Why Recent Global Uprisings Are Led by Youth

By Gayle Kimball

Abstract

Interviews and surveys with 4184 young people and youth activists from 88 counties, raised the obvious questions why and how were youth-led uprisings able to topple entrenched dictators, corrupt governments, and their violent security forces? This article addresses youth demography, why scholars ignore youth activism, and asks why youth were able to mobilize large masses of direct action movements.

Introduction

Activists are not an organization but a world wide web. We are the people on the threshold of changing times.
– Oscar ten Houten, Istanbul

A global or world revolution is underway – a term used by activist writers such as Jerome Roos (Netherlands) and Andrew Marshall (Canada). “Global revolution” is also a term used by Occupy Wall Street, Universities and countless activists. Egyptian revolutionary leaders, for example, studied organizing techniques in Serbia and the US, attesting to the “global” nature of the revolution. Spanish indignados, as another example, called for a day of global protests on October 15, 2011 (the day of a G20 meeting in Paris), and were joined by over 950 cities in 82 countries.[i] In each case, states David Harvey, we see that the global movement builds on local movements such as the student movement in Chile, the landless peasant movement in Brazil, and the Maoist rebellion in Central India.[ii] He points out that since 2011, the focus of popular movements is on ending capitalist austerity programs on a large scale, not just local.

The new global movements followed the first wave of Latin American movements of the 1990s and early 2000s and the global justice movement.[iii] Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, pointed out in 2010 that for the first time in human history mankind is politically informed, aware of global inequalities and lack of respect for all humans. People yearn for human dignity in what he called a “global political awakening” sparked by American imperialism and global mass communication.[iv] Abolhassan Banisadrof, the first president of Iran after the 1979 revolution, observed, “The wave of revolutions from North Africa to the borders of Pakistan is an indicator that young people in these countries are on the move, and moving towards what might be seen as an international revolution.”[v]

The most recent international revolutions began with what is being called ‘the Arab Spring’ by the West. Starting in December 2010 with the self-immolation of a Tunisian vender, age 26, it spread around the world like dominoes. But what is it about the Millennial Generation that motivated them to oust dictators in office for decades and protest against austerity measures imposed by powerful international financial organizations, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank? This research answers this question by considering a number of interviews and open-ended surveys of young people. The questions and most frequent answers are posted on the global youth webpage.[vi]

In a nutshell, well-educated young people learn from and encourage each other online. They oppose growing neoliberal capitalist inequality, emphasise organizing horizontally with direct and participatory forms of democracy, and gained an initial sense of hope from the Tunisian success in ousting dictator Ben Ali in January 2011. Their shortcoming, it appears, is developing a strategy for what to do when the dictators leave or the government is overthrown, leaving opportunity for well-established organizations like the military, Islamic groups or political parties to exploit the situation and take over. My decade of travels and research, which has resulted in a trilogy of books (in progress) about global youth activists, the global girl revolution, and global youth culture, have taken note of this frustration around the world.

But in general the recent youth uprisings should be seen as part of an international leftist movement organizing since the 18^th century. An article in the Global Studies Journal, for example, points out that the world-systems framework looks at a sequence of world revolutions that begin in local rebellions and oppose existing power.[vii] The Global Left movement began with abolitionism in the 18^th century and included 19^th century social movements (e.g., labor, socialism, anarchism, women’s suffrage). Other social movements surfaced in 1968 and 1989 (e.g., second wave feminism, queer rights, indigenous rights) and newer movements (e.g., global justice, food rights, and alternative media) also joined what we might consider ‘the Global Left’. But this global revolution has a fluid form, a “new diffuse, lateral, inter-class transnational subject,” as observed by Spanish reporter Bernardo Gutierrez.[viii] While another Spanish observer notes how the 15-M movement’s use of media to inform and work with other nationalities supported the, “forging [of] a new internationalist movement, as far-reaching as the workers movement of the late 19^th century, but endowed with an historically unmatched set of tools and connectivity.”[ix]

The youth uprisings are international in the similarity of their goals. This is evidenced by the almost universal emphasis on horizontal organizing, belief in radical democracy, forming of cooperatives, the sharing of information and slogans like “Enough” or the “99%”, while also forging collective support on social media and through face-to-face assistance around these ideals. The international characteristic of the global youth movement is further evidenced in how one Greek demonstrator explained: the Egyptians “woke us up,” while Spanish M15 occupations inspired discussions about how to do the same in Greece, resulting in the occupation of Syntagma Square ten days later. Some say this occupation started in Athens, particularly as a result of some Spanish students who organized a sit-in in front of their embassy. But the internationalist element of the global youth movement is present everywhere: Chile sent leaders to assist the Mexican students who organized Yo Soy 132. Spanish indignados assisted in Athens. While Egyptians and Serbians came to New York to help Occupy Wall Street. (It has also been noted that Egyptians supported Wisconsin demonstrators before that). In the same way, solidarity camps were formed in Athens, Berlin and New York to support Turkey’s Gezi Park protests.

My research has also noted that Argentinean activists exchanged ideas with the Zapatistas in Mexico, indigenous people’s environmental movements in Ecuador and Bolivia, and the MST movement in Brazil. Annual meetings of autonomous movements from around the world meet in Buenos Aires, called Enero Autonomo (Autonomous January), which also has an active Facebook page. Other global networks the Argentineans connect with are the People’s Global Action, the World Social Forum, and Via Campesina.

Other than USAID – the so-called democracy training programs of young people around the world – the most ongoing international outreach is CANVAS (Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies), which developed from Otpor. (Two leaders of Otpor founded CANVAS in 2004). The Serbian activist group Otpor’s ousting of their corrupt president in 2000 became a model for other revolutionaries in the region and beyond. Otpor learned revolutionary tactics from American Gene Sharp’s 1973 book The Politics of Nonviolent Action and 1993 book From Dictatorship to Democracy about non-violent resistance (available online).[x] Leader Srda Popovic (age 25) was also inspired by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lech Walesa in Poland, and the Chilean movement against dictator Pinochet — further demonstrating global idea exchanges in action.[xi]

Popovic still leads CANVAS in Belgrade. It’s also called the Revolution Academy and stresses discipline and planning in training leaders from over 46 countries. Their books are available for download.[xii] CANVAS went on to “advise groups of young people on how to take on some of the worst governments in the world – and in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria-occupied Lebanon, the Maldives, and now Egypt, those young people won.”[xiii] CANVAS prefers to work with students because they’re idealistic and energetic. (Reporter Tina Rosenberg described recent CANVAS training with Burmese resistance leaders in her article cited in the previous endnote). Within a week of the start of Occupy Wall St., Otpor activists came to New York to assist Americans. CANVAS was also involved in the 2014 Kiev uprising, as in handing out a pamphlet previously given to Egyptian activists and paying university students and unemployed Ukrainians to bus into Kiev to demonstrate. [xiv]

Millennial Demography

God has a mission for me: I want to work with a group of young people who want to change the world and make everyone equal.
– Manuella, 13, f, Columbia

Youth power rests in their numbers, education, and ICT communication. Comprising over 40% of the world’s population, young people under 25 are the largest youth cohort in history, the best educated, and the most connected via the Internet.[xv]

The United Nations defines youth as ages 15 to 24 and adolescents as ages 10 to 19. The 1.5 billion people ages 10 to 24 have various names such as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y. Generations expert Neil Howe defines them in his most recent work as being born from 1982 to 2004. Younger children are called Gen Z, which some say are born after 1995 and others 2001. The period between childhood and adulthood now popularly understood as “tweens” are stimulated by media to act like teens. This coincides with observations that youth enter biological adolescence earlier, and now spend more time in school. This trend delays job seeking and marriage as boomerangers in their 20s return to live with their parents. In my surveys and interviews of over 4000 youth from 88 countries (spanning a decade), I focused on people younger than 20 and interviewed activists in their 20s, and my own findings affirm these observations.

It is notable that half of the new generation lives in poverty with one fourth existing on less than $1 a day.[xvi]About 40% of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day (2.7 billion people) and more than one billion are extremely poor.[xvii] Globally, over 150 million children live on the streets, some without a parent to care for them.[xviii] Despite being generally the best-educated generation, over a quarter of school-age youth are not in school. Globally, 31% of females and 28% of males are enrolled in higher education,[xix] while about 8% of boys and 13% of girls are illiterate.[xx]

Illiteracy is highest in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. The UN reports that most youth live in developing countries, with about 60% in Asia.[xxi] By 2025, the percentage will grow to 89.5% in countries where poverty is a major issue. In an era when 0.5% of the world’s population controls nearly 40% of the wealth, inequality creates a formula for discontent. Approximately 87% of the 1.2 billion young people ages 15 to 24 live in the more than 100 developing nations that struggle to support their “youth bulge.”[xxii] An online world map shows where young people are concentrated.[xxiii] Some leave their countries to seek work or escape violence, resulting in how youth under the age of 29 represent 30% of the world’s international migrants.[xxiv]

It has been projected that the young generation will be poorer than their parents in many developed countries. Yet more global youth are exposed to rich lifestyles in the media, leading to frustration in an expanding revolution of rising expectations (a concept coined by James C. Davies). German Sociology professors Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim (cited later) provide a great illustration of these rising expectations. As a young waitress, who lives in a small wooden house in rural Latvia, said: “I would like to have a normal life” – meaning as portrayed on TV and experienced by her sister who migrated to Poland.

Global youth are therefore divided by the reality of economic inequality, which keeps the haves and have-nots in different worlds. Most of the facets of our daily lives that we take for granted are a daily struggle for people in developing countries: such as access to clean water in our homes, a variety of healthy foods available in our neighborhoods, and a readily available private place to defecate. These issues are compounded for women who fetch water from a distance and aren’t allowed to squat by a railroad track or urinate on a city street, as I’ve seen men do in countries like India.

Without a youth bulge, developed nations need more young workers to support their aging populations as they retire from work. In Japan, one of the grayest nations, the elderly will be 40% of the population by 2060. In 2013, China relaxed its one-child policy for only-child parents, concerned about the shrinking numbers of young workers in the future (although provincial governments rather than Beijing are the ones that enforce the policy).

In general global youth live in rural areas, in urban slums, or urban and suburban middle-class families. An interview on the global youth webpage with Mashal, a rural Pakistani teenager who lives in a mud brick home, conveys the pain of spending all her time working to try to feed her family, being illiterate and having no control over her own life.[xxv] She only saw her fiancé once and hopes he won’t insist on gold jewelry for her dowry that her family can’t afford. Because of the interview, Hassan – one of the respondents to the book questions – and I started The Open Door Literacy Program to teach Mashal and other illiterate villagers. Her mother wouldn’t let her join because she thought the fiancé wouldn’t like her going out to school, but sent younger kids (see photographs on the website).[xxvi] Photograph albums in Facebook’s Global Youth Speak Out page show the one-room apartment I visited in urban Shanghai. The little girl, age 8, said her parents argue all the time over a lack of money. They can’t afford to get medical care for a burn scar that bothers her, and she is going to a school run by a charity because immigrants can’t attend schools.

Photos of the Rocinha favela I visited in Rio de Janeiro reveal bullet holes in walls from gun battles between the police and young drug lords who control the area (20% of Brazilians live in favelas). A study of one favela found the average school attendance was only four years.[xxvii] The young men in Rocinha sat on their motorcycles guarding the entrance to the favela, knowing they will probably die in their 20s. The woman who showed me around Rocinha has staph sores on her legs because of the human waste in floodwaters that flow in the narrow sunless alleys between the houses when it rains. Because of poverty and drug use, a social worker there said families are unstable with many children growing up without their fathers.

Katherine Boo reports on the grim details of urban children’s lives as trash pickers in a Mumbai slum in her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012). Rubina Ali, the child star of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) also grew up in a Mumbai slum. She told her story to a French writer when she was nine (although she doesn’t know her exact birthday).[xxviii] Rubina described the children playing along the railroad tracks, because it’s dark and damp in the shacks, so close together they don’t allow sunlight, similar to Rocinha. Her extended family slept next to one another on mats in one small room with no window, and their only luxury was an old black and white TV.

Rubina explained there is no privacy in the slum and people insult and shout at each other “all the time.” Boys harass and chase the girls. Kids have to get up early to wait in line to get water for the day (before the water stops at 10:00 am), so they can’t go to school. During monsoon season, the slum floods with dirty water as it does in Rocinha. There’s a toilet area with three holes that don’t get pumped out. Rats and mosquitoes cause diseases, so “every year children die of malaria in our slum,” she reports. The government razed their home in 2014 as it was located on railroad land. The contrast with middle-class life in Mumbai is shown in the Hindi film The Lunch Box (2013). Some shack dwellers are organizing in South Africa and Shack/Slum Dwellers International provides a network of community organizations in 33 countries to support a more global-based movement.[xxix]

Despite the poor having every reason to revolt, it is typical that educated middle-class youth with access to the internet organize the uprisings joined later by people in slums of various ages. The uprisings are usually motivated by hope for change with democratic collective action, youth’s dissatisfaction with employment opportunities, and rising costs of living. Historically, when food prices rise, riots often occur. Most young protesters are middle class and well-educated, according to Youth Studies researcher Andy Furlong.[xxx] Milja Jovanovic, the only woman in the inner circle of Otpor, the initiator group that ousted their Serbian dictator in 2000, reported: “We were middle class, we had enough money to sustain ourselves, or our families supported us. We didn’t need to go out to work to buy food or pay for electricity. I think that was really important because otherwise we couldn’t have committed to Otpor 24 hours a day like we did.”[xxxi]

Middle-class young people are the ones who have the opportunity to get an education and access the internet, either at home or in internet cafes. They have hope that change is possible, and thus are energized to lead uprisings against inequality and government corruption. Author Chris Hedges maintains that only 1 to 5 percent of the population is needed to actively work to overthrow a system.[xxxiii] He explains the poor are too downtrodden to revolt, industrial workers are too few and their unions too weak, so Marxian theories of social change are not relevant in the information age. Hedges believes the revolution will be made by unemployed college students and graduates, the working poor, and professionals like lawyers and teachers, which affirms some of the research presented in this paper.

How to Contact 4,000 Youth in 88 Countries

To find these young people, starting in Japan in 2004, I stayed with families in Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, England, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and Tanzania, as well as in a youth hostel in the Netherlands. I visited schools to talk with students and meet teachers to ask if they would give the questions to their students as a writing assignment. Some of the respondents and teachers snowballed the questions to their networks. Any time I met people from another country, I asked them if they knew youth or their teachers in their country of origin. Over 80 teachers mailed or emailed their students’ responses to the 12 book questions. I met some of them over the years when they came to Chico, California for a six-week study program for English teachers. I interviewed youth activists in Cairo, Skyped with other changemakers, and attended a Global Uprisings conference in Amsterdam in November 2013. I interviewed activists there and continued discussion with some on email.

It’s a convenience sample rather than a statistically random sample, but respondents include a wide variety of backgrounds: hundreds of rural Chinese students (photos available[xxxiv]); village youth from Tanzania and Indonesia; students in a village in Northern India, which is so remote the teacher has to walk an hour up hills to reach his classroom; kids from Rio and Shanghai slums; and demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in my hometown in California.[xxxv] In Tanzania, for example, a young guide I met interviewed rural village youngsters and emailed me their replies, while the principal of an urban Muslim school I visited assigned the questions to some of his students. Some of my respondents came from internet sites such as Sit Diary, youth groups like Students Against Violence Everywhere and educational organizations like the Yellow Sheep River Foundation that assists poor rural Chinese students. I posted the questions on many Facebook pages listed under global youth but only got a few replies: such as from Kevin in Trinidad, who introduced me to Taika in Ethiopia, who, in turn, recruited respondents at her school.

My main contact in China is Yuan, whose English teacher (a former student of mine) gave the book questions to her university freshman in Wuhan. His answers were so thoughtful I followed up with more questions. We’ve been in close contact for almost a decade and he translated for me when I did interviews in Shanghai. He and his friends translated hundreds of surveys I got from an educational organization for rural students I found online.

In India, a friend of an Indian woman in Chico introduced me to an Indian friend in Singapore, who then gave me the name of a high school administrator in Southern India. An Indian student responded to an internet post I made asking for input and he asked his father, a principal in Central India, to assign the book questions. I also met principals when I was in Northern India in 2012, and got several names of students from Youth-Leader magazine headquartered in Berlin.

This is not a uniform sample of youth with internet access responding to multiple-choice questions that limit their input, as designed by marketers or health researchers. All of the answers were quantified by creating categories based on frequency of the answer, available online.[xxxvi] The data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. Qualitative insights were gained from in-person, Skype, and email interviews with young activists. As Professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett points out, we learn more from interviews than survey questions with determined responses, although current research is “heavily in favor of quantitative methods.” I refer to some of the respondents below by their first name, age, and country.

Scholars Neglect Youth Activism

Everyone who writes about the recent uprisings mentions the role of young people, but few include their voice in a significant way. Most academics I’ve encountered think the topic is widely covered simply because the role of youth is a widely known fact. But youth voices are actually left out, just as women and people of color were before Ethnic and Women’s Studies developed in the 60s and 70s. Ageism is a little discussed and carries lots of bias, which my books attempt to redress: doing “history from below,” also called folk history, social history, and “people’s history,” in contrast to the study of great men.[xxxvii] One example of the ageist blind spot, particularly regarding recent uprisings, can be found in how: an anonymous academic, who reviewed one of my book drafts, attempted to list a number of studies dealing with youth, but all were written before the recent uprisings or don’t include them (I added the dates), nor do any seem to feature the role of young people.

I think there are several other books out right now that address the issue of youth and contemporary activism. Marina Sitirin’s Everyday Revolutions [2012, about Argentina only, while her 2014 book with Dario Azzellini, They Can’t Represent Us expands to look at the development of democracy in various countries, with a focus on process but not youth, similar to Maeckelberg] is one as is Marianne Maeckelberg’s The Will of the Man [2009, about the altergloballzaiton movement]. She explains, In contrast to previous social movements, the alterglobalisation movement’s form of organization is its ideology.] Both also address the rise of horizontalist politics. Jeffrey Juris has written about youth activism, technology, horizontalism, in the context of the alter-globalization movement and Occupy. [Juris co-edited Insurgent Encounters, 2013, an enthnography about the global justice movement and World Social Forum. Youth are mentioned in less than 10 pages.] David Graeber’s Direct Action [2009], about the global justice movement] also involves some fairly sustained consideration of the links between direct democracy, new radical politics, history, and youth culture.

My scan of the Journal of Youth Studies from 2011 to 2014 found only 26 titles on youth activism or political attitudes out of 224 articles. 10 of the titles were about youth attitudes towards traditional politics. [xxxviii] Amazingly, not one article was about the uprisings of 2011 to 2014. A similar search of the Journal of Adolescence found only one issue on political engagement but not rebellions (June 2012), with no other such articles in other issues.[xxxix] An online journal called Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements and the online magazine ROAR do provide current information, but not specifically about youth. Other books describe the characteristics of American youth — many of the books about Generation Y are how to manage them in the US workforce or sell to them.

Much of the generational research is done in the US and the UK. Psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett points out that the study of adolescence began in the US early in the 20^th century and the study of US adolescents still dominates the field.[xl] He reports that most of the scholarly journals devoted to this age group (10 to 25) are mostly from the US with an occasional European researcher. The Journal of Youth Studies includes studies from Canada, Australia, Germany and Sweden, as well as the US and the UK.

Most of the academic books on global youth are anthologies of specialized ethnographies about small groups of young people in various regions without much connection between chapters. For example, one such book includes chapters on Thai makeup saleswomen, former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, Latino use of political graphic art, a Sri Lankan refugee, etc. Searching through 15 pages of Amazon.com books listed under “global youth,” I found anthologies, youth ministry, how to market to youth, deviant behavior, or unemployment, but no overviews of global youth activism. The only books specifically about youth and the recent uprisings are by Maytha Alhassen and Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, editors of Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions (2012). There is also an anthology by Anya Schiffrin and Eamon Kircher-Allen, From Cairo to Wall Street: Voices From the Global Spring, which includes samples from activists in their 20s and 30s. Two other books of note are by Alcinda Honwana, Youth and Revolution in Tunisia (2013), and Ahmed Tohamy Abdelhay,Youth Activism in Egypt: Islamism, Political Protest and Revolution (2015).

Four books published from 2012 to 2014 cover the global uprisings, but not with analysis of the role of young people: Paul Mason, Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions; and an Internet ebook by Werner Puschra and Sara Burke, eds., The Future We the People Need: Voices from New Social Movements, also about various ages of activists. They wrote another pertinent book available online, World Protests 2006-2013. The 2014 books are They Can’t Represent us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy by Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini, and Social Movements and Globalization: How Protests, Occupations and Uprisings are Changing the World by Cristina Flesher Fominaya.

Two other books interview urban youth activists in the Americas before the global uprisings: Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (2010)by Jessica Taft, and Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas (2013) by Maria De Los Angeles Torres, Irrene Rizzini, and Norma Del Rio. Taft reported in Rebel Girls that, “Despite their activism, girls are rarely considered and written about as significant political actors. They appear but do not speak.” Taft observes that they’re left out of academic research on girls’ studies and on youth movements, and that the research focus is largely on college students rather than teenagers.

Are Theories of Social Movements Useful?

Besides being ageist and not including “history from below,” another critique of current scholarship is that scholars don’t produce applicable analysis of social movements. Douglas Bevington and Chris Dixon, Ph.D. activists in the global justice and environmental movements, criticize political theory about social movements for being obtuse and written in jargon for a small academic circle. This sort of political theory, they argue, isn’t useful to activists, which is why many activist tend to read more practical and applicable theory generated outside of academic circles. For this reason, Bevington and Dixon call for a movement-relevant ‘social movement theory’ to create a bridge of engagement and find patterns of success. This movement-relevant theory would address how to find “opportunity structures” and do “frame alignment” through direct dialogue. As well as tactics, relevant theory would discuss inclusion and democratic practices within the movement – the role of internal sexism, racism, classism, etc.

Bevington and Dixon point to Jo Freeman’s 1972 article on “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” as the most influential piece of social movement theory, still widely read and used among activist circles. However, while this maybe true in the US, Gene Sharp’s writing on using non-violent tactics appears to be the most influential globally. A retired political science professor, who founded the Albert Einstein Institution for the study of nonviolent action in 1983, Sharp is an example of an academic developing applicable theory for social change. His instructions for peaceful revolution are available online and widely applied (as in the case of CANVAS, for instance).[xli] Occupy Wall Street activists also refer to Bill Moyer’s analysis of “The Movement Action Plan: a Strategic Framework Describing the Eight Stages of Successful Soclal Movement” in an 1987 article, expanded into a book Doing Democracy in 2001.[xlii] It is also worth noting that Marxist professor John Holloway is also influential globally, especially considering how his approach was mirrored in the recent anti-state uprisings. Holloway writes about Latin American autonomism in Change The World Without Taking Power (2005) and explains the best way to achieve revolution is not to try to take over state government, but to create alternatives like the Zapatistas.

Bevington and Dixon say the researcher shouldn’t be detached but do “dynamic engagement.” I asked them in 2014 if their push for relevant theory produced results (His website is http://writingwithmovements.com/about-chris). Dixon emailed in response:

Our proposal for more movement-relevant research seems to have had some effect in the last few years. I regularly hear from Ph.D. students and professors who have been influenced by the questions that Bevington and I raised, and are seeking to incorporate them into their own work. I’ve also been heartened to see the development of the online journal Interface and book collections such as Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social movements and Knowledge Production (2010) and Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political (2013), all of which seem to be moving forward the project of movement-relevant research.

To this list I would add my trilogy of global youth books and Understanding European Movements by Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Laurence Cox (2013). However, a number of Australian psychologists also advocate that academics communicate more effectively to “ensure our work is accessible, engaging and relevant.”[xliii]

On the same token, Canadian Political Science professor and activist Joel Harden added his critique of academic research, including Social Movement Theory, for lack of dialogue with activists and writing in a style that can “often seem lifeless and far removed from the daily setback, breakthroughs, and insights of protest movements.”[xliv] Harden reports Social Movement Theory is unwilling to “move beyond specialist language.” To be engaged would be criticized as “unscientific,” lacking in objectivity and rigor. He believes few scholars listen to or support new forms of progressive activism. To help correct this deficiency, I argue that contemporary writings must feature the voices of youth activists, similarly to sociologist Michael Burawoy, who called for a public sociology that extends outside the ivory tower and “contributes to emancipatory social change” in a time of “market tyranny and state despotism.”[xlv] He is one of the few scholars who includes youth quotations in his writing.

A group of Occupy Wall Street activists attempted to write what activist Ph.D.s Bevington, Dixon, Harden and Burawwoy advocate — movement-relative theory. In their 2013 booklet titled Militant Research Handbook, they defined militant research as the “place where activism and academia meet.”[xlvi] Advocacy research champions a cause, it is said. Rather than doing participant-observation as ethnographers do, researchers share the goals of the movement. Analyzing what makes a movement succeed, they found the key to social change is the optimistic belief that it is actually possible. Some of the Handbook’s examples of militant research are Colectivo Situaciones in Buenos Aires; Observatario Metropolitano urban studies in Madrid; Mosireen media collective in Cairo; Sarai (Centre for Developing Studies); RAQS media collective in New Delhi; and Tidal — the journal of Occupy Wall Street.

Mozambican scholar Alcinda Honwana analyzed the Tunisian youth movement that displaced dictator Ben Ali.[xlvii] She maintained that the research on social movements that began nearly a century ago is biased towards Western Europe and North America, with some research on South America. Studies of non-violent movements also neglect Africa with the possible exception of South Africa. Honwana reported that in the Global South, movements are more interested in jobs than human rights.

Why Were Uprisings Led by Youth?

I think the millennial generation is the most mercurial generation so far, always wanting and urging for change. Never settles even for a while, which I think has contributed to our ungrateful nature in a way. We are extremely creative, innovative and always up for a challenge. We are independent or always wanting that independence. We are the future; with a little bit of guidance we can actually make the world a better place.
– Taika, 18, f, Ethiopia

An older Egyptian novelist (age 56), marveled that “a generation of youth emerged that was like a mutation. Fathers who feared entering police stations gave birth to children whom we saw stand without flinching or retreating in front of armored vehicles shooting them.”[xlviii] Yara is a high school student in Giza, who participated in the January 25 revolution when she was 14. She emailed at age 17: “We learned a long time ago to not fear bullets, sticks, fires, or jail. We seek freedom and death with the same zeal that ‘they’ seek life in ignominy.” Anyone who follows world news has heard of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani advocate for girls’ education since she started writing a blog for BBC at age 11. She represents a pattern of outspoken first-born girls who were encouraged by their fathers, like Yara in Geza. When Malala’s father was asked about his parenting, Ziauddin said, “You should not ask me what I have done. Rather you ask me, what I did not do. I did not clip her wings to fly. I did not stop her from flying.”[xlix]

The uprisings started in Tunisia, so I asked Khouloud Khammassi on Skype why youth were in the forefront of making the revolution. She is an English teacher in her 20s, who lives in the most northern city. She said her parents’ generation was taught to be respectful of authority. They weren’t rebels, with memories of being colonized by France. Their parents were illiterate, like her grandmother. Their energy went to feeding their children, except for when her father, who works as a nurse, participated in labor strikes to protect his job. In contrast, her generation is educated, taught to believe they have rights. Her teachers instilled critical thinking skills, as when they asked students in her high school class how President Ben Ali could win 99.9% of the vote. They didn’t condescend to their students. She was raised to think she had the right to wear a bathing suit in a Muslim country, to be educated and have a job. Arab friends say Tunisian women have character, they’re not mediocre. Educated people like her speak French, Arabic and English so they have access to a variety of information such as the pride French people feel in their revolution of 1789.

Khammassi estimated that up to 80% of the demonstrators were young. It was mostly young people age 15 to 35 protesting on the streets, not just students, but a variety of backgrounds and professionals like lawyers and doctors. She observes youth ages 15 to 25 are wilder because they expect immediate results. In 2008, after a strike, a group of young internet organizers started the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. They corresponded with Kefaya youth activists in Egypt. Using Facebook they discussed strikes and blogging as changemaking tools. Their police state was even more dominant than in Egypt, with less press freedom, but with stronger trade unions.

Western consumer culture values youthful appearance and style, using it to sell goods, rather than venerating the elderly as was traditional. Global media changed the attitudes of global youth as in the replacement of Marxist focus on the proletariat with consumerism, glamour and fashion in urban China and Russia. In rural areas tribal elders still rule, but the majority of people now live in cities where tradition breaks down as people from different backgrounds mix together with access to the World Wide Web and Western films, TV, and hip-hop. Youth spend much of their time with peers in school rather than with family and elders, while ICT also spreads new ideas. As Anna, 18, observes from Ukraine:

My generation is more technologically addicted and less determined by the future. We live in the world where anything can happen and the opportunities are unlimited, the information is spread in a finger snap. The previous generation takes more time to adjust and make a decision, therefore it makes them less flexible.

Globally, children with access to TVs watched Disney cartoons and Harry Potter films where the young hero defies authority. Egyptian activist Esraa Abdel Fattah said that as a child she watched animated movies where the hero takes on the power structure: “I loved The Lion King, Finding Nemo and Antz; I was always wondering why we weren’t doing this in Egypt.”[l] Disney Studies might be a surprising addition in this regard, because their influence is generally not known to be at all ‘revolutionary’. Another media influence on youth’s courage in the face of police violence may be that they’ve seen many violent scenes in films, where the hero is usually not harmed or the cartoon character gets squashed and bounces back.

The most referenced film for young activists is the dystopian German-American V for Vendetta (2005) – the inspiration for demonstrators globally who wear the Guy Fawkes mask. It’s about an anarchist rising up against totalitarianism in a fictional England led by “V.” As the main protagonist V. states in the film: “ideas are bulletproof” and “people should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

Youth Value Democracy, Especially Young Women

Brazilian environmentalist and politician Marina Silva told a Bioneers Conference in 2012 that youth are creating a new activism with multi-centered leadership. The old model was a military hierarchy with a chain of command. The new model is the democratic, collaborative and instantaneous World Wide Web with no command center and no reverence for experts. Youth tend to not be ideological or give credence to political parties, with the exception of the few who support reactionary nationalists parties. Instead, they’re interested in action, occupying urban centers to create islands of actual participatory and egalitarian democracy.

What is also an interesting difference is that today, youth activists generally don’t produce media stars or symbolic leaders. For example Steve Taylor, a member of UK-Uncut, stated global youth protests may not have a unified ideology as they did in 1968, but they share organization practices: “no egos, no celebrities, no one telling anyone else what to do and no one willing to take orders – one that lends itself to online social media and has captured people’s imaginations.”[li]

The feminist critique of patriarchal hierarchies in government, religion, business, media, the family, etc., has been a major influence on the youth emphasis toward direct democracy and horizontal (participatory) organization. In consciousness-raising groups, the main tool of the Second Wave of feminism, each person gets a chance to speak without interruption and arriving at consensus is valued. Media stars were denigrated. Women learned that seeming individual issues are socialized, that “the personal is political.” “The feminist process” is therefore seen as inclusive; women of color and post-colonial feminists pointed out the intersecting influences of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, and age. Women of color rejected the idea of a general sisterhood or sexist patriarchy as the primary form of oppression. These feminist concepts influenced horizontal organizing in the global justice movement and through it, the recent youth-led uprisings.

All of this points to how Millennials are creating a new paradigm of decision-making. In the US, their belief in equality enabled the election of President Obama and progressive Senators like Elizabeth Warren in the same election cycle. They helped pass state legislation legalizing same-sex marriage and marijuana.

However a TIME magazine cover article about US “Generation Me Me Me” made an interesting connection: “Because millennials don’t respect authority, they also don’t resent it. That’s why they’re the first teens who aren’t rebelling. They’re nice and not even sullen.” As Tavi Gevinson said (she’s the 17-year-old editor of Rookie, a popular Internet girls’ magazine), “there’s not this us–vs.–them thing now. Maybe that’s why millennials don’t rebel” according to old political-ideological strategies. In Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (2006), Canadian professor Richard Day contrasts the older “hegemonic” revolutionary strategies with the new more anarchical forms of organizing. The former relied on authoritarian offensive force led by a Trotskyite vanguard against one basic form of oppression (class) and the national government. Here, one group is often identified as evil, as the oppressor which must be violently uprooted. The new emphasis, however, appears to be toward the “logic of affinity,” as in the global justice movement. The goal is to generate small groups that oppose neoliberalism to set up small alternative organizations – in a prefigurative sense – where another way can be lived and explored and experimented without the violent overthrowing of the state.

Some suggest that horizontal organizing typical of the recent uprisings is easier for those socialized to be female than those socialized to be male. Author Marina Sitrin observed people in Argentinean horizontal groups, which provided a model for later rebellions, noting that they create politica afectiva (creating affection): “a politics of social relationships and love.”[liii] In interviews with 75-leftist girls in 2005 and 2006 in Vancouver (British Columbia), San Francisco, Mexico City, and Caracas, a little more than half of the girls said they were part of groups where there are no leaders, everyone is a leader.[liv]

Interestingly, on a more expanded level, how Spanish indignados also used the feminine plural to refer to the crowd protesting austerity cuts. This increasing feminization is being picked up on in a variety places and media – even conservative media are now picking up on the trends. When Republican Governor Chris Christie was accused of illegal practices in 2014 for example, Fox News analyst Brit Hume commented: “In this sort of feminized atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct, kind of old-fashioned tough guys, run some risks.”[lv] Other conservatives also worry that feminism is undermining masculinity, as in Christina Hoff Summers’ The War Against Boys (2001) and Kay Hymowitz’ Manning Up (2012). But role reversals are happening and, overtime, feminism has had an affect; we’re seeing that in today’s global youth movement, which champions more radical forms of democracy. In Japan, for instance, aimless young men who reject the work ethic of their fathers are called “herbivores,” while their female peers are “carnivores” or the “hunters.” Chinese boys unanimously told an American teenage interviewer that girls are better students and Chinese experts refer to a “strong female, weak male” phenomenon.[lvi] If girls are more egalitarian, as studies indicate, and they’re the majority of university graduates, their increasing influence will be and has been positive.

In closing, an analysis of 843 protests that occurred from 2006 to July 2013 in 87 countries found the main causes of discontent were in this order: anti-austerity and economic justice problems (such as food price riots in 2008 and price rises also contributed to the Arab Spring), lack of democracy, protests against international financial organizations such as the IMF, and human rights (women’s rights were 6% of the protests).[lvii] The researchers used news reports to determine that protests mainly demand real democracy from national governments — especially in Africa and MENA, but about two-thirds of the protests didn’t succeed in making changes. Democracy Now! was chanted in occupations in Madrid, Athens, New York City, etc. The one-third of protests that created change mostly succeeded in improving rights. However, the big aim – economic justice and transformation – seems the most difficult to achieve.

The same analysis reported that activists are not just traditional union members, but include the middle class, youth, and others disillusioned with their governments. The largest number live in higher-income countries where they have higher education levels. The report found the most common protest action is marches and rallies. New methods include direct action such as roadblocks and occupations of city squares, with the assistance of technologically gifted computer hackers and whistleblowers. In response, governments increase surveillance and have exercised in many instances acts of violent repression. However, in the face of violent state repression most protests are peaceful: only 9% include violence and vandalism, even though half suffered direct repression and violence from state authorities. Most of the violent protests were in low-income countries, such as Sub-Saharan Africa. Both the number of protests and the amount of protests are increasing, including some of the largest in history such as a 48-hour strike of 100 million of union workers in India in 2013, and 17 million in Egypt in 2013 to overthrow President Morsi. Austerity cuts spread to 119 countries in 2013 in Europe and most developing countries, indicating unrest will only continue.

As youth aim for fundamental societal transformation, what are their concerns and goals? In my global youth survey, one of the questions was: “If you were the leader of your country, what changes would you make?” Many answers were given; the most common follow:

1. Youth issues: better education, recreation facilities, listen to youth, children’s rights 21%
2. Develop the economy, such as lower taxes and build the infrastructure 17.5%
3. Help the poor 12%
4. End corruption 11%
5. Protect the environment 9%
6. Peace 8%

Youth Are Skilled in ICT

All the new technology and electronic stuff has changed everything and turned mostly all the impossibles to possibles. I’d like to control myself from going on my laptop all the time.
– Kanwar, 15, m, India

Khue (17, f, Vietnam) observes that her generation extends its altruism globally because of the internet: “I actually see more and more people about my age being so committed to helping others and saving the Earth. This is the difference that the internet and globalization has brought to my generation. We spread our concerns to other places that might be unrelated to us.” Cyber activists like Yara in Egypt provide each other with encouragement and specific information using international social media, such as in how to treat tear gas with vinegar and how to brand their democratic goals. As the targets of consumerism, youth know how to be effective marketers in return. They used shocking photos to generate mass anger, such as the photo of the Tunisian vegetable seller covered in bandages who protested police corruption by setting himself on fire. The Egyptian photo of another young man in his 20s who was beaten to death by police in Alexandria was another galvanizing photo that went viral, feeding the revolutionary emotion of Enough!, and galvanizing the resolve of a mass group of people “that we’re not going to take it anymore.” (Posters of his face were in Tahrir Square during the occupation when I visited in July 2011).

ICT doesn’t require rock-throwing skills; videos of global uprisings usually show young men in jeans hurling rocks that women may have gathered. Women use blogs, videos and cell phones to publicize events and educate people about revolutionary issues. Blogger Lina Ben Mhenni (born 1983) spread news of the Tunisian protests. Asmaa Mahfouz, 26, is called the Leader of the Revolution because of her famous YouTube video appealing to men’s honor to come to Cairo’s Tahrir Square on January 25. Single people usually live with their parents: Her family forbade her to demonstrate on the street and cut her off from the internet, so she used her phone to organize from her bedroom. Libyan women lawyers such as Salwa Bughaigis were pioneering organizers against Gaddafi in Benghazi. Using Facebook, Natalia Morar, 25, a Moldovan journalist, organized a protest against rigged elections that attracted 20,000 people storming the parliament building in 2009. This was called the first “Twitter Revolution.” Like other organizers she was surprised at the massive turnout of young supporters. Women using ICT also initiated huge demonstrations in Lebanon in 2005 (Asma Andraos), Yemen in 2011 (Tawakkol Karman) and Israel in 2011 (Daphni Leef).

Mark Zuckerberg, the young CEO of Facebook (born in 1984), is an archetype of the Millennials as fictionalized in the film The Social Network (2010). His aim is, “We think the world’s information [activists would substitute economic] infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.”[lviii] Zuckerberg calls this the “law of sharing” that leads to caring about people’s stories shared online. He joined with other tech giants to form internet.org, with the goal of increasing internet access from about 2.7 billion people to all humans by providing them with mobile devices. Some school districts already use digital textbooks with interactive and video features, stored on the cloud. Zuckerberg states in a paper on Facebook that in a knowledge economy, connectivity is a human right.

Enabled by their use of technology and free social media (over half of them add online content every week), Millennial author David Burstein points out his generation has already made significant global change. “We’ve toppled dictators, helped elect a president, created social networks that have connected the world, forced businesses to adopt a social agenda broader than profit — and all before most of us have turned thirty.”[lix] Burstein believes Millenials have a “passion for making a difference” by building large online activist organizations such as Facebook’s Causes (the largest online activist platform with over 100 million users), Mobilize.org, Ourtime.org, and DoSomething.org. The latter claims to be the largest US nonprofit for young people and social change with 1,425,974 million members who “kick ass on causes they care about” such as bullying or homelessness. Avaaz claims over five million members – their goals and priorities are revealed in a survey of members.[lx]

Young people want to be heard and they want progress to happen quickly. Comfortable with the fast pace of change, they fault adults for their lack of adaptability, as Vishwa, 17, m, says in India: “The changes in the world are much faster right now than ever before. I wish that adults accepted them faster without so much hesitation and get accustomed to the newer ways of life faster.” Millennials are scornful of slow-moving bureaucratic hierarchies. There’s no General or Command Center on the web and group consensus or peer recommendations are often valued over credentialed experts. Some view their peers as seduced by their love of speed to act irresponsibly, as Marwan (17) said in Egypt, “The generation of my parents is used to doing things the hard way and having a sense of responsibility, but my generation wants the fast, easy way to get what we want, and few of us have a sense of responsibility.”

Some of these characteristics of defying authority and impatience with slow-moving bureaucracies may be true of any generation of young people. However, this generation’s access to electronic communication is unlike any previous generation and gives them a broader and more egalitarian worldview. They expect open discussion of social issues and young women in leadership positions. Indian revolutionary Gandhi explained that dictators require fear and tacit consent in order to rule, while Millennials are often brave. Even one-party China faces daily uprisings and protests as young people use proxy servers to bypass censors and access the internet to discuss problems such as corruption, pollution and rural land grabs.

The internet’s cyperactivism provides international support for groups like the Zapatistas and anti-GMO movements, alternative media as on YouTube, hactivism (e.g., revealing Nation Security Administration secret documents or denial of service to punish a corporation), and culture jamming. It gives new meaning to corporate advertising such as “spoof sites” like PinkLovesConsent.com that appeared to feature Victoria’s Secret underwear printed with anti-rape slogans advocating consent. Advocacy networks can exchange ICT information with thousands of international NGOs, some of them addressing youth issues. NGOs are increasingly also using the language of the anti-capitalist left, as in “empowerment,” “gender quality,” and “bottom-up leadership.”[lxi]

Examples of large international groups connected by the Internet are Independent Media Center, Food Not Bombs, and People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (they all have Facebook pages). Probably the largest international organization for activists is the World Social Forum, first held in Brazil in 2001 to counter the World Economic Forum and an offshoot of the alterglobalization or social justice movement. Its purpose is to bring activists together to “discuss and strategize alternatives to capitalism.”[lxii] They believe they are the world’s largest gathering of activists and social movements. Photos of recent conferences on the Forum website show many young faces. However, the 2013 international organizing committee recently received criticism for being too hierarchical.

Globalization Empowers Youth Activists

If youth meet from 10 different countries with different religions and backgrounds, they will have ideas in common, now that globalization is common and cultural boundaries are reducing. The habits include image consciousness, being tech savvy, living life for today, ignoring consequences of their actions, and being reactive. I feel most of them have complaints about restrictions on them or have problems with how their parents don’t get them right. I certainly do believe that there is a global youth [as do others].[lxiii] Some of all youth have the same voice that is to be spread around the world so all the youth can stand together and fight against the differences.
– Maham, 13, f, Pakistan

Globalism spreads media almost everywhere in a “space-time compression” enabled by ICT. Youth often adopt and initiate new global trends in their localities, such as hip-hop music.[lxiv] Widely quoted, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observed in their 2000 book Empire that, beginning in the 21^st century, social movements took the form of a virus traveling around the world on the internet that produced a “cycle of struggle,” cyberactivism and cyberpolitics.

German Sociology professors Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim critiqued social sciences for not looking at global interactions and global generations, using what they call a cosmopolitan framework, instead by being bound by “methodological nationalism.”[lxv] They point out that almost one-third of German young people come from immigrant families and that global migration flows will increase as unemployed youth seek jobs. Generally youth are the “losers” in the globalization process because of their high unemployment, causing increasing insecurity to become “the basic experience of the younger generation.” They maintain that a self-aware global generation doesn’t yet exist, but youth share the internet as a common framework for viewing the world. They value and imagine equality but approach it individually rather than collectively and politically, unlike the activists of the 1960s.

Writing five years later, Yara (17, Egypt) does think middle-class youth are a self-aware global generation, explaining: “I have 900 friends on Facebook. I know people around the globe who agree with me about wanting to change tradition, maybe we’re right.” The older generation was shut down by their parents, as we heard from Tunisia, while her generation is ambitious and connected. Their parents didn’t have the chance to connect with each together. She said her generation abhors the tradition of go to university, get a job, and start a family. The same view was expressed by an Australian boy:

I’d like adults to understand that in the 21st Century, young people are thinking big and have a huge amount of knowledge that can be useful, due in a large part to the Internet and the globalization it has brought about. I also would like them to think outside the box a little more, as so many (including my parents) think that school-uni-job is the only way to go (Will, 18).

Yara’s generation “hates that cycle. We don’t want to be just another generation in the history book” or repeat their parents’ and grandparents’ failures, as other students told me in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. “We want to write the book,” she said. Yara observes her generation is characterized by ambition and courage: “We don’t settle for the normal half-filled cup. We ask, ‘Is that all life has to give?’” When I asked Yara why they are so courageous she said it’s because their communication systems provide them with support and information, as support is a resource for social movements.

With globalization and migration, narrow categories of how to study youth like class or developmental stage don’t work, as global media create more fluid and mixed influences on youth combined with local culture. Scholars call this mixture hybrid, creole, bricolage, transnational, and hyphenated cultural influences on youth identity.[lxvi] The “glocal” approach looks at local influences interacting with the messages of global culture. The focus is on intersectionality of influences on youth identity and culture, rather than simply how youth develop an adult identity – similar to feminist methodology and its recognition that identities are shaped not only by gender, but race, nationality, sexual preference, age, and so on. Youth are often innovators, bringing global popular culture to their local networks.

Intersectionality applies to understanding social movements, according to Suzahn Ebrahimian, who describes herself by her age, ethnicity and work rather that her gender: a “23-year-old Iranian-American writer and agitator.” She criticizes some who regard the lack of a unified national or global struggle as a failure.[lxvii] She explains:

Containment, categorization, assigning subjectivity and identity, ignoring complexities and intersections; these are the products of linear histories, binary constructions, simple dichotomies, and unified pluralities. In other words, our oppressors use simple boxes of identity to contain and destroy our potential—so how is recreating this containment supposed to be liberating?

She advocates for solidarity, which might mean blockading a shipment of tear gas from the US to Turkey, but not sameness: “I want to complicate myself together with you.”

Youth are Optimistic, Confident, Have Hope, and Are Altruistic

We can do a better job than our elders because we have more knowledge and we are more capable of learning new things and having the mind to solve problems. We’re the best people so far, so count on us.
– Tommy, 14, Taiwan

“Young people are increasingly driven and empowered change agents, working to make positive noise,” agrees Ronan Farrow, the first director of the Global Youth Issues Office in the US State Department when he was in his 20s. He characterized young people today as impatient, unfocused, risk-takers, brash and disobedient—the traits that lead to change: “Sometimes we act like the rules that don’t apply to us.”[lxviii]A Viacom survey of 15,000 young people in 24 countries reported that most (84%) believe that their age group has the potential to change the world for the better.[lxix] At no time in history have more youth lived under some form of democracy and has the proportion of youth been so great, increasingly the likelihood of movement away from dictators like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

Called the most cause-aware group in history, a claim backed up by my survey of over 4,000 young people, this generation is altruistic; they want to do good. They like electronic gadgets and spending money, but their main goal is not to get rich. They understand that money doesn’t guarantee happiness; therefore their priority is their relationships with family and friends. The SpeakOut survey reveals three of youth’s top four life goals are altruistic (percentages are small because of many answers):

*Do good works, make the world better 30%
*Personal goals 21% (happiness, goals, grow, enjoy, love)
*Worship God (Most often mentioned by Muslim youth) 15%
*Help family or country 15%
*East Asians, North Americans and Indians are most likely to want to do good.

Three out of four of their top career goals are helping professions

*Medical professional 14%
*Business 10%
*Teacher 10%
*Do good 8%
*Social work, counseling 7%

Only 1% felt their purpose is to be famous or to get rich, only 4% felt their purpose is to be a business success, and only 8% of boys and 9% of girls think their purpose is to enjoy life, while 8% of boys and 6% of girls don’t know their purpose. In contrast, almost a third think their purpose is to do good. When asked what one question would you ask the wisest person on the planet, the most numerous responses were philosophical rather than materialistic:

*Meaning of life 22%
*About the wise person 21% (i.e., how did you get so wise?)
*Personal success 18.5%
*Science and social science 11%
*Death—what happens after 6%

Implications for the future are uprisings led by youth. All signs appears to suggest that trends will continue, and the global youth revolution will spread around the globe, especially considering inequality and injustice caused by neoliberalism is increasing. An animated plotting of uprisings drawn from The Global Database of Events, Language and Tone show that they’re increasing.[lxx] Youth are numerous, impatient, able to share ideas and encouragement on ICT and willing to not waste the talents of half of their generation. Now that they know they can overthrow dictators and governments, they can organise to create change, they have hope – a powerful motivation for fundamental societal transformation. The bottom line, however, is that the most pressing world problem is climate change and environmental degradation. Youth have to be willing to make lifestyle changes in their marching for social change. Human future depends on their willingness to consume less, developing alternative social-economic structures, and continue to lobby for a range of societal transformations.

Notes: 21st Century Youth-Led Uprisings in Chronological Order
N.B. *indicates the protests including an ongoing tent city in a city square. Youth started these rebellions but were joined by masses of people of different ages and backgrounds. In some cases, youth includes people in their early 30s. See photos of uprisings.[i]

Serbia: 2000. President Slobodan Milošević was ousted in 2000 by Otpor (Resistance). They provided a model for later uprisings, including Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, and Egypt.

Georgia: 2003. Kmara (Enough) protests against rigged elections led to the resignation of President Edward Shevardnadze, called the Rose Revolution. Youth built on earlier organizing against the corrupt education system in 2000 and learned from Otpor.

*Ukraine: 2004, Pora (It’s Time) thousands of young protesters organized against rigged elections in the Orange Revolution. Young people from other former Soviet countries came to observe how to make a “color revolution.”

Zimbabwe: 2004. Sokwanele means enough! The youth protesters distributed CDs and condoms with Bob Marley lyrics on them, painted graffiti, and continued campaigning against President Mugawe until the present.[i] Their focus is on fair elections, “Campaigning non-violently for freedom and democracy in Zimbabwe.”

*Lebanon: Cedar Revolution, 2005. Protesters blamed Syrians for the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on February 14 and protested the 15,000 Syrian troops stationed in their country. Well-connected and media savvy young people organized large demonstrations resulting in the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the resignation of the government, and the first free parliamentary elections since 1972. (See photos).[ii]

Venezuela: 2007. The catalyst for student organizing was the government shut down their favorite TV station, a voice of opposition. Their demonstrations in turn shut down the city but the station wasn’t reopened. Next, students mobilized for a no vote against Hugo Chavez’ 44-pages of 69 constitutional amendments to permit him to be president for life and enlarge his powers. They defeated his proposals.

Burma/Myanmar: 2007. In the Saffron Revolution, students and thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns organized non-violent resistance against military rule. A 24-year-old Burmese monk named Ashin Kovida started the Saffron Revolution. Kovida saw a clandestine film Bringing Down a Dictator, about Otpor’s success in Serbia. The ruling general switched to being a civilian president in 2011. Aung Sang Suu Kyi was released from almost 15 years of house arrest in 2010 and was elected to parliament in 2012.

Iran: 2009. The Green Movement unsuccessfully protested rigged presidential elections but didn’t succeed in removing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (documented in the film The Green Wave, 2012). The main slogan was, “Where is My Vote?” The regime said the uprising was instigated by the US, UK and Israel. Many of the activists and journalists are still in jail. The government monitored social media use, indicating that it can be a resource for oppressors as well as rebels.

Portugal: 2010. “A Generation in Trouble,” a “Desperate Generation,” organized a 300,000 person demonstration against austerity cuts, inspiring later European protests. Portugal’s public debt was equal to 90% of GDP so it implemented cuts in 2010; they didn’t solve the problem so a bailout was agreed upon with more austerity cuts. Youth wrote a “Manifesto of a Generation in Trouble.” About 300,000 protesters demonstrated on the streets in March of 2011.

*United Kingdom: 2010. University students organized around 50 campus occupations to protest tuition increases and other austerity measures.

In August 2011 riots started after a young black man was shot by police and riots protesting racism spread throughout England. Occupy London began on October 15 at St. Paul’s Cathedral to protest economic inequality, removed by police in February 2012 (see video[iii]).

Tunisia: 2011. In the Jasmine Revolution, President Ben Ali resigned and fled to Saudi Arabia after a fruit vender set himself on fire to protest police corruption. The first democratic elections were won by the Islamist Ennahda party. It resigned in 2013 so new elections could be held, fearful of the same fate as the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (photos online).[iv]

*Egypt: 2011. The revolution in Tahrir Square began on January 25. President Hosni Mubarak resigned in February, only 18 days later. In July 2013, after a year in office, President Mohammed Morsi was ousted in a military coup backed by large demonstrations due to his attempts to abrogate power and Islamize the government through the Muslim Brotherhood. The military retained power with the election of General Sisi in 2014, outlawing freedom of speech and assembly.

*Yemen: 2011, In January demonstrations led by a woman began against President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Westerners call it the Jasmine Revolution. Saleh resigned in November. Elections were held in February 2014.

Libya: 2011. Uprisings began on February 15 after security forces opened fire on a protest in Benghazi. Demonstrators chanted, “No God but Allah, Muammar is the enemy of Allah” and “Down, down to corruption and to the corrupt.” Muammar Qaddafi was killed in August. July 2012 elections voted in a secular party over the party aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, but chaos resulted with competing militias.

Bahrain: 2011. Protests began on February 17 against the royal family’s monopoly of the economy and government. Sunni King Hamad brought in Saudi Sunni troops. Angry majority Shia youth protested but dissent was stifled and Pearl Roundabout demonstration site was torn down.

Morocco: 2011. In February, demonstrators took to the streets to limit some of the powers of the monarchy. The king offered reform including giving up claims of divine rights to rule and nominating a prime minister from the largest party in parliament. The youth-led February 20 Movement wanted a constitutional monarchy. Moderate Islamists won the November elections.

Syria: 2011. Youth under age 17 wrote, “The people want the regime to fall,” the slogan of the Arab Spring, on a wall in Dara in southern Syria. They were jailed and tortured. Protests began in March to demand the release of political prisoners. The civil war between Muslim sects killed over 100,000 people and displaced about half of Syrians from their homes.

*Spain: 2011. The 15-M movement of indignados began in May, starting in Madrid and spreading around the country. Protesters occupied the Puerta del Sol until June, and then spread out in neighborhood assemblies. Austerity measures continued under a conservative government.

*Greece: 2011. On May 25, “The Squares,” the Direct Democracy Now! movement was sparked by the Spanish protests, also against austerity cuts. They occupied Syntagma Square until August, with general strikes bringing out the largest crowd in June.

*Israel: 2011. A September tent occupation of Tel Aviv’s ritzy Rothschild Boulevard demanded social justice, but not for Palestinians. It was triggered by the high cost of housing and high taxes for the middle class. Daphni Leef, 25, was tired of high rents, so she used to Facebook to ask other young people to join her on the streets. Similar to other initiators, she was surprised by the thousands who joined her in Tel Aviv and then across the country.

Oman: 2011, in the summer youth groups demanded the resignation of the prime minister, a nephew of the Emir. He was replaced in November.

*US: 2011, September, Occupy Wall Street. The call to occupy was initiated by Canadian magazine Adbusters. Occupy sites spread to cities across the US, with the most publicity given to New York City and Oakland because of police violence.

Canada: 2012. In February’s Maple Spring, the casseroles (banging pots and pans) movement, Quebec students voted to walkout to protest tuition hikes. The strike lasted for 100 days (photos and video online).[v]

Later in the year Idle No More was started by three indigenous women and a non-native woman to protest proposed changes in environmental protection laws. They drew from their culture to do round dances to gather support for their movement. In January 2013, six young indigenous men walked for two months and 1,600 kilometers to parliament. They called it the Journey of Nishiyuu (human beings) for equal rights for all the reserves. Others joined them along the way. The movement was replicated by other occupied indigenous people around the world, including Palestine, Australia, New Zealand, and the US.

Mexico: May 2012. Mexican students in “Yo Soy 132” demonstrated against media bias in the upcoming presidential elections. They called for fair elections and spoke against corruption and neoliberal policies.

Hong Kong: May 2012. Secondary students formed an activist group called Scholarism to protest the mainland’s efforts to impose patriotic education in schools. They led a sit in and a hunger strike in front of government offices.

*Turkey: May 2013. The occupation of Gezi Park started as a protest against the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s plan to cover it with commercial buildings, and expanded to protest his increasingly autocratic attempts to instill Islamic values. Gezi remained green but the Prime Minister continued with building projects that demolished green spaces.

*Brazil: June, 2013. Protests against fare increases for public transportation expanded to protests against government spending on world athletic events rather than social programs and against corruption. The fare increases were rescinded in São Paulo.

*Ukraine: 2013-2014. Protesters occupied Independence Square for three months. President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014, leaving behind a bankrupt country. Protesters in the western part of the country were angry about his reneging on an alliance with the European Union, under Russian pressure.

*Venezuela: February, 2014, student protests at a university in San Cristóbal spread around the country to protest police detention of students. Middle-class neighborhoods in Caracas protested the high inflation rate, shortage of basic goods like flour, and high crime rate. Opposition leaders were jailed. They wanted socialist President Nicolas Maduro to resign. The protests continued for months, with students camping in three plazas in the capital and in front of the United Nations office.

*Taiwan: March and April, 2014. Students occupied the legislative building to protest a trade agreement with China. The Sunflower Revolution protesters carried banners stating, “If we don’t rise up today, we won’t be able to rise up tomorrow,” “Save democracy,” “Free Taiwan,” and “We will let the world know you suck [President Ma Ying-jeou].”

Hong Kong: June 2014. A movement for democracy organized an unofficial referendum to give voters the right to chose their leaders without Beijing’s vetting the nominees, resulting in the largest demonstration in a decade. Occupy Central with Love and Peace is led by professors and students. Student organizations called Scholarism and The Hong Kong Federation of Students organized an overnight sit-in after the march, cleared by police. They used familiar slogans, “power to the people” from the 1960s and “the people want….” as used in the Arab Spring. A student leader explained, “Students hold the key to future” and asked, “If students don’t stand on the front line of democracy, who else can?”

References: Chronology of Youth-Led Uprisings

[i] http://www.sokwanele.com/

[ii] www.google.com/search?q=cedar+revolution+timeline&espv=210&es_sm=91&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=ChTrUtf7MY-DogT2uIK4DA&ved=0CE8QsAQ&biw=1460&bih=928

[iii] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17187180

[iv] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/07/arab-spring-one-year-on_n_1134034.html

[v]http://globalnews.ca/news/858944/were-the-quebec-student-protests-worth-it/

[i] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/24/1218598/-Global-Uprising-A-Selection-of-Images-Photos#

References: Main Work

[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Occupy_movement_protest_locations

[ii] Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini. They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy From Greece to Occupy. Verso, 2014, p. 3.

[iii] Ibid, p. 14.

[iv] Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Montreal, May 2010.

Author of Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (2012).

[v] Abolhassan Banisadr, “What Makes a Revolution?” Harvard International Review, April 6, 2011.

http://hir.harvard.edu/print/what-makes-a-revolution

[vi]http://globalyouthbook.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/global-youth-book-questions/

[vii] Christopher Chase-Dunn and Nicolas Pascal, “Articulation in the Web of Transnational Social Movements,” Global-e: A Global Studies Journal, April 30, 2014.

http://global-ejournal.org/2014/04/30/vol8iss3/

[viii] Bernardo Gutierrez, “Around the World in 843 Protests,” Occupy.com, April 18, 2014.

http://www.occupy.com/article/around-world-843-protests-living-most-revolutionary-times-history

[ix] Michel Bauwens, “Spain’s Micro-Utopias: The 15M Movement and its Prototypes, P2P Foundation, May 25, 2013.

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/spains-micro-utopias-the-15m-movement-and-its-prototypes-part-2/2013/05/25

[x]Gene Sharp. From Dictatorship to Democracy. The Albert Einstein Institution. Fourth edition, 2010. www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html

[xi] Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution,” New York Times, February 16, 2011.

www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17sharp.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB

[xii] http://www.canvasopedia.org/legacy/content/special/core.htm

[xiii] Tina Rosenberg, “Revolution U,” FP: Foreign Policy, February 16, 2011. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/16/revolution_u&page=full

[xiv] William Engdahl, “US NGO Uncovered in Ukraine Protests,” Boiling Frogs Post, January 7, 2014.

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2014/01/07/us-ngo-uncovered-in-ukraine-protests/

[xv] The UN reports there are about 1 billion youth ages 15 to 24—18% of the world’s population–and 20% of the world is aged 5 to 14.

“State of the World’s Population,” United Nations Population Fund, 2011. http://foweb.unfpa.org/SWP2011/reports/EN-SWOP2011-FINAL.pdf

[xvi] www.unfpa.org/swp/2004/english/ch9/page8.htm

[xvii] Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, p. 21.

[xviii] “Street Children” http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/fight-against-discrimination/education-of-children-in-need/street-children/

[xix]http://www.prb.org/pdf13/youth-data-sheet-2013.pdf

Population Reference Bureau, “The World’s Youth 2013 Data Steet.”

[xx] Adult and Youth Literacy, UNESCO, 2013. http://www.uis.unesco.org/literacy/Documents/fs26-2013-literacy-en.pdf

[xxi] UN Youth: Social Policy and Development Division

http://undesadspd.org/Youth/FAQs.aspx

[xxii] UN-HABITAT Youth Unit, “Youth 21: Building an Architecture for Youth Engagement in the UN System,” January 1, 2012.

1. unhabitat.org/…/Youth21_Building_an_Architecture_for_Yout…

[xxiii] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/31/how-the-worlds-populations-are-changing-in-one-map/

[xxiv] http://undesadspd.org/WorldYouthReport/2013.aspx

[xxv]  http://globalyouthbook.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/interview-with…pakistani-girl/

[xxvi] http://opendoorsliteracyproject.weebly.com.

[xxvii] http://www.irinnews.org/pdf/in-depth/tomorrowscrisestoday-chapter6.pdf

[xxviii] Rubina Ali. Slumgirl Dreaming. Delacorte Press, 2009.

[xxix] http://www.sdinet.org/about-what-we-do/

[xxx] Furlong, Youth Studies, p. 222.

[xxxi] Mathew Collin, The Time of the Rebels: Youth Resistance Movements and 21^st Century Revolutions. Profile Books, 2007, p. 15.

[xxxii] Charles B. Strozier, et al, eds. The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence and History. Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 141.

[xxxiii] Chris Hedges, “The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies,” TruthDig, April 13, 2014.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_of_human_progress_and_the_collapse_of_complex_societies_video_2014

[xxxiv] www.ysriver.com

[xxxv]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFNT3fzRXHY&feature=related

[xxxvi] Frequencies: http://globalyouthbook.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/138/

Cross tabs: http://globalyouthbook.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/140/

[xxxvii] “History from Below,” The Many-headed Monster,” Mark Hailwood and Brodie Waddell (eds), The Future of History from Below: An Online Symposium (2013) http://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/history-from-below/

http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/new-history-from-below.html

http://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/history-from-below/

[xxxviii] http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjys20?open=16&repitition=0#vol_16

Following are the topics and date posted online: Greek youth’s protests in 2008 (January 2011), theories of youth resistance (June 2012), Canadian youth activism for people with disabilities (June 2012), a student occupation of their university in 2010 (November 2012), University of Ottawa students’ political engagement (June 2012), youth involvement in politics in Scotland (June 2012), How to involve young Canadian women in provincial public police development (August 2012), Peruvian youth activism for sexual health (November 2012), Spanish youths’ attitudes towards politics—based on interviews (November 2012), British youth’s political participation (September 2013), Australian girls’ attitudes towards women leaders (January 2013), youth protests in Africa (march 2013), Australian teens political interests (May 2013), young men’s political participation in an English town (September 2013), influences on British youth’s political participation (September 2013), theories of youth agency (September 2013).

[xxxix] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01401971/35/3

[xl] Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, ed. Adolescent Psychology Around the World. Psychology Press, 2012, p. IX.

[xli] http://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FDTD.pdf

Video: How to Start a Revolution: The Blueprint for Change that is Rocking the World

http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/155/transcript_155.pdf

[xlii] Margaret Flowerrs and Kevin Zeese, “Major Social Transformation is a Lot Closer Than You May Realize,’ Truthout, January 2, 2014.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20966-major-social-transformation-is-a-lot-closer-than-you-may-realize-how-do-we-finish-the-job

[xliii] Elmina Subasic, Reynolds, Reicher, and Klandermans, “Where to From Here for the Psychology of Social Change?,” Political Psychology, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2012.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/pops/2012/00000033/00000001/art00005

[xliv] Joel Harden, Quiet No More: New Political Activism in Canada and Around the Globe. James Lorimer & Co., Toronto, 2013, p. 199.

[xlv] Michael Burawoy, “Third-Wave Sociology and the End of Pure Science,” The American Sociologist, Fall/Winter, 2005, p. 152.

http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/PS/TAS1/third_wave.pdf

[xlvi] Natalie Bookchin, et al., The Militant Research Handbook. New York University, 2013.

http://roarmag.org/2013/09/militant-research-handbook-occupy-theory/

[xlvii] Alcinda Honwana. Youth and Revolution in Tunisia. Zed Books, 2013 ,Chapter 3.

[xlviii] David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh, “In Egypt, A Chasm Grows Between Young and Old,” New York Times, February 16, 2014.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/17/world/middleeast/a-chasm-grows-between-young-and-old-in-egypt.html?_r=0

[xlix] “Malala Yousafzai,” NPR.org, October 15, 201

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/15/234730460/malala-yousafzai-a-normal-yet-powerful-girl

[l]Katherine Zoepf, “A Troubled Revolution in Egypt,” The New York Times, November 21, 2011.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/world/middleeast/a-troubled-revolution-in-egypt.html?pagewanted=all

[li] Jack Shenker, “How Youth-Led Revolts Shook Elites Around the World,” The Guardian, August 12, 2011.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/12/youth-led-revolts-shook-world

[lii] http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/moyermap.html

[liii]Marina Sitrin. Everyday Revolutions. Zed Books, 2012, p. 65.

[liv] Jessica Taft. Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas. New York University Press, 2011, Chapter 6.

[lv] Herbert Dyer, Jr., “Fox News Analyst: Christie’s Problems Due to ‘Feminized Atmosphere’ of Media,” All Voices, January 13, 2014.

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/16328109-fox-news-analyst-christies-problems-due-to-feminized-atmosphere-of-media

[lvi] Michael Stanat. China’s Generation Y. Homa & Sekey Books, 2006, p. 45.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, ed. Adolescent Psychology Around the World. Psychology Press, 2012.

[lvii] Isabel Ortiz, et al., “World Protests 2006-2013,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, September 2013.

http://policydialogue.org/files/publications/World_Protests_2006-2013-Final.pdf

[lviii] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/zuck-letter/

[lix] David Burstein. Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation is Shaping Our World. Beacon Press, 2013, p. xviii.

[lx] https://secure.avaaz.org/en/poll_results_2014/?cl=3910522107&v=37530

[lxi] Ana Esteves, Sara Motta, and Laurence Cox, eds., “’Civil society’ vs. Social Movements,” Interface, Vol 1, No.2, November 2009, pp. 1-21.

https://www.academia.edu/1410479/Interface_vol._1_2_civil_society_vs_social_movements

[lxii] http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/world-social-forum

[lxiii] A survey of American youth also found that they feel more in common with members of their generation in other countries than with older Americans. Eric Greenberg. Generation We. Pachatusan, 2008.

[lxiv] Mary Bucholtz and Elena Skapoulli, “Youth Language at the Intersection: From Migration to Globalization,” Pragmatics, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 1-16, 2009.

[lxv] Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, “Global Generations and the Trap of Methodological Nationalism For a Cosmopolitan Turn in the Sociology of Youth and Generation,” European Sociological Review, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2009, pp. 25-36. DOI:10.1093/esr/jen032

[lxvi] Mary Bucholtz and Elena Skapoulli, “Youth Language at the Intersection: From Migration to Globalization,” Pragmatics, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2009, pp. 1-4.

[lxvii] Natalie Bookchin, et al., The Militant Research Handbook. New York University, 2013, p. 28.

[lxviii] Leah Garchik, “Ronan Farrow Making Mark as Diplomat at Young Age,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 16, 2012.

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/16/DD6N1OHRE6.DTL

http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/empowering_youth_change_agents

[lxix]“The Next Normal,” Viacom Media Networks. This market study claims to be the “broadest single study of Millennials to date” and the first “truly global portrait.” 2012. Analyzed 15,000 youth ages 9 to 30 in 24 countries.

http://www.viacom.com/news/Pages/newstext.aspx?RID=721468

[lxx] http://www.popularresistance.org/mapped-every-protest-on-the-planet-since-1979/

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