One little-mentioned factor is that protests are exciting. When everybody is doing it, solidarity becomes fashionable
to keep up with the protest movements under way around the world. Large anti-government demonstrations, some peaceful, some not, have in recent weeks clogged roads on every continent: Algeria, Bolivia, Britain, Catalonia, Chile, Ecuador, France, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Pakistan and beyond.
Anxious to impose a pattern on these seemingly random events, analysts have come up with three categories of explanation. These are economic, demographic and conspiratorial. As for conspiracies, governments like to hint that sinister outside forces are stirring things up. The Chinese foreign ministry has suggested that the protests in Hong Kong were “somehow the work of the”. In Latin America it is whispered that socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela have fomented unrest elsewhere to distract attention from their own troubles.
The third factor is the obvious reason for demonstrating, that conventional political channels seem barren. In the late 1980s protesters’ usual targets were autocratic governments that allowed at best sham elections. Without a free vote, the street was the only way to exercise “people power”. Some of this year’s protests—against Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, for example—are similar. But apparently well-functioning democracies have also been affected.
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