From Politics to Protest

From 2009 through 2014, political protests erupted in more than 70 countries around the world, in both democracies and non-democracies. In most cases, the protests were not led by a political party or a trade union, and the protesters themselves were openly anti-institutional, mistrustful of both the market and the state, and lacked a coherent ideology. In this article, the author claims that though these “movements of mistrust” do not claim power and do not offer political alternative to the status quo, they do represent an effective strategy of citizen empowerment in the age of globalization, when the power of citizens derives mainly from their ability to disrupt.