Protest Dynamics in the Global Context.

Abstract

At a time of growing socio-political instability, the analysis of the numerous protests taking place around the world is becoming of the utmost interest. This article focuses on the dynamics of non-violent destabilization processes, which are becoming increasingly dominant even in developing countries and less developed regions with many socio-economic and political problems. The authors provide empirical data on non-violent protest activity based on the Global Protest Database, which consists of a huge number of media in nine languages and is presented in the Google News aggregator. With a list of more than 520,000 articles in nine languages from January 2005 to December 2021, the authors standardized all the data on the number of news sources per month, and then used the principal component method to aggregate the information into a variable that can be considered as an index of protest activity. The observed value of the index for each month and trends are presented in the article. This study was supported by strategic project ‘National Centre for Sci-ence, Technology and Socio-Economic Foresight’ of Higher School of Eco-nomics integrated development programme.