openDemocracy: What are the meanings behind the worldwide rise in protest?

There is no single set of statistics that can be used to quantify the rise in protests – in part because what constitutes a ‘protest’ is defined in different ways. However, several surveys and databases show a sharp spike in protests in 2011-2012, followed by a lull, and then a renewed intensification of citizen revolts from 2015-2016 (ILO; Gdelt; Acled). In 2016, new protests rocked Armenia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Thailand, Yemen and Zimbabwe. In 2017, there have been notable protests in Argentina, Belarus, Ethiopia, Gambia, Hungary, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Morocco, Paraguay, Romania, Russia and Venezuela – to name but a few examples. [...]

A key characteristic is that today’s protests are driven by a diversity of issues, grievances and popular concerns. Some protests aim very directly to eject a government or regime from power – think of the on-going revolts in Venezuela that have been seeking a ‘recall referendum’ on President Nicolas Maduro’s continuation in office. Some revolts push for other types of less dramatic democratic reforms – like the protests in Iraq in 2016 that pressed for a fairer power-sharing democracy or those in Latin America seeking more extensive rights for indigenous minorities. Some focus more on cases of corruption – recent Brazilian and Indian protests being two of the best-known such examples. Many protests in the West have been primarily against austerity cuts – those in Greece and Spain being emblematic of this type of mobilisation. Others are less precise and more generically against capitalism and neoliberalism – like the various national versions of the Occupy movement. In contrast, some protests are responses to very specific, local grievances and have relatively modest aims – a growing number of protests in Russia fit into this category, for example. [...]

In fact, most protests combine a number of different features. Most mobilisations are made up of diverse elements, involving uneasy allies whose agendas and operational modes diverge significantly. Often, for example, progressive forces begin protests that are then joined by activists with illiberal or nationalist-nativist identities – the relationship between the new active citizenship and today’s much-discussed wave of populism is complex, often uneasy, yet significant. Recent activism in Ukraine – that has involved both progressive democrats and more rightist-nationalist groups – provides one particularly noteworthy example of such uneasy bedfellows combining in common revolt. [...]

Nearly all protests are ignited by a proximate cause – a particularly emblematic corruption case, a mining company’s new project, a disaster that kills many people and can be traced back to government negligence. But invariably they also emerge out of background grievances that fester for years – a slow decline in political freedoms, poor economic performance. As a general rule, protests erupt in dramatic fashion when both an immediate trigger and longer-term frustrations are powerfully present and fuse together. Think of the way that protests in Turkey moved from their specific aim of stopping a redevelopment project in Istanbul’s central square to a wider set of rights and governance issues. Think also of the way that protests in Brazil initially focused on the specific issue of bus fares, then on high-level corruption cases, then on the country’s broader political situation – and in doing so involved grassroots community groups, leftist-radicals, rights-oriented NGOs and rightist-conservative movements. In the US, Black Lives Matter has responded to specific killings, and then also harnessed a wider set of grievances about black communities’ abrogated rights. 

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Political Critique: We will save Europe! The problem with Macron’s rhetorical loop

Watching Macron’s speech at the Sorbonne last week it was exactly this – the show’s leitmotif – that came to mind. I don’t want to caricature an intervention that was valid in many ways, founded on a courageous vision and delivered with a charisma that was both strong and sober, but the more insidious ‘loop’ at its base. Indeed Macron’s intervention can certainly be seen as necessary in a context where there are so few innovative ideas. And it might actually be useful if – as it seemed to many – this was a search for an interlocutor, a way to open a dialogue, while putting his opinion out there. [...]

Let’s look at the facts. No European country has a majority that prioritises ‘being European’ over its own nationality (Eurobarometer May 2017). How we see Europe, what it is and what we think it should do varies from region to region, country to country. If for some Italian citizens it might seem an urgent priority to confront the migration question, and to worry about it, many other countries have shown they are not in agreement with solving this in a shared manner. Not to mention the economic rigour of Germany which has created resentment in half the continent but has been a landmark in the country’s domestic politics. With so many competing priorities what we are left with is a mosaic of different visions about what European institutions should be and do, dictated by internal political dynamics that necessarily have repercussions on the relationships – and power balance – between different nations.

The six ‘key points’ identified by the French President – youth, innovation, common defence, a joint eurozone budget, climate change, migration – will need to transform themselves into a passpartù, capable of opening the national gates that limit action within existing political communities. The alternative, that no leader of state can really permit, is a great relinquishing of sovereignty. Leaving aside the possibility of the collapse of the European Union, the game is played around these two extremes: either more sharing or greater concessions. In both cases it is necessary to know what ‘this Europe’ really is. Without this, the risk is that of remaining stuck inside the Pinky and the Brain loop.

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BBC4 Profile: Antonio Guterres

On Profile this week, we look at the life and career of the world's top diplomat - the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres.

When he opened the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, the 68 year old former Portuguese Prime Minister warned the world was in danger, "in pieces" and needed putting back together again.

So, who is he and how does he plan to go about it?

Mark Coles talks to childhood friends, political colleagues past and present - even Portugal's President - who help explain the events and personal tragedies that have shaped Guterres and led him to take on arguably the most difficult job on the planet.

Floods, cancer, Catholicism, chocolate and cheese...everything you need to know about new UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, on Profile this week.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: The Triumph of Tribalism

Andrew Sullivan on how America has become "a truly tribal society".

"I've lived here since the Reagan era", he writes, "and there have been plenty of divides. But none quite as tribal or as rooted in non-negotiable identity as this one".

He warns of what the outcome might be and reminds the listener that a liberal democracy is always a precarious enterprise.

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The Atlantic: The Toxic Nostalgia of Brexit

More than a year on from the Brexit referendum, the meaning of the result—both why it happened and where it will lead—is as unclear as it is non-negotiable. Politicians and journalists have tried in vain to interpret Brexit, labelling it, among other things, a “working-class revolt,” a working-class “tantrum” (as the current Europe minister diagnosed it at the conference), an “English revolt,” a “free-market revolution,” a “victory for real, ordinary people” and a corruption of democracy by a small, scheming elite. All these readings contain kernels of truth: “Brexit” was a blank canvas onto which a people projected their personal fantasies, fears, and fury. But Brexit cannot appease them all. [...]

As for these (other) Brits who want to remain in the EU, the sense of leaving is hard to see. To escape the bureaucracy of Brussels, Britain is undertaking perhaps the greatest bureaucratic mission in its history, replacing or replicating over 40 years of EU law, trade agreements, and institutions, with the perverse hope that the country will look no different afterwards. To expedite this task, May is pushing through a piece of legislation, known as the Withdrawal Bill, that will nullify parliamentary scrutiny until Brexit is complete, despite Brexit’s ostensible aim of enhancing the power of the British parliament. With similar absurdity, Britain is leaving the world’s largest free-trade area with the ambition of becoming a “champion of free-trade,” as Johnson envisions, and is seizing control of its borders to “embrace the world,” according to May. Becoming a “global Britain” is the destiny-du-jour. (Because of Britain’s supposedly strong reputation abroad, “the phrase global Britain makes sense,” Johnson explained during his conference speech. “If you said global China or global Russia or even, alas, global America, it would not have quite the same flavor.”)  [...]

“This is Magna Carta, it’s the Burgesses coming at Parliament, it’s the great reform bill, it’s the bill of rights, it’s Waterloo, it’s Agincourt, it’s Crecy,” Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg declared in one of his (many) conference speeches. “We win all of these things.” According to a recent poll, almost two-thirds of Leave voters are ready for the battle ahead: They believe that “significant damage to the British economy” is a “price worth paying” for Brexit. Among over-65s, this number rises to 71 percent, with half of them even ready to accept a family member losing their job for the cause. [...]

Brexit, in this regard, is already a success. Because, finally, Britain can speak of itself in the lofty language of “destiny”: its “place in the world,” its glorious past and glorious future, a fairy-tale distraction from the dull failures of its domestic politics—soaring inequality, falling living standards and poor economic growth. “The eyes of the world are upon us,” May declared in Florence. It doesn’t matter if none of this is true—the world is more indifferent to our fairy tales than we like to think. All that matters is that we’re allowed live that life again, illusory or not. Brexit is partly theater, and Britain’s soul has taken the stage—that’s why everyone must play along. “Throughout its membership, the United Kingdom has never totally felt at home being in the European Union,” May consoled the crowd in Florence. “And perhaps because of our history and geography, the European Union never felt to us like an integral part of our national story in the way it does to so many elsewhere in Europe.” Boris Johnson also admired Britain’s natural inclination to “diverge from the great accumulated conglomerate.” Now, he says, “we will be able to intensify old friendships around the world, not least with fast-growing Commonwealth economies.” For Boris, some 70 years on, Britain’s “post-imperial future” is bright.

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The New York Review of Books: Referendums: Yes or No?

But most of the world, these days, calls any decision by direct popular vote a referendum. Democratic nation-states dislike them, feeling that they confess a failure of representative democracy. France is one country that has tried to tame the referendum. At first, French republicans damned it as a tool of Bonapartism, since it was used by Napoleon III in the nineteenth century to bypass parliaments and base his dictatorship on “the people.” But later, republicans worked the measure into their curious rules for orderly regime change: first a revolution, then a provisional government to prepare elections for a constituent assembly to draw up a new Constitution; next comes a referendum to approve the Constitution; and then, finally, the first parliamentary elections of the new Republic. [...]

Behind referendums and plebiscites lies the idea of popular sovereignty. But does that legitimize a “right to self-determination,” when it’s a vote about leaving an existing nation state? That right is, anyway, a fine-sounding collective right, which is almost impossible to define, let alone to enforce. It can be made to mean almost anything: for instance, German postwar “expellees” from Central Europe claimed that it meant their right to return to their homeland and evict the Polish and Czech settlers who had replaced them. [...]

The central factor in referendums is who has the right to call them. Formally, the Kurdish and Catalan referendums were both illegal because neither the Iraqi nor the Spanish government licensed them. (But the European Union showed despicable hypocrisy in snubbing the Catalans, since more than half the EU’s members only exist because they broke away from larger states without permission or prior referendum). Some places—California and Switzerland among them—have for many years granted a specified minimum of petitioners the right to call a referendum. But now, globalized social media is transforming the whole ballot initiative question. A ceaseless torrent of organized demands for change is spreading the habit of direct democracy, which is already bypassing traditional legislatures. Referendums, vulnerable to demagogues and lies as they certainly are, look set to carry the politics of the future.    

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Politico: Politics of prayer in Kosovo

An outsize Italianate building at the heart of Pristina’s concrete cityscape — whose consecration was attended by Kosovo’s president, Hashim Thaçi, and an Albanian representative of the Vatican — the building is not just a religious monument; it’s also rich in political symbolism.

The project was championed by the late former President Ibrahim Rugova, who led Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority in a campaign of resistance against Serbian repression in the 1990s.

For Rugova, the cathedral — towering over the corner where a street named for Bill Clinton meets one named for George W. Bush — is a way of signaling to Europe that its newest country, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, is open and tolerant.

With one of the highest rates per capita of citizens signed up to radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, Kosovo is eager to prove to the rest of Europe that its Muslim-majority population is nothing to worry about, and that it peacefully co-exists alongside its Christian counterpart. [...]

A high school was razed to make space for it, forcing students to relocate to others on the city’s outskirts. The cathedral also received pride of place in the city center, while requests for land to build a new central mosque were initially rejected.

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Katoikos: Catalonia: Europe’s newest country?

The Spanish government, after years of economic crisis, high unemployment rates, corruption, lack of opportunities for its youth and austerity, showed little competence in dealing with people’s needs. That gave the separatists a perfect platform to gain momentum and push for their cause, similarly to how, in other EU nations, we’ve seen the rise of “radical” political parties and movements. [...]

It is fair to say that the Catalan government seized an opportunity to push for its agenda, which is based on financial control and power. Very much like Britain, which always wanted special treatment within the EU and complained about its budget and how much it had to contribute, the Catalan government was in disagreement with Madrid over how much it should pay.  [...]

Another major failure of the government in Madrid is that it failed to mobilise the Catalans who want to stay in the Spanish union. Instead, it seems to believe that relying on the fact that the Spanish constitution prohibits such referendums and issuing a violent crackdown on the voters would solve the problem. [...]

Only around 42% of the electorate voted, 90% of which supported independence. If the other 58% were motivated to take part, maybe the outcome would have been different. In addition, it could have started a positive campaign to convince the Catalan electorate, rather than arresting its elected officials.

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Al Jazeera: When does a 'crime' become 'terrorism'?

Paddock's action was no sudden rampage brought on by a rapidly boiling fury. It was not some quick response to a sudden insult. That happens all too often in a country were so many people legally carry guns on a regular basis. There is also no indication at the moment that he held a particular survivalist view of society collapsing, building up resentment at those around him, aggravated by just having lost his job, as was the case, for example, of 41-year-old James Huberty who killed 21 people and injured 19 others in 1984 when he walked into a Mc Donald's restaurant near where he lived in San Diego, shooting customers indiscriminately. [...]

However, there is no simple answer to this important question. Those who study these matters cannot even agree on a definition for what a "terrorist" is. Nor is there much consensus on how people find their way into becoming one. Perhaps the best way to understand what defines a "terrorist" is to go back to one of the first people who promoted the idea of anonymous attacks by individuals or groups against civic targets. This was Mikhail Bakunin, a mid-nineteenth century anarchist who promoted the idea of the "propaganda of the deed". In other words, it was the significance of the deed itself, its symbolic quality, that was crucial. The political idea was that the violent action would be reacted to with such repression by the state that this would alienate more people and so set in motion a revolution. [...]

Beyond the attack on society, it seems to me that for a violent assault to be considered "terrorist" there has to be some articulation of an ideology. There has to be some notion, however bizarre and unrealistic, of what the ultimate objective is that the "terrorist" is reaching for.

The outburst has to be something more than an expression of anger, frustration, depression or confusion. If the threat that the violence poses is to be regarded as something that challenges how we live, with the attendant vast security infrastructure that demands, then it must be driven by more than an idiosyncratic vendetta. 

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