 Thank you all for joining us, it's wonderful to be here and it's wonderful I guess to be last in this panel, because it's nice to follow up all these other presentations which I think blend into some of my ideas here hopefully well. So let me just explain the title, Social Movements in the Global Order, I think as we've already heard from some of the other panelists, you know a lot of the focus of research on social movements is really concentrated on national level politics, we tend to look at relations between societies and governments and then to make assessments about why what's driving protests based on the relationship between governments and the population. But I think that there's also a higher level of analysis that we could take this to which is to try to understand are there factors at the global level that are similarly driving protests. I think this is especially germane when we look as I'll show you in a few minutes about the nature of the protest wave that we're living through right now which has really unfolded across the world, across many different regime types, democracies, autocracies, across all income levels that raises a question is there something happening at the global level that is similarly driving protests right and I think that's something that as scholars we don't pay enough attention to and I want to just foreground here I'm especially interested in questions of global capitalism right and a lot of our discussions of protests often ignore the question of capitalism or reduce it simply to the issue of inequality but I think there are bigger structural dynamics that are unfolding that I want to foreground here and I'll say that you know much of this research is based on my work in Africa but I hope that some of these ideas also extend to other regions especially in the global south. I think some of the ideas here are very applicable for example to what's unfolding in Sri Lanka currently a place where I've also spent a lot of time. So this is what I'm trying to do. I'm going to try to answer the question of the relationship between this outbreak of protests that we're living through and the shifts in the economic order by asking a more basic question right and an old question that goes back obviously to Marx of who is the revolutionary class and here I think are what I would consider to be the two dominant explanations right and when we say that who is the revolutionary class what I'm really trying to get at are what are the demographics of the protest right who are the actual protesters and why are they protesting and can we slot them into existing ideological frameworks that we have and that we continue to rely on not only to explain the emergence of these protests but also to assess whether or not they are effective how are they organizing how are they articulating the demands does any of this even matter right and I think that the two dominant approaches that we have had can be categorized here in these nice two pictures one of course the Marxist tradition in which the industrial worker is positioned as the revolutionary class right and so here you see some propaganda from China where you have the workers of the world literally uniting to foment revolution obviously the the Marxist interpretation protest is still strong but not as influential especially in the global north as it once was and so we have what I would call the civil society model represented on the picture on the right and there you have these highly well organized organizations that operate within this thing called civil society right mostly middle class people who articulate clear and concise demands upon government and the entire industry of social movement research in the global north tends to privilege this model of organizing and mostly finds that movements in the global south fail to adhere to what I refer to as a civil society model of social movements right these are you know well we'll come to this because I don't have a lot of time let me let me summarize what I think these two models emphasize in terms of how they understand who the revolutionary class is so obviously in the Marxist you have the the urban proletariat the industrial working class who is centered in these analyses it's primarily a structural argument right the focus is on the role of the industrial worker in the means of production the basic model of political change that it advances this idea that these protests will lead to the emergence of a vanguard political party with the explicit objective of capturing state power right in contrast the more liberal model what I refer to as a civil society model is a contingent model it looks a lot more at the organization of the protests themselves is a lot of emphasis on what we might consider a form of respectability politics are the protesters nonviolent are they well organized do they articulate clear demands upon government do they coordinate with political parties to make democratic demands and participate in the democratic process and then we assess whether they are successful or not based on whether they are able to translate their popular action into some sort of legislative reform okay my general starting point here is that both of these models are inadequate to explain the ongoing upsurge of protest and let me go back here to a series of protests that started to break out in Africa in the early 2010s these were some of the biggest ones they were part of what were referred to as the Occupy wave of protest the largest Occupy protests in the world actually unfolded in Lagos Nigeria or Nigeria in general these were protests called Occupy Nigeria most people didn't hear about these but something like five million people Nigerians participated in these protests they almost brought down the Nigerian state over two weeks they engage in these protests and I want to show you here how the president of Nigeria responded to these protests because I think this attitude that governments took to the protesters was common in many of the cases that I've looked at since then right and I won't read this to you explicitly but you see here a certain disdain for the nature of the protests they were unfolding during this period right where governments explicitly dismiss the protesters as rioters and this I think is part of the difficulty we have in terms of explaining this recent outbreak of protests because they do not conform to our existing models of how protesters should behave right and as soon as they use violence as soon as they fail to articulate clear and concise demands on on the state we tend to dismiss them as rioters or in some cases as terrorists so here are some of the questions that I'm trying to answer in this project to come back to the sort of starting statement that I made I do think there's something going on at the global level that we need to pay a lot more attention to specifically how changes in the global political economy are impacting social movements across the global south this is a point that I think Alcindor was making very eloquently and I want to just emphasize it here why is it that people have lost faith in the institutions of democracy right there's a way in which a lot of social scientists have emphasized the idea of a democratic retreat globally there's a lot of hanging I think in policy circles there's much less questioning about the nature of democracy that was implemented in many of the countries across the global south and whether or not the political party especially the opposition political parties that took power as a result of this democratic opening in the 1990s have actually fulfilled their function of representing oppositional perspectives across the global south with a civil society I mean I think again this is a concept that was really developed in a particular context of the global north of the West that has been exported to explain non-institutional politics across the global south I don't think it's particularly useful I think it's helpful to keep it as a category but as I'll talk about I don't think it helps us understand what's actually unfolding in many of these societies and then the basic question of who is the revolutionary class and I'm going to go through this fairly quickly but some of these ideas about critiques of civil society in particular are were questions I took up in this book with Adam Branch they came out in 2015 that was looking at African protests specifically and I think some of the ideas I'm working on here build on the analysis that we developed here and in particular the kind of wave of protests that we started documenting in Africa beginning in 2005 what I kind of cheekily referred to here is the anti-post neocolonial protest which I've been unfolding at a pretty steady clip across the African continent since 2005 you know I won't go into this much but you know the common story right people observe a spike in fuel prices or bread prices initially it draws a certain group of people out into the streets challenge these the rising costs of living and then very quickly they morph as Alcindor was selling us into these demands for the fall of the government itself right so how do we make sense of these kinds of protests I think again both the Marxist and liberal models are very unhelpful in terms of understanding the politics of these types of protests and I think there's a way in which we often dismiss the actual transformative potential of these groups as they take to the streets to give you a sense of how things have unfolded since we wrote this book you can see here's just a slide from the economist that these protests very much continue across Africa right I think in many ways but one of the things we argued in the book is that the so-called Arab Spring actually had its roots in Africa and that shouldn't actually be considered part of this larger wave of protests that have been unfolding in Africa since 2005 and that continues into the present day if we look at it globally we can see and I think as other presenters have already made clear that these protests are not unique to Africa that they are unfolding across the world we have seen a steady increase in protests since 2009 globally in every region of the world right and obviously when I'm making generalizations on a global scale I know that my analysis wouldn't apply to every country all the time but I think that there is some patterns that we can try to discern here how am I doing on time okay I'm gonna try to rush through just a few ideas and obviously I'm not gonna be able to talk about this in detail but there's a few things that are unfolding in the African context that again I think are relevant for understanding these protests across the global south and potentially in the global north one of course is the rise of Asia China in particular Asia has become Africa's largest trading partner by far much of this has been driven by the commodity boom right most African countries have been growing pretty steadily since 1995 but this has led to a massive increase in inequality right because most of the growth has been concentrated in the commodity sectors it's actually led to a phenomenon very interesting that's also unfolding in places of Latin like Latin America and South Asia that economists refer to as premature deindustrialization so the classic model of economic growth is the idea that you attract foreign direct investment and that leads to more middle-class jobs usually through the expansion of the industrial sector that's not happening in Africa it's actually been leading to a process of premature deindustrialization places like Kenya for example had a higher share of workers in the industrial sector in the 1980s than they have today and this is not unique to Kenya but unfolding across the African continent and the overall tendency that we've seen here is that there has been tremendous growth across Africa but no reduction in poverty right in fact Africa has become the home of inequality globally even though we don't think of African countries as being particularly unequal nine of the 12 most unequal countries in the world are actually in Africa and that includes very poor countries like the Central African Republic as well as much richer countries like South Africa right so what is the connection to the political right I think here is where I'm trying to draw these connections between what's happening at the global level economically and what's happening at the political level right if we think about the period of 1945 to 2001 as being kind of the emergence and consolidation of something we might call the Western liberal order I think it's fairly clear I don't know exactly when we would pinpoint the date that that liberal order is collapsing has collapsed and then here are some of the ways that I would think characterized it right and it's being replaced by something else I don't know what we want to call this but a rise of populist nationalism what's been referred to as democratic backsliding isolationism we all know these trends from our own country they're not unique to any particular country but seem to be a common phenomenon let me jump ahead here because I think I need to move ahead these are all specific to the African context I want to get to this point which I think is really important is to try to look at this historically about what this transformation of the international economic system did to domestic order within African countries and how useful that is for understanding the rise of protests in particular in the 1980s as Africa was a democratizing prior to the 1980s only three African countries were classified as democracies the nature of democratization was very much of a neoliberal variety right so that it emphasized elections and the emergence of political parties but not the possibility of radical political transformation and the Malawian economist Tandika and Kandawire coined the phrase choice this democracy in the 1980s to explain this process of democratization essentially one in which you had at one point very robust communist parties opposition parties that called for radical transformations of the economy but in order for them to participate in the democratic game they were forced to abandon any sort of agenda for economic transformation right and so you've had this long-term disciplining of African opposition parties where regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum they tend to espouse the exact same set of economic policies and this is really important to explain the larger loss of trust that ordinary people have in the political system because essentially what they're being presented with even under the rubric of a democracy are political parties that espouse the same economic agenda it is striking that in Africa's 55 countries for example there are no left governments right that's extraordinary when you think about the history of robust communist parties across Africa that since the 1990s none have taken power this includes parties like the African National Congress which till this day right is a member of the Socialist International but has been a champion of a particular type of neoliberal capitalism right so if we want to understand why people lost faith in the in the democratic system right I don't think it's easy I think it's too easy to put that on on authoritarian charismatic populist leaders there's a larger inability of the democratic system itself to tackle some of these economic transformations that are unfolding I think I'm out of time so let me just jump ahead because I have some cool pictures I think just one last point here about civil society right much of our models now civil society especially I live in New York City is really concerned about this outbreak of a protest is trying to figure out ways to engage with these social movements figuring out ways to discipline social movements right much of this happens under the auspices of what's referred to as philanthropy capitalism it's basically trying to mold these unruly and disruptive movements into civil society like our liberal social movements right by providing them resources to organize providing them training we have all kinds of centers in New York and DC that take activists from the Global South put them through these trainings to try to teach them how to work within the democratic system it is obviously problems with the ways in which we have created this industry to engage with social movements and to bring them into these models of organizing that don't actually have much impact in our own societies let alone are unlikely to bring change to societies abroad we've seen this across the African context but I think in many other places right this thing called civil society that we tend to have a lot of faith in as being an agent of agent transformative change largely fails to do that and I think there's an interesting research agenda that has emerged around the concept of the civil society elite right these are our people who you know may have their roots in activist communities but over time getting incorporated into these non-governmental organizations that by their nature cannot advance more radical transformative agendas out of time okay so let me just show some pictures because my basic point here is that I think we need to pay a lot more attention to two populations right the urban underclass and the rural poor because they are often left out of analysis for reasons that I think I'm trying to articulate and that brings me to you know what's been happening across Africa and elsewhere just some pictures and I'll end on this these were the some of the protests that I first started got getting interested in these questions right there's a lot of protests unfolding in rural parts of Africa that nobody's paying attention to I think we see similar dynamics and in South Asia and Latin America as well these were a series of protests I visited back in 2013 you know over a gas pipeline so the pipeline itself was being funded by Chinese money the villagers protested the government again is not protecting the interests of the villagers they instead went in and destroyed the village right and you can see very similar to the Nigerian president the Tanzanian president at the time basically criticized the protesters for protesting the extraction of their own resources if you look at lucha a group in the Democratic Republic of Congo it's not surprising that it emerged in eastern Congo the more rural part of the country rather than the capital Kinshasa similarly you see how the government responds to their attempts to draw to criticize the nature of the political regime that's in power I think it's really important to look at the words of activists and I'll end on on this slide and just one more slide I think that gets at this and especially their suspicion of the role of the international community right lucha has a very sophisticated critique I think this is why Alcindor was was quoting Fred Bauma but they have many different leaders who are drawing a similar type of analysis pointing out the global forces that are driving them onto the streets and here they even extended that analysis to the role of the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of Congo in ways that again I don't think we take seriously enough and let me let me leave it with that because I know I'm over time thank you so much