Editors' Note: A Decade In Which The People Marched

The year 2021 marks the ten-year anniversary of one of the most impactful global events in recent memory—the Arab Spring. The initial outbreak of protest in Tunisia sparked a chain reaction that led to the fall of several longstanding regimes—those of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt are particularly notable—and to protracted conflicts that continue to this day.

The Arab Spring, however, was not the only instance of mass social mobilization during the last decade. Since then, the world has witnessed protests and social movements in Thailand, Mali, Russia, Turkey, Belarus, Chile, Hong Kong, the United States, and more countries. In this issue, Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press of Carnegie Europe write: "Protests have been a crucial barometer of whether governments are delivering for their citizens. The explosion in citizen mobilizations suggests that many governments are not." From liberal democracies to authoritarian regimes, people have risen up in protest either in digital spaces or in the streets—even in the midst of a global pandemic.

This issue not only addresses the protests themselves; it also covers the way they are perceived by those on the ground and on the other side of the globe. Toni Morrison famously wrote: "Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgements…They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media."¹ Journalists, in outlets as famous as the New York Times and as personal as their own social media accounts, have brought the events and framing to understand such events to others.

The title of this issue is The Revolution Will Be Televised—a play on Gil Scott-Heron's 1971 song, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." This issue examines more than the fundamental social and political reasons behind protest movements; it studies the intersection of time, place, and audience and how these factors influence the development of social movements. The message of Scott-Heron's poetic lyrics was that protests and flashpoints might end up on the nightly news, but the larger, lasting consequences of these movements, good or bad, would not.

Perhaps this issue in and of itself is an example of what Scott-Heron was referencing: a curated collection of articles covering protests from around the world that will not lead to institutional change and does not attempt to do so. That said, the articles seek to provide deeper, more contextualized descriptions of movements, their causes, and their outcomes thus far. The authors who present their pieces in this issue provide thought-provoking descriptions of specific protests, overarching perceptions, and theories around social movements and change.

Liah Greenfeld opens the issue by offering a historical view on how nationalism developed in the sixteenth century, how concepts of nationalism alter peoples' perceptions of self, and how those perceptions of self move people to act. Next, Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press discuss protests in authoritarian states and their often-limited results. Johns Hopkins SAIS professor, Hofung Hung, analyzes the consequences of Hong Kong's 2019 unrest and the July 2020 implementation of Beijing's National Security Law. Penchan Phoborisut introduces the specific case study of Thailand's student-organized protests and Bangkok "flash mobs" throughout 2020, highlighting how new forms of dissent fueled by social media and culturally relevant memes have been used to overcome harsh restrictions on speech.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak goes further, examining how the ongoing protests in Thailand have evolved from their populist antecedents to challenge the military-royalist establishment.

Moving to Latin America, Lucia Dammert and Diego Sazo write about Chile's 2019 riots, sparked by a seemingly innocuous increase in public transport fees. The authors discuss how the uprising took elites by surprise, and how they struggled explain it—using either "riff-raff" or "agitator" frameworks. Next the text traverses to Africa, where Lisa Mueller discusses sub-Saharan African protests since the Arab Spring, and Paul Melly provides a journalistic account of how protests and political action in Mali have unfolded over the...