Global protests are increasing

The number of protests each year more than tripled between 2006 and 2020 according to one global study, thanks to demonstrations about political regimes, injustice, inequality, climate change and more. “That increase in activism has eclipsed even the turbulent 1960s,” says Lisa Mueller, who studies social movements at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “We really are in an empirically exceptional time of global protests.”

[...]

Research shows that protests can influence media coverage, public opinion, policy and politics — at least in the short term. [...] Protests can also help to spur longer-term changes in public opinion — yet such influences are harder to trace.

[...]

Large protests seem more effective than small ones; non-violent protests appear to be more potent than violent ones; unified goals might achieve more than diffuse demands do. Repression — by police, for instance — can win more support for protesters.

[...]

“Social protest and larger-scale social action is a way to generate social change — but that doesn’t mean it always will,” says Eric Shuman, a social psychologist at New York University who works in this field. “And we’re still trying to figure out when it will and when it won’t.”

[...]

The non-violent campaigns — such as the Philippines’ People Power Revolution that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 — were about twice as likely to succeed at achieving regime change as were their armed counterparts.

[...]

But [reseaerchers] later found that the effectiveness of non-violent revolutionary campaigns is waning over time4 — in part, they say, because governments are learning how to suppress uprisings.

[...]

[Research] also showed that every movement that mobilized at least 3.5% of a population was successful. This led to what’s known as the 3.5% rule — that protests require this level of participation to ensure change. But the figure can be misleading [...] . A much larger number of people are probably supporting a successful revolution even if they aren’t visibly protesting.

A key reason for the success of movements is that they have large numbers of supporters — and that’s “because numbers can translate into political leverage.”

  Nature

Continue reading.