Against Order, against Chaos: Understanding the Two Major US Protest Waves of the 21st Century

Rishi Awatramani, Johns Hopkins University

This paper argues that the Seattle protests of 1999 and the anti-war protests of the early 2000s mark the beginnings of a resurgent era of protest in the United States following decades of decline. We find that this new phase of protest is clearly marked by a rise of new social actors and protest demands. However, we find that this protest wave preceded an even larger protest wave from 2011 to 2016. When compared to prior historical peaks of social protest in the 20th century, the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and the protests surrounding the 2016 presidential race are of far greater relative historical significance than is often assumed. Using a newly constructed dataset from the Arrighi Center for Global Studies which measures patterns of social protest from 1870 to 2016 as recorded in newspaper reports, we argue that the anti-globalization and anti-war protest at the turn of the century set the stage for the much larger and more sustained protest upsurge in the US following the 2008 financial crisis. In this second wave, our data finds wide geographic spread of protests, the rise of both far-right and far-left actors, the explosion of diverse protest demands, and the regularity of ‘anti-systemic’ grievances. We argue, therefore, that the Seattle protests inaugurated a wave of protest against the existing system of global governance, while the post-2008 protest wave represents a response to the chaos of the destabilized global order and the weakening of US hegemony.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 246. Understanding the Exceptional Decline of US Trade Unions: Narrative Data and Quantitative Data as Synergy.