Global Protest Movements in 2019: What Do They Teach Us?

Photo by Jonathan van Smit, licensed under CC BY NC ND.

Amid an unprecedented sense of global uncertainty, protest movements around the world are opening new horizons. This series, which was assembled before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, includes brief reflections on a number of protest movements that emerged or consolidated during the second half of 2019. Protest movements in, but not limited to, Hong Kong, India, Iraq, Lebanon, Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile have put into question various forms of power and inequality. They offer us new and very different languages of justice, methodologies of political engagement, notions of citizenship, and pluralist, intersectional revisions of social contracts. By engaging with global protest movements that have garnered widespread “real world” media attention, this series attempts to explore how useful anthropology is in capturing the affectively intensive, dramatic, vital, performative, and friction-filled dimensions of the real world of protests.

Posts in This Series

Introduction: What Do the 2019 Global Protests Teach Us?

Introduction: What Do the 2019 Global Protests Teach Us?

Amid an unprecedented sense of global uncertainty, protest movements around the world are opening new horizons. As a case in point, in the midst of the Covid-19... More

Activists-in-Becoming: Lebanon’s October 17 Revolution and Its Afterlives

Activists-in-Becoming: Lebanon’s October 17 Revolution and Its Afterlives

In October 2019, a series of events rendered the corruption of their government starkly visible to many Lebanese: sizeable wildfires were not controlled for day... More

Revolution for Everyone, Even the Joker

Revolution for Everyone, Even the Joker

On October 13, 2019, Ahmad Shwqy, a young Iraqi graphic designer in Baghdad, posted a series of altered images online. The images, which quickly went viral, sho... More

Space of Care in the City: Doing Fieldwork in the Midst of Hong Kong’s Protest Movements in 2019

Space of Care in the City: Doing Fieldwork in the Midst of Hong Kong’s Protest Movements in 2019

“Care for a visit to the airport now?” My roommate knocked on my bedroom door. It was past midnight. The two of us had just returned from an advocacy group’s mo... More

Social Mobilizations in Ecuador: From October 19 to Covid-19

Social Mobilizations in Ecuador: From October 19 to Covid-19

When initially invited to collaborate on this series on global protests around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic had not yet started. Very soon after Ecuador’s s... More

Staying with the Rubble: Chile at a Crossroads

Staying with the Rubble: Chile at a Crossroads

Juan, a migrant street vendor, sits proudly and calmly by his handwoven textiles, which he has displayed over a white cloth on the plaza floor. On multiple occa... More

Colombia’s 2019 Protests, or How Common Futures Are Imagined through Unexpected Encounters

Colombia’s 2019 Protests, or How Common Futures Are Imagined through Unexpected Encounters

The Day the Beauty Queen Spoke Following her coronation in the national beauty pageant, the recently elected Miss Colombia was asked about the protests planned ... More

Mapping Assertion and Belonging: Reflections on the Life of the Anti-CAA Movement in New Delhi, India

Mapping Assertion and Belonging: Reflections on the Life of the Anti-CAA Movement in New Delhi, India

December 15, 2019, marked a horrific Sunday in the history of the Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. Just three days prior, the ruling Hindu national... More

Global Protest Movements in 2019: Conclusion

Global Protest Movements in 2019: Conclusion

As the pieces in this series have shown, October 2019 saw the emergence of multiple protest movements across the globe. On October 17, a series of discrete even... More