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2 November 2019

In Iraq, Lebanon and Chile, Locally Driven Protests Can Have a Global Impact

Judah Grunstein 

From Lebanon and Iraq to Ecuador and Chile, popular protests have shaken governments and captured the imagination of pundits worldwide in the past few weeks. Combined with the mass demonstrations that forced regimes in Algeria and Sudan to cast aside longtime leaders earlier this year, as well as the Yellow Vest movement that stunned France from December 2018 through the late spring, some observers are wondering whether we are witnessing a revolutionary moment of global proportions. Has popular dissatisfaction with the unfair distribution of globalization’s spoils reached a tipping point? Or are these protests locally driven, offering little or no insights into broader trends?

At first glance, any attempt to draw broad conclusions from the disparate protest movements runs into formidable obstacles. The differences between the countries where they erupted seem to outweigh by far whatever common characteristics they share. ...

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