Public Seminar | A New Rising Tide of Global Social Protest?: The Early Twenty-First Century in World-Historical Perspective

The central question addressed in this talk is whether it makes sense to see the recent global wave of protests as the initial stages of a decades-long period of escalating social protests and revolutions, analogous to that which characterized the transition from Dutch to British hegemony (in the late 18th and early 19th century) and the transition from British to US hegemony (in the first half of the 20th century). We compare these three periods, drawing on a major new database compiled by the Global Social Protest Research Working Group at the Arrighi Center at Johns Hopkins University, using newspaper reports on social protest events over the past two centuries from the digitized historical archives of the New York Times and The Guardian (UK). The paper examines the relationship between the rise/decline of world hegemonies and rise/decline of global social protest as well as the changing composition of protest over time. Our preliminary conclusion is that we are indeed on the eve of a long period of worldwide social unrest, revolts and revolutions with important analogies with past hegemonic transitions; however, resolutions that worked (at least temporarily) to contain previous waves of unrest are no longer sufficient in the early 21st century phase of historical capitalism; most notably due to the ecological limits of mass production/consumption capitalism, transformations in the nature of warfare, and the changing balance of power between global North and global South.