17th Alternative Futures and Popular Protest Conference

Manchester Metropolitan University 2-4 April 2012

Title: Rock around the globe: The political and social protests of 2011 in
comparative perspective
(Working draft)
Kostas Kanellopoulos1
Abstract
In the last decades popular protest has increased by all means and possible
meanings. Protests whether in the forms of social movements, campaigns, or
advocacy networks have spanned across almost all the social and political strata of
almost any given contemporary society. This phenomenon has been described in the
literature as the coming of the social movement society. According to this view
present time social movement modes of action are been less dramatized and more
pacified and may be becoming part of the conventional repertoire of participation
protest has increased in breadth but has decreased in depth and tense. However, in
2011 the world has witnessed a dramatic series of huge protests and fighting in the
streets that brought down yearly long regimes in the Arab world, the rise of the
Indignados movement where several hundreds of thousands people protested in
countries like Portugal, Italy, and especially Spain, and Greece against the austerity
measures and their respective political systems, the summer riots in the UK and the
emergence of the Occupy movement in the US. What all these events had in
common? What were their differences? What political opportunity structures, if any,
lead to these political protests, and how, in the longer run, political opportunity
structures facilitate or constrain the protesters? Are we in front of the beginning of a
whole new protest circle with some sort of re-emergence of the social question and
the rise of a new distinctive repertoire of action, a situation that builds upon,
transforms, and potentially overcomes the social movement society of the past
decades?
Introduction
In 2011 the world has witnessed a dramatic series of huge protests. At the beginning
was the unfolding of the Arab Spring where popular protest and riots erupted first
in Tunisia and then in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan,
Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Western
Sahara. In short almost all the Arab world was in turmoil with considerable
differences, of course, in degree and scope of the protests across all of these countries.
At the same time in southern Europe hundreds of thousands Portuguese, Spaniards,
Greeks and Italians marched, demonstrated, and occupied the central squares of their
1

Kostas Kanellopoulos received his Ph.D. in Political Sociology from Panteion University. This
working draft was composed during his stay as a researcher responsible for Analysis of mega protest
events and claims (2010-2011) concerning the austerity measures in Greece, Mediterranean
Environment, Networks and Actions, EC & Mediterranean Voices (coordin. M. Kousis), at the
University of Crete. Please address all correspondence to [email protected]

cities several times to protest against the austerity measures imposed over them by
their governments and the E.U. authorities. In August hundreds of thousands Israelis
opposed the continuing rise in the cost of living, Chilean students launched a series of
massive demonstrations in the streets of Santiago, while the streets of several British
cities experienced the worst riots, arsons, and looting of the last decades. The autumn
of 2011 saw the advancement of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York and
in many other American cities. In the 15th of October people in 951 sites across the
globe declared their will to fight for the rights of the 99% of the worlds population
and towards the end of the year many thousands Russians demonstrated to demand
fair elections and in effect challenge the until then undisputable authority of Vladimir
Putin.
The sequence and the prominence of these events led many commentators to tag 2011
as a global revolutionary year and compare it with analogous global revolutionary
years of the past like 1848 and 1968 (Mason 2012a). And in the same logic 2012 is
already exhibiting some of the features that made 1849 a byword for reaction(Mason
2012b). Other scholars like Raimundo Viejo Vinas (2011) traced the genealogy of this
new global movement to the experiences of the Spanish protests of March 2004, the
riots of the Parisian suburbs of 2005 and the Greek uprising of December 2008 and
compare it with the Global Justice Movement of the beginning of this century.
But before compare the mobilizations of 2011 with those of 1848 or those of 1968, or
trace its roots I think it would be fruitful to compare the various political and social
protests of 2011 to each other and try to examine, understand, and interpret them by
using the methodological tools and concepts of the contemporary social movement
research and theory.
In doing so we will provide a brief (and in any case unfinished) description and an
analysis in terms of the social composition of the participants, their stated goals, their
organizational features, their interaction with the authorities, and their achievements
of a selective number of cases namely those of Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, UK,
and USA. We will then examine if there are any common characteristics among these
cases, and what their main differences beyond the obvious ones are. In a following
and closing section we will discuss what new all these protests bring in particular to
world and national politics and more generally to social movement theory and
research.
However, before starting our analysis it would be useful to discuss briefly two
significant points: the first has to do with the state of the art in social movement
theorizing and the other with the analytical distinction between protests and social
movements.
In short, after the epistemological turn of the 1970s that led to the abandonment of
the various collective behavior and breakdown theories no real challenge has risen to
deny the rationality of collective actors or the validity of social movements as
political actors. In the 1980s there was a debate between the proponents of the
resource mobilization approach and the proponents of the new social movements
theory but nobody seemed to deny the substance or the leading role of what was
labeled as new social movements (see Cohen 1985). In the 1990s the various
approaches were somehow combined and paved the way for a great number of
academic research in the field of collective actions and social movements (for a
critique see Buechler 2000). Towards the turn of the century some scholars
summarized in a way the outputs of all this research and articulated an argument
about the coming of the social movement society at least in the global North
(Meyer and Tarrow 1998, Taylor 2000, Rucht and Neidhardt 2002, McAdam et al.
2

2005). According to this view protests whether in the forms of social movements,
campaigns, or advocacy networks have spanned across almost all the social and
political strata of almost any given contemporary society and present time social
movement modes of action are being less dramatized and more pacified and may be
becoming part of a conventional repertoire of participation protest has increased in
breadth and has become a routine feature of modern politics (Meyer and Tarrow
1998).
In a recent reformulation of this theory Sidney Tarrow has distinguished between
three possible meanings of the term movement society (2011: 28):
Global Movements: That globalization and its discontents have created a wave of
resistance across the planet, or at least in different regions of the global North or
global South (Smith 2004).
Contained Movements: That unconventional collective action is becoming so
widespread and so common, and the response of authorities to them so
institutionalized, that movements are becoming subsumed in conventional politics.
Warring Movements: That todays global society is becoming increasingly turbulent.

Regarding the global movements recent research has shown that transnational protests
have not increased during the last decades not even in the most transnational
integrated regions like the European Union (Uba and Uggla 2011). Whereas,
contained movements as unconventional political action has become more widespread
and at the same time more complicated (Dalton 2006). Warring movements, on their
behalf, employ violence as part of their regular repertoire of contention and according
to Tarrow constitute a major threat to civil liberties because their actions invite
indiscriminately state repression of all forms of contention.
At the end of this paper we will discuss how the political and social protests of 2011
shed some new light, reinvigorate or alter the above assumptions. The second
significant point I want to make is that it is analytically preferable to distinguish
between political and social protests on the one side and social movements on the
other. Protest is defined by Karl Dieter Opp as joint (i.e. collective) action of
individuals aimed at achieving their goals by influencing decisions of a target (2009:
38) whereas a protest group is a collectivity of actors who want to achieve their
shared goals by influencing decisions of a target (Opp 2009: 41). I would comment on
these definitions that they refer to political protests and political protest groups. That
means there are several protests joint action of individuals aimed at achieving their
goals that are not inherently political. They are not political not because their claims
do not have political implications, quite the contrary, but simply because some
protestors do not aim at influencing decisions of a specific target either because this is
their will or because the target in question is not that specific and personalized. We
could label these protests as social protests. It is obvious that every political protest is
social too but every social protest is not necessarily political in the narrow use of the
term.
In addition both political and social protests may lead or be amplifications of a social
movement but they do not constitute by themselves a social movement. I will refrain
myself from giving a succinct definition of the term social movement but it seems
valid to assume that a social movement requires some time to grow and develop,
some collective identity making, a lot of collective action framing and a growing
sense of solidarity among its adherents. A political or a social protest may possess

these qualities but certainly may not also, that is why it is better to distinguish
between the two phenomena
The 2011 protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, UK, and USA
My aim here is to provide a preliminary understanding of the political and social
protests of 2011 in a representative selection of cases and not to build a law like
statement by looking for concomitant variations. This attempt has on the one hand to
do with the (limited) availability of data and on the other reflects the preference for
historical data over statistical one. As Della Porta states for the Weberian logic in the
production of scientific knowledge the comparative method is inherently historical
insofar as it tests empirical relationships between variables in different systems; the
aim is an in-depth understanding of the context rather than establishing relationships
between variables (Della Porta 2002: 292).
In choosing which cases to compare I tried to follow Sartoris advice and compare
cases that are not identical but not too similar either (Sartori 1991). The protests of
Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, UK, and USA are comparable not simply because they
happened almost at the same time but in the regard of the wide participation of young
people, the wide use in all cases of the new forms of communication, the common
expression of disappointment and anger. In all these countries there is an undisputable
correlation between the protests and the current capitalist crisis. Because this crisis as
a genuine capitalist crisis is global we can observe its short-term results in a variety of
countries spanning from the Arab world, Southern Europe, and core countries like the
UK and the US.
So, I have chosen the Tunisian protests because it was there that all begun a popular
uprising that led to the overthrown of a yearly long authoritarian regime. The same
pattern we find in Egypt an even more massive, and violent, revolt in a country with
special weight in the Arab world. The cases of Libya and Syria were disqualified
because there are cases of open civil war with overt foreign interference. Political and
social protests elsewhere in the Arab world were less massive than those in Tunisia
and Egypt and without those spectacular outcomes. Spain and Greece are both euro
zone countries, both severely hit by the crisis and the places where the Indignados
movement was erupted in large numbers. USA is important because the Occupy
movement that emerged there is in a way a continuation of the European and before
them the Arab Indignados in American soil and because of course USA is an
important case in itself. The case of UK is rather deviant since this at a first glance is
clearly a case of rioting but its severity and tense, with over 3000 people arrested,
makes it hard to ignore it and not include it in the landmark protests of 2011.
As it is obvious this study runs the risk of building on an insufficient knowledge of
each country but I think is a risk worthy to be taken since by proceeding per identity
and difference we will be able to discern some common trends, detect what is typical
and what is not and then try to shift from description to explanation.
Tunisia
On 17 December 2010 a policewoman confiscated Mohameds Bouazizi vegetable
cart in the provincial Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid. Twenty-six year old Bouazizi
attempted to complain to local authorities because an official permit for selling

vegetables in the streets was not actually necessary but he was refused an audience
(Thorne 2011). As a result he doused himself with petrol and set himself on fire. Soon
afterwards angry citizens of Sidi Bouzid protested peacefully but their protest met a
heavy hand response by the police. The next day the protests turned into riots and
plenty of imaged of the events were immediately transmitted through social media
sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Within few days two more people committed
suicide to express their disperse, and many more were injured and some eventually
died because of the police repression. The protests reached the capital of Tunis on 27
December and spread to many more Tunisian cities.
Most of these protests were initially called by independent trade union activists and
were communicated through the various social media. Later on the Tunisian
Federation of Labor Unions held a rally in support of the protesters. Another
important challenging group was that of the lawyers. Unorganized at the beginning
and through their National Order they went on strike and demonstrated against the
attacks on lawyers. Students and teachers also followed these protests and a growing
number of educated unemployed youth appeared in the streets.
The stated goals of the protestors were against police repression and corruption. As
protests continued and grew in the capital and elsewhere the demands were also
against unemployment and rising poverty. Some more specific claims were made too,
like the ones against governments online censorship and for the release of political
prisoners. Eventually all of these culminated to the demand for the ousting of the
Tunisian President and his corrupt government.
Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and his party (RCD) had established a semi-authoritarian
regime and ruled Tunisia since 1987. Following the neoliberal trends from the 1990s
and onwards Ben Ali has managed to liberalize the Tunisian economy and society
without actually democratize it. Ben Ali was an accepted public figure for the West
and along with his party were even official members of the Socialist International.
However, Tunisia suffered huge inequalities, severe government corruption, and
lacked real political freedom. As a matter of fact just three months after Ben Alis
ousting it was announced that he would face 18 charges, including voluntary
manslaughter and drug trafficking. The same would happen to most of his family and
former ministers (BBC 2011b).
Tunisian security forces tried to stop the protests through repression but this strategy
produced the opposite results. Then Ben Ali himself tried to tame the unrest by
visiting Mohamed Bouazizi in hospital and announcing the creation of 300,000 new
jobs but protests, violence and looting didnt stop. On the 14th of January some
Islamist groups had called for an anti-governmental protest just after the Fridays
prayer, Ben Ali responded by dissolving his government and declaring a state of
emergency. At the same day the Tunisian military withdraw its support for the
President, forced him into exile and pledged to protect the revolution.
At the immediate aftermath violence and looting continued and the national army was
extensively deployed in Tunisia in order to maintain order. Prime Minister Mohamed
Ghannouchi assumed presidential power and along with the army supervised the
transition. Protests continued throughout February of 2011 this time demanding the
ousting of the rest of Ben Alis government. Finally, on 27 February 2011
Ghannouchi resigned, the political police was dissolved, the oppositional Ennahda
Movement was legalized on 1 March 2011, on 9 March the RCD was dissolved by
court order and elections to a Constitutional Assembly was scheduled for the 23rd of
October 2011. An estimated number of over 200 people lost their lives during the
political unrest in Tunisia (BBC 2011a).

Egypt
The Tunisian uprising had a direct domino effect on Egypt. Within few days since the
ousting of the Tunisian President an Egyptian set himself ablaze near the parliament
in Cairo and many more people from a variety of socio-economic and religious
backgrounds in Egypt planned an analogous day of revolt for 25 January
symbolically and ironically coinciding with the National Police Day in the country
(Zayed 2011). Initially, the goal was to protest against abuses by the police in front of
the Egyptian Ministry of Interior and to demand the resignation of the Minister and
the end of Egyptian emergency law.
The 25th of January day of revolt was called and coordinated by various youth
groups and some young and well known bloggers through the use of social media
pages like Facebook and Twitter. The most instrumental group, however, was the 6
April Youth Movement which distributed tens of thousand leaflets saying I will
protest on 25 January to get my rights. This protest group was formed as a Facebook
group in Spring 2008 to support the workers of an industrial town who were planning
to strike on 6 April that year. Most of the adherents of this group are young educated
people who support free speech and criticize corruption in government and the
countrys stagnant economy.
The call for a day of revolt was a big success that led tens of thousand people in
Cairo and many thousand in almost all the major Egyptian cities to protest.
Encouraged by this big turn out the protesters expanded their demands to include the
end of State corruption and term limits for the president. Although most of the
protesters were non-violent there were some reports of civilian and police casualties.
The next day the Egyptian government shut down internet access for most of the
country to cripple one of the protesters main organizational tools and impede the
flow of news as protests and fights with the police forces was spreading all over the
country.
On Friday 28 January began the Friday of Anger protests just after Friday prayers.
Hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Cairo and other Egyptian cities demanding
this time the termination of Mubaraks regime.
President Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt since 1981 under a continuous state of
emergency. The pretext for the imposition of a state of emergency was the threat of
terrorism. Under the law, police powers were extended, constitutional rights
suspended and censorship legalized. Mubarak had established a semi-authoritarian
and deeply corrupted regime that had gained the support of the West by maintaining
policies of suppression towards Islamic militants and peace with Israel. Moreover, he
too had succeeded in liberalizing the Egyptian economy without actually democratize
the country. Despite high levels of national economic growth around 40% of Egypts
predominately young population lived under extreme poverty and there was a
growing unemployment problem especially among the educated youth.
The Egyptian regime reacted forcefully to the threat posed by the protesters. At first
there were supporters of the regime that clashed with the protesters in Tahrir Square
causing the injury of several and the death of some and then as police forces were
withdrawn from the streets it was paramilitary groups that attempted to terrorize the
anti-Mubarak protesters. There were reports of looting and accusations that the
Minister of Interior had facilitated the escape of prison inmates en masse in order to
terrify the Egyptian population. The military was soon deployed in the streets to
maintain order. With the Tahrir Square as the epicenter of events many hundreds of
thousands people gathered every day to demonstrate against the regime and demand

change. The military forces didnt open fire at the protesters and eventually President
Mubarak resigned with the Supreme Council of Armed Forces assuming power.
Violent protests against military rule and a push for democratization continued
throughout the year. Many thousand people were arrested and injured and
approximately 950 people lost their lives during these waves of unrest (Haaretz 2011,
Irish Times 2011).
Spain
On January 2011 the digital platform Real Democracy Now was created on Spanish
social media networks. Using the same media this group called for a protest on 15
May in places all over Spain. According to the organizers 50,000 people gathered in
Madrid alone and about 130,000 throughout Spain. At the end of Madrids
demonstration some protesters staged a peaceful sit-in in the city center to which the
police responded by beating the protesters. As a result a group of 100 people went to
Puerta del Sol the central square of Madrid and started camping. The next day a
similar action took place in Barcelonas central square. Police tried to disperse the
campers but they along with other bystanders kept coming back to the squares. In the
following days the protesting campers grew in numbers and their form of action
spread in many Spanish cities.
Spanish protesters drew inspiration from earlier 2011 protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and
Portugal even asking through a banner their Greeks counterparts to wake up (BBC
2011c). They soon become known as the Indignados since they shared a strong
rejection and anger because of unemployment, welfare cuts, the Spanish two-part
system, the corrupt politicians, capitalism, banks and bankers. The Indignados
demanded jobs, better living standards, and a fairer system of democracy. In their
square occupation they held daily assemblies to practice direct democracy and formed
like the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, citizens committees to handle communication,
food, cleaning, protest actions, and legal matters.
Spain has been hit hard by the ongoing capitalist crisis and the socialist government in
agreement with the center-right opposition party has imposed severe austerity
measures. The rate of unemployment reached a eurozone record of 21,3% while youth
unemployment rates stands at 43,5%, the highest in EU. Of course these rates didnt
grow overnight since the Spanish model was in trouble for quite a long time (Lopez
and Rodriguez 2011).
Spanish protests were staged close to the local and regional elections of Spain, held
on 22 May, and this has created a heated debate with the authorities because
protesting the day before the elections is forbidden in Spain. However, tens of
thousands protesters camped in the Spanish squares towards the election day and
many hundred thousand demonstrated in Puerta del Sol and elsewhere. Apparently the
socialist government of Spain has chosen not to clash with the Indignados and wait
their mobilization to evade. Serious police repression occurred only in Barcelona
when because of a Europeans Cup final in football, where the local team was
competing, the police decided to evacuate Placa Cataluna by force causing the injury
of 120 protesters.
By mid June most square camping was closed down since the Indignados chose to
continue their struggle through a series of peaceful long marches during the summer
across the country.

Greece
A somewhat direct outcome of the Spanish protests is that the Greeks did wake up.
On 25 May almost 30,000 people in Athens and some thousands in other Greek cities
had responded to Facebook group calls and mounted their version of the Indignados
movement. And one of their banners was saying, We woke up. Just like in Spain
these protesters gathered in central squares, the epicenter here was Syntagma Square
in Athens just opposite the Greek Parliament, to demonstrate without the interference
of political parties or unions against the austerity measures, politicians and the
political system in general.
Of course this was not the first time Greeks were demonstrating against the austerity
measures. Since the beginning of the Greek debt-crisis in the spring of 2010, Greek
labor unions and various un-unionized protesters had mounted several mega protests.2
In almost all these cases violent confrontations between some protesting groups and
the police had occurred but the socialist government of PASOK seemed to remain
intact.
In May 2011 Greek people looked exhausted and frustrated. The economy was going
through a fourth consecutive year of recession, the unemployment rate had doubled in
almost one year reaching that of Spains, and many business of all sizes and in all
sectors were closing down. Ordinary people were furious against the corrupt and
incapable political and economic elites and the Indignados call gave them a valid
framework to protest. Mainstream media and politicians accepted, if not encouraged,
the peaceful Greek Indignados that were gathering in Syntagma.
But Greek Indignados were not a homogeneous group: there were equivalent numbers
of young, old, and middle aged people, there were right-wingers (and fascists) that
stood in front of the Parliament and shouting curses against the politicians and the
foreigners of all short (IMF and EU officials and immigrants) and there were leftwingers and anarchists that were holding daily direct democratic assemblies and
camped in the square. Soon the Indignados were attracting numerous people and in
the days of general strike, they were in fact united with the strikers (with the
important exception of those belonging to the Greek Communist Party). During these
days hundreds of thousands took to the streets and violent clashes with police, which
left many injured, occurred. Towards the end of July protests vanished away but
George Papandreous government has suffered severe loses in terms of legitimacy.
Mega protests, general strikes and violent clashes begun again in October, this time
without the Indignados framework, which resulted in the resignation of Papandreou
and the formation of a care-take government of PASOK, the conservative opposition
and a far right party. The new government imposed even more severe austerity
measures that led in February 2012 to a new mega protest, which included
approximately 500,000 protesters, violent clashes, lootings and arsons of numerous
buildings in the center of Athens.
UK
Whereas in Greece even the most militant protesters spent their August on vacations
in England thousands of young protesters spent August of 2011 on rioting and
looting. All begun after a peaceful protest on 6 August in front of Tottenham police
2

As mega protests we term protest events were over 30,000 people participate. In Greece between
March 2010 and May 2011 there were even demonstrations of over 200,000 participants.

station, following the death of a local man from the area, who was shot dead by police
officers two days before. As in Sidi Bouzid few months ago, the local police made
limited attempts to talk to the relatives and friends of the dead man, tension escalated,
rumors spread, and within few hours the protest turned into a riot (Lewis 2011a).
In the next day calls made and distributed through BlackBerry Messenger were asking
young people to gather in various places in London, clash with the police and loot
whatever they could (Halliday 2011). The third night the riots diffused to many other
major English cities. The pattern was everywhere more or less the same: a racially
mixed multitude of teenagers boys and girls were out in the streets trying to loot
from broken stores when at the same time people from black, Asian, and white
ancestry gathered to watch, jeer at police and sometimes participate in the violent
confrontations, the arsons, and the looting (Lewis 2011b). As of 15 August when
order restored about 3,100 people were arrested, hundreds were injured and 5 were
killed. Around 15,000 people participated in the riots causing an estimated 200
million English pounds worth of property damage (BBC 2011d).
Although UK is an advanced capitalist society social inequalities and social exclusion
remain extremely high (Pieterse 2002). Riots begun in one of the most deprived areas
of the country and most of the participants were young people with low income and
few possibilities for a better future. These protesters targeted police for bad behavior
and discrimination towards them and as soon as police was for a while in retreat they
field was free for all kind of actions and behaviors.
Unlike other social protests of 2011 or previous riots elsewhere such as the December
2008 riots in Athens (see Kanellopoulos 2012), these rioters never found or seek
support from other protest groups, political organizations or the wider public and their
revolt was easily contained. A short hand outcome of the 2011 England riots was a
confirmation of the effectiveness of UK authorities to arrest, prosecute, and imprison
many hundred teenage protesters.
USA
A short hand outcome, among many others, of the Arab revolts and the Spanish
Indignados was that they sparked a protest movement in North America. In mid July
the editors of the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters created a new hash
tag on Twitter saying OccupyWallStreet and actually started coordinating with
other activist groups a protest in New York against Wall Street (Yardley 2011). The
first protest took place in New York Citys Zuccotti Park, a site near Wall Street, on
September 17, 2011. Approximately 1,000 protesters marched through the streets with
100 to 200 of them staying overnight in the park. The police responded by arresting
seven people on September 19 and eighty more until September 24, but the Occupy
Movement had already gained momentum and had diffused to over 600 communities
in the United States and in many other cities worldwide (Dixon 2012).
The protesters in all of these sites were coming from very different backgrounds.
There were many long time activists, many people who participated in a protest for
the first time, women with children, some union members, students and many
unemployed or partially employed educated youth. The protest was organized from
the beginning as a direct-democratic action reflecting vastly the North American
version of the Global Justice Movement. In all occupy sites protesters held daily
general assemblies and used various direct democracy techniques to discuss all sort of
matters (Yen Liu 2012). The character of the protest was categorically non-violent

and most occupiers collaborated with the authorities and their demands not to stage
tents or to lower the volume of the music played by the protesters bands.
The main slogan used by protesters was the phrase We are the 99%. This 99% of
the population is in sharp contrast with the top 1% of income earners who tend to
control everything. As in most social protests there was not a single unified goal but a
variety of goals. Occupy protesters mainly want more and better jobs, more equal
distribution of income, bank reform, and a reduction on corporate control over politics
and politicians.
On October 15 the Occupy Movement called for a worldwide occupy protest
resembling the global days of action of the anti-globalization movement. Many
thousand people participated in over 900 sites around the world. Several hundred
were arrested across the U.S. not because they turned violent but simply for refusing
to obey police orders to leave public areas. Towards the mid of November the mayor
of New York along with many other mayors and university presidents have ordered
the eviction of protesters from parks and university campuses. By the beginning of the
next year some protests took place under the banner of 99% but the occupy movement
seems to be in decline (Larson 2012).
These protests in the U.S. attracted major media coverage and academic attention and
it is expected to have exerted some influence on the public discourse (Gamson 2012).
However, the overall story of the occupy movement in the U.S. points out to a serious
restriction of the democratic right to gather and mount a protest in public spaces in
that country (Calhoun 2011).
Similarities and Differences
The most striking similarity among all these protests is the overwhelming presence of
young demonstrators. The mobilization of young people is, of course, considered a
normal phenomenon among social movement scholars and activists alike. The
young are supposed to be bold and fearless, more innovative, more receptive to
calls for social change, not to afraid to take risks since they usually are not carrying
any family obligations. In the new social movements of the 1970s and the 1980s the
participation of young people was also attributed to the availability of time they
enjoyed and the overall social security provided by the expanding welfare state
policies.
But the young people in our cases seem to mobilize for quite different reasons: they
have time because a great proportion of them in all the countries under study are
either unemployed or are working part-time, most of them are unwaged precarious
workers since the welfare state policies are diminishing for a long time now and they
do not provide social security, they are afraid of an uncertain future they cannot
control, they are well aware of the environmental degradation, they begin to realize
that they constitute the first generations after the end of World War II to put up with
worse standards of living than those of the previous generations, they share a
discretion towards the use of new technologies, a good proportion of them is well
educated, and they are familiar with the emerging world culture and lifestyles which
nevertheless are fashioned in such ways as to attract their attention and consuming
preferences.
Additionally a last common feature of the young people that mobilized around the
world in 2011 is that they are not all that young. Besides the knowledge that youth

10

is a social construction and not an objective reality true for all times and societies, in
contemporary societies the duration of youth has been significantly expanded because
of the ageing societies, especially in the West, the extension of the time spent on
studying, and mainly the continuous dependence on family networks for support due
to the lack of chances to take full responsibility of themselves.
The neoliberal policies that have been implemented in various ways during the last
decades have created a grey portrait of rising social inequalities and growing
unemployment especially for the young (Afouxenidis 2012). At first, neoliberal
policies were used both in democratic and undemocratic settings as an appropriate
response to the economic stagnation of the 1970s (Harvey 2005). After the collapse
of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe the new doctrine gained legitimacy and
some vital spaces to expand. Globalization became then the cover theory for the
neoliberal project (Rosenberg 2000, McMichael 2005). Capitalism was once again
unleashed soon leading to the crash of 2007-08 and the current economic recession
(Glyn 2007, Harvey 2010). Concerning our cases:
The U.S. and the UK are rightfully being considered as the champions of
neoliberalism. In these countries the neoliberal policies have been implemented
successfully and for a long time but this did not help them to sustain growth and both
countries were severely hit by the economic crisis. The state, contrary to the doctrine,
intervened to save the banks and the big corporations but it did not alter its policies
towards the working class and the unemployed.
Greece and Spain represent less successful paradigms for neoliberal policies
implementation comparing to core euro zone countries and both were hit by the
current crisis appeared this time as a dept crisis. A fast track implementation of
structural adjustment programs was proposed as a recipe for recovery. The result was
the collapse of the economy and a further rise in unemployment.
Tunisia and Egypt are significantly poorer than the above countries but were both
considered as successful examples of achieving growth through the liberalization of
their economies. However, the capitalist crisis threatens to break the fragile social
pact of the last decades since an already poor population faces famine due to rising
food prices and the local middle strata loose any hope for upward social mobilization.
In all these cases the stubborn persistence of those in charge, whether they are from a
center-right or a center-left flavor, in imposing the same unsuccessful policies creates
an environment favorable of political dissent and a youth revolt.
But as it is evident, to all who are familiar with social movement studies,
preconditions for dissent does not necessarily lead to dissent. Environmental
conditions are in practice mediated by the protesters choices, their organizational
formations, the political opportunity structures they face, the action repertoires that
are employed.
By the term organizational formations I mean all the organizational and coordinating
efforts that are, in my view, necessary and sufficient for any short of collective action
to emerge and develop. Formal and informal organizations are the obvious parts of
these formations but they are not the only ones. Loose friendship or kinship networks,
subculture collectivities, and even members of a web list can also be important
components of an organizational formation. Thus:
In Tunisia and Egypt we could observe almost all sort of organizational forms and
types taking part to the coordination of the revolt against the local regimes: friendship

11

and kinship networks, facebook groups, formal unions, official and underground
political organizations and political parties.
In Spain there were present mainly informal web groups and ad hoc collectivities
formed precisely on the occasion and the needs of the Indignados campaign.
In Greece informal web groups were also present as well as the collectivities that
created and sustained the occupation of Syntagma Square but these actors were soon
accompanied, and in a way outweighed, by institutional parties of the Left, extraparliamentary political organizations, formal and informal trade unions.
In the USA organizational and coordinating efforts were carried by web networks,
some local unions, and by the informal affinity and activist communities of the
country.
In the UK we observed the more loose organizational formation based mainly in
decentralized mailing lists and scattered friendship networks.
Regarding the role of political opportunities structures (POS) in the mediation of
dissent there is an ongoing heated debate that I cant reproduce it here in detail (see
for that reason Goodwin and Jasper 2012). I will suffice to say that POS is a rather
vague, not adequately refined, and in times misleading concept but still useful since it
has not yet been replaced by a better one concept to account for the impact of political
systems and contexts on collective action and social movements. For the needs of this
study I will take for granted the formulation of McAdam who discerns between four
political opportunities important for the rise of protest movements: (1) increasing
popular access to the political system, (2) elite divisions or conflicts, (3) the presence
of elite allies, and (4) declining state repression (McAdam1996: 26-29). Thus:
In the semi-authoritarian regimes of Tunisia and Egypt popular access to the political
system was by definition subverted and there was not any sign of declining state
repression. Also in the phase of protest emergence elements (2) and (3) were largely
absent and only afterwards seem to play an important role. The ousting of the most
prominent members of the regime by other regime figures may indicate an elite
division between hardliners and moderators, as is usually the case in transitions. And
as allies among the elites could be seen the powerful, albeit illegal, Islamist groups.
In Spain the centre-left government and the centre-right opposition had agreed on the
austerity measures and policies. As a result access to the political system for those
opposing these measures could be seen as closed. Elements (2), (3), and (4) were also
missing.
In Greece some short of access to the political system is guaranteed because of the
presence of relatively powerful parliamentary communist and left wing parties. The
right wing opposition to the centre-left Greek government denied the recipe of the
measures, not the austerity and the structural adjustment policies themselves. But as
popular dissent was mounting the right wing opposition finally made a compromise
with the socialist party and a small far-right party to form a caretake government.
During all that period state repression is steadily rising.
In the case of British rioters no political opportunity was of course favorable. Only
state repression seemed initially to decline because police forces were not expecting a
riot in August but they soon regained control of the situation and severely repressed
the young rioters.
In the USA case in spite of the democratic nature of the regime popular access to the
political system steadily declines during the last years and corporate control of
politics was one of the major reasons that led to the occupy protests. No elite division

12

or conflict has happened and only a small layer of academics could count as an ally
among the elites. Police repression is here also very powerful.
These facts suggest that political opportunities tend to matter most for the
continuation and not the emergence of protest. Additionally and in accordance to
Goodwins argument POS seem to play a much more significant role for political
contention in non-democratic than in democratic settings (Goodwin 2012: 284).
Concerning now the action repertoires the 2011 protests appear to have in common a
certain preference namely what we could call as a direct-democratic action
repertoire.3 This repertoire consists of mobile phone action call, creation of blogs,
collection of signatures, launching of referendums, extensive use of youtube,
facebook, twitter, to expose, communicate and coordinate, public space
camping/campaigns. The main characteristic of this form of action is that is decisively
decentralized and horizontal. Its adherents are distrustful of political parties,
bureaucratic organizations, and the system of representation in general. Direct
democratic repertoire of action can times be conventional, disruptive or violent but is
neither exclusively attached to convention, disruption or violence, nor categorically
excludes anyone of these forms.
In Egypt and Tunisia the bulk of young protesters found it difficult to adjust
themselves to the needs of an electoral campaign and the Islamist parties managed to
subdue in the elections. In Spain the Indignados were precisely formed in the
backdrop and against an electoral campaign. In Greece most of the local Indigandos
renounced representative democracy and most protesters, especially in the biggest
demonstrations, marched outside the official labor unions and the political parties
blocks. The Left, which has a predominantly electoral policy, is gaining some ground
but doesnt seem to threaten the status quo and at the same time some far-right groups
are coming to the fore. The UK protesters certainly are not inclined towards
representative politics and they dont seem to trust state institutions in general. Finally
in the US Occupy Movement the critique against representative democracy and the
corporate control of politics is apparently the central issue.
Conclusion
The emergence of the new direct democratic action repertoire along with the rise to
prominence of a new social actor the various layers of precarious workers seem to
spin off a new protest cycle by giving birth again in the 21st century of the late 19th
and early to mid 20th centuries social question. Heightened conflict, broad sectoral
and geographic extension, the appearance of new social movement organizations and
the empowerment of old ones, the creation of new master frames of meaning, and the
invention of new forms of collective action that according to Tarrow (1995: 92)
characterize a new wave of protest, seem to be present.
This protest wave is arguably rooted in the Global Justice Movement at the turn of the
century, the global campaign against the war in Iraq, the left campaign in France
against the implementation of a European constitution in 2005, but also the French
superb riots of the same year and especially the Greek urban riots of 2008.
3

We categorized with Maria Kousis direct-democratic action repertoire as a distinct form of action
in our research on the Greek mega-protests of 2010-2012. This distinction is of course still in
experimentally stage.

13

The new protest cycle is not characterized, though, by global movements that oppose
transnational institutions but from protests that are pointed against national
governments and, at the same time, share a deliberate internationalist stance.
The warring movements of Tarrows formulation, if at all present, will maybe
become significant as reactionary counter-movements against the protest movements
of 2011. In contrary, the contained movements of the social movement society are a
possible option for 2011 protests. However it is not that certain that the radical and
overly subversive claims, if of course do manage to endure, will be for long tolerated
by the various state apparatuses. The 21st century social movement society is
seemingly going to point that it will have to face the 21st century capitalist state.

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