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Wednesday 16 November 2011

Public Protests Around The World


The global financial crisis has spawned a global protest movement campaigning against things like inequality, corporate greed, lack of jobs, etc.
Although these protests have occurred for decades, they have typically been in the developing countries, or about the situation in developing countries.
As such, many Western nations, who have strongly influenced the conditions in developing countries, have typically not paid much attention to such protests, no matter how large (even the famous Battle for Seattle was more about violence than the underlying issues, for example). However, this time, the global financial crisis has hit the ordinary citizens of Western nations quite hard, and inspired by the Arab Spring and protests in Spain, a global movement seems to have sprung up.
Although these protests received some media attention (albeit negative), many protests had begun decades ago in the developing world with barely a mention.Protesters in Oakland hold placards with the “we are the 99%” theme
Mass protests, throughout history have come at a time when enough of the population has been affected by policies of the rulers and elite. They have often been met with brutal, efficient crackdown by the guardians of the elite, be they local police, militias, national militaries, or even another nation’s military forces.
This page was originally created back in 2000, and updated a few times until the end of 2003. At that time, the context was the global protests at the current form of globalization marginalizing so many people around the world. Those protests were often against key institutions of globalization, such as the G8, World Bank, IMF and the World Trade Organization.
At the time, as large as some of the protests may have been, they were typically met with hostility from the intellectual establishment and mainstream media, typically from the West which was generally benefiting from the corporate-oriented globalization it was controlling and shaping.
This page has now been updated to include an overview of the protests on the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, as there is a lot of parallel.

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