Ivan Krastev - Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest
Here you can read online Ivan Krastev - Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Philadelphia, year: 2014, publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest
- Author:
- Publisher:University of Pennsylvania Press
- Genre:
- Year:2014
- City:Philadelphia
- Rating:3 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Since the financial meltdown of 2008, political protests have spread around the world like chain lightning, from the Occupy movements of the United States, Great Britain, and Spain to more destabilizing forms of unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Russia, Thailand, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Ukraine. In Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest, commentator and political scientist Ivan Krastev proposes a provocative interpretation of these popular uprisingsone with ominous implications for the future of democratic politics.Challenging theories that trace the protests to the rise of a global middle class, Krastev proposes that the insurrections express a pervasive distrust of democratic institutions. Protesters on the streets of Moscow, Sofia, Istanbul, and So Paulo are openly suspicious of both the market and the state. They reject established political parties, question the motives of the mainstream media, refuse to recognize the legitimacy of any specific leadership, and reject all formal organizations. They have made clear what they dont wantthe status quobut they have no positive vision of an alternative future.Welcome to the worldwide libertarian revolution, in which democracy is endlessly disrupted to no end beyond the disruption itself.
Ivan Krastev: author's other books
Who wrote Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev
Julian de Medeiros
Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev
Moises Arce
Donatella Della Porta
Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Democracy Disrupted
The Global Politics of Protest
Ivan Krastev
Copyright 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available from the Library of Congress
Cover image Rasslava / 123RF. Cover design by John Hubbard.
ISBN 978-0-8122-2330-9
Contents
The European revolutions of 1848 ended on December 2, 1851, when tragedy repeated itself as a farce and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte guillotined the Second French Republic by means of a coup. In the days and weeks during which this last act of the revolutionary drama was unfolding before the eyes of the world, five of the greatest political minds of nineteenth-century Europe ran to their writing desks with the ambition to capture the meaning of the event. They felt they were living in strange times, when one was never sure, between ordering and eating ones dinner, whether a revolution might not intervene.
As one would expect from analyses written in the heat of the moment and burdened by passions and frustrations, the authors got the characters of the political actors right but the story wrong. In the manner of the man who mistook his wife for a hat, they mistook the end of the revolutionary wave for its beginning. If the experience of the great five teaches us anything, it is that making sense of the present can be as troublesome as predicting the future.
The desire to make sense of the present is what guided me in writing this little book on protests and democracy. It is not a book about any particular protest, although the protests in Bulgaria inspired me to undertake this adventure, and protests in Russia, Turkey, and Thailand are central to my argument. The book does not attempt to venture an overarching theory of the protests or to conceptualize the new protest experience. It is not a book by somebody who was really there or even dreamt of participating in the events it describes. It does not strive to classify the protests or to figure out how to judge their success or failure. Its aim is more modest: to capture the meaning of the events, to reflect on the complex relationship between mass protests and democracy, and to analyze how mass protests are transforming democracy.
In the three short years between Occupy Wall Street and Vladimir Putins Occupy Crimea, we witnessed an explosion of protests all around the worldthe Arab Spring, Russian Winter, Turkish Summer, and the dismembering of Ukraine all were part of the protest moment. Each of these demonstrationsand many less monumental oneswas angry in its own way, but the protests are also a worldwide phenomenon.
Do they signal a radical change in the way politics will be practiced? Or are they simply a spectacular but ultimately insignificant eruption of public anger? Is it the technology, the economics, the mass psychology, or just the zeitgeist that has caused this global explosion of revolt? Do the protests prove the technologically amplified power of citizens? Or, alternatively, do they mark the decline of the political influence of the middle class and its growing discontent with democracy? Will it be the empowering energy of the protests or the conservative backlash against them that will shape the future of democratic politics?
What strikes any observer of the new wave of revolutionary politics is that it is a revolution without an ideology or a project. Protesting itself seems to be the strategic goal of many of the protests. Failing to offer political alternatives, they are an explosion of moral indignation. In most of the protests, citizens on the street treat politics not so much as a set of issues as a public performance or a way of being in the world. Many protesters are openly anti-institutional and mistrustful toward both the market and the state. They preach participation without representation. The protest movements bypass established political parties, distrust the mainstream media, refuse to recognize any specific leadership, and reject all formal organizations, relying instead on the Internet and local assemblies for collective debate and decision making.
In a way the new protest movements are inspired by mistrust in the elites, empowered by mistrust in leadership, constrained by mistrust of organizations, and defeated by the protesters inability to trust even each other: This is an obvious but unspoken cultural difference between modern youth protest movements and those of the past.... Anybody who sounds like a career politician, anybody who attempts to use rhetoric, or espouses an ideology, is greeted with visceral distaste.
Mistrusting institutions as a rule, the protesters are plainly uninterested in taking power. The government is simply them, regardless of who is in charge. The protesters combine a genuine longing for community with a relentless individualism. They describe their own political activism almost in religious terms, stressing how the experience of acting out on the street has inspired a revolution of the soul and a regime change of the mind. Perhaps for the first time since 1848the last of the pre-Marxist revolutionsthe revolt is not against the government but against being governed. It is the spirit of libertarianism that brings together Egypts antiauthoritarian uprising and Occupy Wall Streets anticapitalist insurrection.
For the protesters, it is no longer important who wins elections or who runs the government, not simply because they do not want to be the government, but also because any time people perceive that their interests are endangered, they plan on returning to the streets. The silent man in Taksim Square, Istanbul, who stood without moving or speaking for eight hours, is a symbol of the new age of protests: He stands there to make sure that things will not stay as they are. His message to those in power is that he will never go home.
While it is popular for Europeans to compare the current global protest wave with the revolutions of 1848, todays protests are the negation of the political agenda of 1848. Those revolutions fought for universal suffrage and political representation. They marked the rise of the citizen-voter. The current protests are a revolt against representative democracy. They mark the disillusionment of the citizen-voter. The current protests function as an alternative to elections, testifying that the people are furious; the angry citizen heads to the streets not with the hope of putting a better government in power but merely to establish the borders that no government should cross.
But is a protest really a better instrument than elections for keeping elites accountable? Can we be confident that people will amass on the streets in large numbers whenever the public interest is violated? Could it not be that the next time the government crosses the line, there will be too few protesters and the effort will fail? How can we be sure that elites will not capture future protests in the same way that they have captured elections? Is the strategy of permanent protest more promising than the once popular dream of permanent revolution?
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest»
Look at similar books to Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Julian de Medeiros
Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev
Moises Arce
Donatella Della Porta
Reviews about «Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest»
Discussion, reviews of the book Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.