Mark Edelman Boren - Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos Book 2, 2010-2021: Social Media, Womens Rights, and the Rise of Activism in a Time of Nationalism, Mass Migrations, and Climate Change

Across the first two decades of the twenty-first century, student resistance around the world kept changing dramatically. The technology supporting activism changed, the strategies of protest changed, and the face of resistance changed. In the 2000s, the internet and the proliferation of affordable computers revolutionized activism, allowed for greater access to information, and increased the reach of organizations. They added ways for activists to disseminate news quickly and more ways to level critiques of oppression. In the 2010s, cell phones and the rise of social media transformed activism once again, spawning new street-level tactics and making possible the creation of vast organizing networks able to communicate information to tens or hundreds of thousands of followers instantaneously. Not surprisingly, it was a decade of unprecedented activism. There were the Arab Spring protests; the Occupy protests; antigovernment demonstrations in Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq; pro-Palestinian protests; the Maidan protests in Ukraine; anti-Brexit demonstrations; agitations by Pussy Riot and Voina in Russia; the Latin American Spring; the international Womens Marches; massive antirape protests in India; the Sunflower Movement; the Umbrella Movement and the Hong Kong prodemocracy protests. There were Extinction Rebellion, the Yellow Vests, and Black Lives Matter. As the decade came to a close, there were yet new dawns appearing in student activism in Nigeria, Hungary, Peru, Thailand, and a host of other countries. Social-media platforms with massive reach, such as Twitter and TikTok, let activists share news and information on an unprecedented scale in the 2010s and became the clarion for flash mobbing (a popular contemporary tactic of direct action) or bugled warnings to protestors that troops were approaching. A new generation entered the fray literate in social media and new tech, and an international fashion for resistance developed and spread. Protestors adopted a style of clothing easily recognized around the worlda counteruniform of sortsand a culture of resistance. People who belonged to multiple groups (as activists often did) shared information across multiple networks with the tap of a finger. And the widespread availability of cell phones put a camera able to record suppressive violence, and the capability to broadcast video to the world, in just about everyones pocket.

In many ways, the global geopolitical trends of the second decade were not new. Around the world, imperialism and greed for resources fueled wars and famine in smaller nations, which led to mass migrations of people, which led to a global rise in xenophobia, racism, and nationalism, which was exploited by populist authoritarians to amass personal and political power. What was new by the end of the decade were the effects of environmental and economic destruction brought on by climate change, the dominance of socialmedia technology, and the election of an unstable, incompetent TV personality to the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth. The chaos and destruction sowed by the rise of US president Donald Trump is to this day hard to qualify. In the United States, he undermined democracy; encouraged government corruption; rewarded the rich and powerful; put unqualified loyalists in positions of power; gutted climate protections; sold drilling, logging, and development rights in national parks; and consciously encouraged racism, xenophobia, and voter intimidation. Internationally, he eschewed democratic traditions, abandoned long-standing treaties and accords, and strained NATO and other alliances while courting the favor of dictators of enemy nations. All this precipitated the reformulation of the relationships among the worlds powers. At the same time, and not surprisingly, the planet saw a rise in authoritarianism, nationalism, ethnic violence, and racism. Even democratic nations witnessed an open resurgence of fascism and a rise in social injustice, racial and ethnic hatred, and police violence.

Authoritarian nations clearly benefited from Trumps destabilizing influence and the corruption of his administration as it ate away at the reputation of the United States and undermined international human-rights and prodemocracy efforts. Dictatorships and authoritarian governments also profited from the fact that international media attention was distracted by the latest in a series of seemingly never-ending crises and provocations manufactured by Trump. Predictably, with less media coverage elsewhere and the leader of the free world snuggling up to the worst dictators on the planet, human-rights abuses and the use of force by law enforcement and even the military to suppress demonstrations became more pervasive around the globe. For authoritarians, the fear of police violence and human-rights abuses leading to negative international media coverage and economic sanctions dramatically lessened.

As calamitous and grim as all that was, all of these trends in nations large and small also fueled youth resistance, galvanized movements for reform, and inspired a new generation to fight for social and economic justice. As Astra Taylor argues in her book Democracy May Not Exist, but Well Miss It When Its Gone, democracy is a constant becoming that lives in the tensions among people wrestling with political dilemmasand if we can say anything about the 2010s, it is that the decade saw the creation of a lot of tension. The irony for authoritarians is that the more social injustice, the more police violence, the more restrictions that were placed on peoplethat is, the more that people were suppressedthe more they organized, protested, and fought back.