Abstract
This chapter compares the scope and characteristics of protest waves of the 1930s and the 2010s in the global South using events reported in The New York Times. By mapping out world-historical patterns of protest events, this chapter demonstrates key juxtapositions between the two protest waves: in both eras, global protest waves occurred in periods of world hegemonic transition and capitalism-in-crisis, but at different locations within the capitalist world-economy. During the rise of US hegemony and the period of the Great Depression, many protests happened in the global semiperiphery, while during the decline of US hegemony after the Great Recession, most protest events emerged within the global periphery. This suggests that popular protests’ links to economic and geopolitical crises and revolutionary regions in the global South were changing along with world-historical contexts. The most common shared theme in popular protests—struggles against exclusion—was consistent in both protest waves across regions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The identification of three broad zones in the world-economy—core, semiperiphery, and periphery—is a key contribution of world-systems analysis to understanding the characteristics of the capitalist world-economy. Within the axial division of labor, the core and the periphery are involved in an unequal exchange of high-wage products (e.g., manufactured goods) and low-wage products (e.g., raw materials). The semiperiphery stands in between in terms of its wage levels and the products it trades in both directions (Wallerstein 1974, 349; 1985).
- 3.
- 4.
Countries: Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Sudan); Asia (China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong); Europe (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine); Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Venezuela); Middle East and North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Libya).
- 5.
From the database, I have derived yearly counts of protest events as well as more detailed time-series data that include: date; location (country/region and city/town); type of protest; organization/groups; subject/topic/claims; size; violence; primary theme (struggle for exclusion, exploitation, or combined).
- 6.
Arrighi (1994) argued that the historical phases in the expansion of the capitalist world-economy were defined by particular state formations and modes of capital accumulation, which together attained hegemonic power over the world-economy and were thus capable of fundamentally reshaping it. The process of these movements has led to successive “systemic cycles of accumulation.” The long twentieth century, based on US hegemony, is one of these systemic cycles.
- 7.
Numerous studies have attempted to find and explore the shared and similar factors of the Arab Spring. By drawing on the most notable works, we can identify a few common conditions of the protest waves across the Middle East and North Africa regions as follows: the characteristics of authoritarian regime and lack of democracy; internal political conflicts; the expansion of the middle class and the growing number of highly educated people; a higher rate of unemployed youth/young population; skyrocketing inflation (food prices) and unemployment rate; and the presence of social minorities (race and religion) and conflicts (see Goldstone 2011; Wallerstein 2011; Weyland 2012; Beck 2014; della Porta 2014, 160–196).
- 8.
References
Amin, Samir, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds. 1990. Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Althaus, Scott L., Jill A. Edy, and Patricia F. Phalen. 2001. “Using Substitutes for Full-Text News Stories in Content Analysis: Which Text Is Best?” American Journal of Political Science 45: 707–723.
Amin, Samir. 1990. “The Social Movements in the Periphery: An End to National Liberation?” In Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System, edited by Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, 96–138. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. New York, NY: Verso.
Arrighi, Giovanni, and Beverly Silver. 1999. Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System: Comparing Hegemonic Transitions. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2001. “Capitalism and World (Dis)Order.” Review of International Studies 27: 257–279.
Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989. Antisystemic Movements. New York, NY: Verso.
Beck, Colin J. 2014. “Reflections on the Revolutionary Wave in 2011.” Theory and Society 43: 197–223.
Benski, Tova, Lauren Langman, Ignacia Perugorría, and Benjamín Tejerina. 2013. “From the Streets and Squares to Social Movement Studies: What Have We Learned?” Current Sociology 61: 541–561.
Boswell, Terry, and Christopher Chase-Dunn. 2006. “Transnational Social Movements and Democratic Socialist Parties in the Semiperiphery: On the Global Democracy.” In Global Social Change: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Christopher Chase-Dunn and Salvatore J. Babones, 317–335. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chase-Dunn, Christoper. 1989. Global Formations: Structures of the World-Economy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
———. 1990. “Resistance to Imperialism: Semiperipheral Actors.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 13: 1–31.
della Porta, Donatella. 2014. Mobilizing for Democracy: Comparing 1989 and 2011. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
della Porta, Donatella, and Dieter Rucht. 1995. “Left-Libertarian Movements in Context: A Comparison of Italy and West Germany, 1965–1990.” In The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements, edited by Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans, 113–133. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Dunaway, Wilma A. 2003. “Ethnic Conflict in the Modern World-System: The Dialectics of Counter-Hegemonic Resistance in an Age of Transition.” Journal of World-Systems Research 9: 3–34.
Earl, Jennifer, Andrew W. Martin, John McCarthy, and Sarah A. Soule. 2004. “The Use of Newspaper Data in the Study of Collective Action.” Annual Review of Sociology 30: 65–80.
Goldstone, Jack A. 2011. “Understanding the Revolutions of 2011.” Foreign Affairs 90: 8–16.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1995. The Age of Extremes: A History of The World, 1914–1991. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Jung, Chungse. 2013. “Does Semiperiphery End? Empirical Reappraisals on the Perspective of Antisystemic Movements.” Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Riverside, California, April 12.
———. 2015. “Revisiting Antisystemic Movements on the World-Historical Perspective.” Paper presented at the ASA Annual Meeting. Chicago, Illinois, August 24.
Karataşli, Şahan Savaş, 2017. “The Capitalist World-Economy in the Longue Durée: Changing Modes of the Global Distribution of Wealth, 1500–2008.” Sociology of Development 3: 163–196.
Lloyd, Paulette, Matthew C. Mahutga, and Jan De Leeuw. 2009. “Looking Back and Forging Ahead: Thirty Years of Social Network Research on the World-System.” Journal of World-Systems Research 15: 48–85.
Mahutga, Matthew C. 2006. “The Persistence of Structural Inequality? A Network Analysis of International Trade, 1965–2000.” Social Forces 84: 1863–1889.
Mahutga, Matthew C. 2014. “Global Models of Networked Organization, the Positional Power of Nations and Economic Development.” Review of International Political Economy 21: 157–194.
Mahutga, Matthew C., and David A. Smith. 2011. “Globalization, the Structure of the World-Economy and Economic Development.” Social Science Research 40: 257–272.
Maney, Gregory, and Pamela E. Oliver. 2001. “Finding Collective Events: Sources, Searches, Timing.” Sociological Methods and Research 30: 131–169.
Martin, William G. 2005. “Global Movements before ‘Globalization’: Black Movements as World-Historical Movements.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 28: 7–28.
———. 2008. Making Waves: Worldwide Social Movements, 1750–2005. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
McMichael, Philip. 1990. “Incorporating Comparison within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alternative Comparative Method.” American Sociological Review 55: 385–397.
Minkoff, Debra C. 1997. “The Sequencing of Social Movements.” American Sociological Review 62: 779–799.
Nemeth, Roger J., and David A. Smith. 1985. “International Trade and World-System Structure: A Multiple Network Analysis.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 8: 517–560.
Polanyi, Karl. [1957] 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Santiago-Valles, Kelvin. 2005. “World-Historical Ties Among ‘Spontaneous’ Slave Rebellions in the Atlantic.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 28: 51–83.
Silver, Beverly J. 2003. Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Silver, Beverly J., and Giovanni Arrighi. 2011. “The End of the Long Twentieth Century.” In Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown, edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian, 53–68. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Strang, David, and John W. Meyer. 1993. “Institutional Conditions for Diffusion.” Theory and Society 22: 487–511.
Tejerina, Benjamín, Ignacia Perugorría, Tova Benski, and Lauren Langman. 2013. “From Indignation to Occupation: A New Wave of Global Mobilization.” Current Sociology 61: 377–392.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System I. New York, NY: Academic Press.
———. 1985. “The Relevance of the Concept of Semiperiphery to Southern Europe.” In Semiperipheral Development: The Politics of Southern Europe in the Twentieth Century, edited by Giovanni Arrighi, 31–39. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
———. 1995. Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. New York, NY: Verso.
———. 2011. “The Contradictions of the Arab Spring.” Al Jazeera, November 14. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111111101711539134.html.
West, Michael, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins. 2009. From Toussaint To Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
Weyland, Kurt. 2012. “The Arab Spring: Why the Surprising Similarities with the Revolutionary Wave of 1848?” Perspectives on Politics 10: 917–934.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jung, C. (2020). Global Crises and Popular Protests: Protest Waves of the 1930s and 2010s in the Global South. In: Rayner, J., Falls, S., Souvlis, G., Nelms, T.C. (eds) Back to the ‘30s? . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41586-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41586-0_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-41585-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-41586-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)