Focus on the Global South, Special Issue: "Contested Waters," 2025–2026.
Focus: Global protest cycles, social movements, and uprisings in a period of multiple crises.
Abstract: This article analyses the global wave of uprisings and social protests that emerged across diverse regions between 2019 and 2025 — from Chile, Lebanon, and Sudan to Iran, Sri Lanka, and France — as a conjunctural phenomenon reflecting the convergence of multiple structural crises: the uneven and often violent integration of peripheral economies into global markets, the erosion of social protection under austerity, the delegitimation of political elites in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and the accelerating impacts of ecological crisis. We argue that this protest wave constitutes a "troubled waters" conjuncture: the conditions producing revolt are structural and deep, but the organizational forms of protest remain episodic and fragile, creating cycles of mobilization and demobilization that achieve significant disruption without consolidating durable political transformations.
1. Introduction: The Long Protest Wave
In October 2019, protests erupted simultaneously in Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Catalonia — a coincidence striking enough that commentators reached for metaphors of contagion and solidarity. Within weeks, demonstrations in Hong Kong and Sudan (both of which had begun earlier in 2019) were joined by mass mobilizations in Iraq, Colombia, and Haiti. The "October wave" of 2019 seemed to signal a new moment of global unrest, driven by shared grievances of inequality, political corruption, and economic precarity but expressing themselves in radically different national contexts.
The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily suppressed mass public protest, but it also intensified the underlying grievances that had produced the 2019 wave. By 2021–2022, new waves of protest were visible in Sri Lanka (2022), Iran (2022–2023), France (2023, yellow vests and pension reform), Panama (2023), and Bangladesh (2024). Meanwhile, ongoing protest cycles continued in Nigeria, Sudan, Myanmar, and across the Francophone Sahel. The scale and geographic breadth of these mobilizations prompted renewed scholarly interest in global protest dynamics and the conditions under which social unrest escalates to system-challenging moments.
This article examines these protest waves through the lens of "troubled waters" — a metaphor for the structural conditions in which surface disruption reflects deeper structural currents. We argue that understanding the protest wave requires integrating structural analysis of the underlying crisis conditions with a careful attention to the organizational and political factors that shape how protest translates (or fails to translate) into political change.
2. Structural Conditions: The Conjuncture of Crises
2.1 The Inequality-Austerity Complex
Decades of neoliberal restructuring have produced a distinctive global inequality landscape in which GDP growth in middle-income and developing economies has been accompanied by rising within-country inequality and systematic erosion of public services and social protection. The Gini coefficient increased in most Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Sub-Saharan African economies between 1990 and 2015, even as absolute poverty declined. This "growth with inequality" trajectory means that economic progress is experienced by large segments of populations as relative deprivation — as the visible enrichment of elites while access to public education, healthcare, housing, and transportation deteriorates for the majority.
The austerity policies adopted by many governments in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis intensified this dynamic. IMF conditionality programs in Lebanon, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, and Zambia required cuts to fuel subsidies, public sector wages, and social transfers that directly and visibly reduced living standards for urban populations already experiencing stagnant real wages and rising cost of living. In many cases, the immediate trigger for protest — Chile's metro fare increase, Lebanon's WhatsApp tax, Ecuador's fuel subsidy cut — functioned as the straw breaking the camel's back of accumulated grievances about the costs of austerity being borne by ordinary people while political elites appeared immune to its effects.
2.2 The Legitimacy Crisis of Political Elites
The 2019–2025 protest wave took place in a context of systematic decline in public trust in political institutions across diverse political systems. Corruption scandals — Operation Car Wash in Brazil and its regional ripple effects in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador; the Pandora and Panama Papers revelations of offshore financial arrangements by political and business elites; systematic evidence of police brutality and judicial impunity — contributed to a perception, across diverse political and cultural contexts, that the political class operates primarily in its own interests and is systematically insulated from accountability.
This legitimacy crisis is not simply a function of economic grievance. In Chile, one of Latin America's wealthiest and most stable economies, the 2019 uprising (estallido social) was driven as much by resentment of an elite that appeared to live in a different social world — behind the walls of private schools, private healthcare, and private retirement systems that had been systematically removed from public provision — as by specific economic deprivation. The "it's not about 30 pesos, it's about 30 years" slogan captured a perception of accumulated betrayal rather than a specific policy grievance.
2.3 Ecological Crisis as Multiplier
The accelerating impacts of climate change — more frequent and severe droughts, floods, and storms; crop failures; water shortages; forced displacement — are increasingly operating as multipliers of existing socio-economic grievances. In Sudan, intensifying competition over water and agricultural land between pastoralists and sedentary farmers has fueled conflicts that overlap with the political crisis produced by the military's resistance to civilian rule. In Sri Lanka, the 2022 economic collapse that triggered the "Aragalaya" uprising was partly driven by a misguided ban on chemical fertilizers that devastated agricultural production.
The intersection of ecological and political-economic crisis creates "polycrisis" conditions (Tooze 2022) in which multiple overlapping emergencies simultaneously overwhelm state capacity, delegitimize existing policy frameworks, and create acute immediate suffering that can rapidly translate into mobilization. The Sahel's political upheavals — coups in Mali (2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023) — are inseparable from the region's deepening climate-driven food security crisis and the failure of Sahel governance frameworks to address it.
3. Organizational Forms: The Trouble with Horizontalism
If structural conditions explain the emergence and breadth of the protest wave, organizational dynamics explain its limits. The dominant organizational form of 2019–2025 protests has been variously described as "horizontalist," "leaderless," or "networked" — mobilizations organized through social media coordination, decentralized assemblies, and the deliberate avoidance of hierarchical leadership structures. This organizational form has significant strengths: it makes protests resilient to decapitation by arresting or co-opting leaders, enables rapid mobilization, and maintains democratic internal cultures that sustain participation.
However, horizontalism also generates characteristic weaknesses that have repeatedly limited the political impact of protest cycles. Without organizational structures capable of making binding decisions and holding actors accountable to them, protest movements face severe challenges in (a) developing and communicating coherent programmatic demands; (b) negotiating with political actors and evaluating the adequacy of proposed concessions; and (c) transitioning from disruptive street presence to engagement with formal institutional politics.
Chile's 2019 estallido provides a telling case study. The mass uprising that produced the 2020 constitutional referendum — a historic achievement — was organized through a complex landscape of neighborhood assemblies (cabildos), social movement organizations, student unions, and informal networks that coordinated effectively for disruption but struggled with the sustained organizational work required for the multi-year constitutional writing process. The eventual defeat of the new constitution in the September 2022 plebiscite reflected in part organizational weaknesses that horizontalist protest movements are systematically ill-equipped to address.
4. Against the Tides: Limits and Possibilities
The title "Against the Tides" captures a double meaning. Protest movements are swimming against the tides of structural power — the accumulated institutional, economic, and cultural advantages that dominant classes have constructed over decades. But they are also, in important ways, shaped by the tides: structural crisis conditions create both the energy and the limits of revolt.
The most consequential protest outcomes of the 2019–2025 wave — the removal of incumbents in Sudan (2019), Sri Lanka (2022), Bangladesh (2024), the constitutional processes in Chile and Kenya — have occurred where protest movements combined mass mobilization with sufficient organizational coherence to impose costs on elites and extract meaningful concessions. In these cases, protest movements developed the organizational capacity to maintain sustained pressure, fragment elite coalitions, and create conditions in which negotiated transition became the rational choice for at least segments of the incumbent regime.
Conversely, protest waves that lacked this organizational coherence — Lebanon's 2019 thawra (revolution), Iraq's 2019 uprising, Haiti's continuous unrest — achieved massive mobilization, demonstrated the profound delegitimation of existing political systems, but failed to generate the sustained organizational pressure needed to break elite deadlocks. In these cases, the political crisis produced by protest was answered not by reform but by elite reconsolidation, often involving violence, and the exhaustion of mobilization energy.
5. Implications for Progressive Politics
The protest wave raises fundamental strategic questions for progressive and left political forces globally. The organizational forms that have proven most effective for mass mobilization — horizontal, networked, social-media coordinated — appear systematically inadequate for the political organization required to consolidate transformative change. Yet the hierarchical party forms of twentieth-century left politics have themselves been delegitimized by their own history of bureaucratic degeneration, programmatic rigidity, and susceptibility to co-optation.
The most promising emergent models appear to combine movement energy with organizational capacity in hybrid forms — "movement parties" (Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise, MORENA's original formation, various experiences in Latin America and Africa) that maintain flat, participatory decision-making cultures while developing the organizational infrastructure needed for electoral and legislative politics. Whether such hybrid forms can sustain both their mobilizing energy and their organizational effectiveness over multi-election time horizons is one of the central questions of contemporary progressive politics.
6. Conclusions
The "troubled waters" of the 2019–2025 protest wave reflect deep structural currents that show no sign of abating. The convergence of inequality, austerity, political delegitimation, and ecological crisis creates conditions that will continue to produce social unrest across diverse contexts. The question is not whether such unrest will continue, but whether it can be organized in forms capable of generating durable political transformation.
The lessons of the most recent protest wave suggest that the organizational question is as important as the structural one. Mass mobilization is necessary but not sufficient. Building the organizational capacities — sustained institutional presence, strategic decision-making, the capacity for programmatic development and political negotiation — that can translate protest energy into structural political change remains the central challenge for progressive forces in the current conjuncture.
Published in: Focus on the Global South, Special Issue "Contested Waters," 2025–2026. The authors are affiliated with the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) and the Focus on the Global South research program (Bangkok).