When this decade began, the world was still emerging from the 2008 global economic collapse. There was a perception that a few elites held all the power, said Zachariah Mampilly, an international studies professor at the City University of New York.
“There's a sense that there has been a tremendous increase in inequality around the world,” he said. “There is increasingly a lack of faith in government. That national governments in particular are no longer able to craft solutions to some of the more extreme central problems that we face as a species.”
What followed the financial crisis was an unprecedented era of civil resistance that touched every continent. There were initial successes for protesters, but as the years wore on, governments responded in increasingly authoritarian ways. And as 2020 dawns, some experts are questioning whether nonviolent protests are as effective as they once were.
It all started with one person, in Tunisia. Fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi snapped when officials tried to confiscate his cart. He set himself on fire, setting off demonstrations nationwide — and the Arab Spring across the region. Demonstrators forced the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents from power. Then the Occupy movement swept the globe.
After that, there were too many major demonstrations to list. Among them: Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; civil unrest in Syria, Sudan and Chile; and global protests for action on climate change.
“Globally speaking, we live in the most contentious time in recorded human history as civil resistance goes,” said Erica Chenoweth, a human rights and international affairs professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government who has studied every reported instance of civil resistance back to 1900. “This is a way that people try to get what they want when they don't feel like the normal political process is operating in ways that can accommodate their demands.”
And, she said, it’s had an impact.
“If you look at a movement like Occupy, which many people called a failure, the truth is that the agenda that was set by Occupy — that is a focus on inequality — was taken up by basically everyone.”
Erica Chenoweth, human rights and international affairs professor
“If you look at a movement like Occupy, which many people called a failure, the truth is that the agenda that was set by Occupy — that is a focus on inequality — was taken up by basically everyone,” Chenoweth said.
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