its aims, “a rapid change in wealth distribution and power structures”. The movement’s aim is to mobilise 3.5 per cent of the population, which it says is all that’s needed to achieve change.
Political analysts have started commenting on this ongoing wave of protests. Thierry de Montbrial, of the French Institute of International Relations, says: “The traditional system of enforcing power from top to bottom is increasingly being challenged, there is a social revolution with a growing demand for participatory democracy.”
Jacquelien Van Stekelenburg says, “It is also easier, in a digital, globalised world, to know how the other half (or the One Per cent) live. There are not just new streams of information, but streams of people. Those youngsters in the Arab Spring in all likelihood knew at least one person living overseas, and it creates a kind of relative deprivation– ‘I want to have that too’.”
The proliferation of protests is no guarantee that things will change. “Staging [demonstrations] is no longer the difficult part,” says Youssef Cherif, a political analyst and one of the authors of new Carnegie Endowment research on the success of protest movements. “The problem is what to do after the protests, how to make your point and achieve the goals you’re protesting for.”
Protests and revolutions are defined by idealised slogans, he says, but systematic change is harder work. “You can break off part of a system, but it’s very hard to break the whole structure, which is formed of institutions and networks that are difficult to break.”
“The leaderless nature of many of the protests makes them harder for authoritarian governments to quash, but it may also make the movements more difficult to sustain,” says Sanjoy Chakravorty, of Temple University. “The movements that actually led to change or that were more sustained, they had a basis, a leadership structure, people articulating, organisation, going door-to-door to get people to show up to a rally,” he says. “The leadership question is central and that is the thing we haven’t figured out yet: how do we actually find leadership in these inchoate displays of anger…@
