Global Protest Movements — How Solidarity Spreads Across Borders Now

To understand what's new, look at what was.

In 1848, there was a wave of revolutions across Europe — France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary. Historians call it the Springtime of Nations. It looked, at the time, almost miraculous. One country caught fire, then another, then another, over about six months. Nobody had seen anything like it.

The mechanisms of spread: newspapers, which took days to weeks to carry news across borders. Traveling revolutionaries, often exiles, who physically moved between cities. Diplomatic cables, which were only just becoming fast. A shared educated class that read the same pamphlets.

The 1848 revolutions mostly failed. They failed in part because spread was fast enough to ignite but slow enough that the old regimes had time to coordinate suppression.

Jump to 1968. Paris, Prague, Mexico City, Chicago, Tokyo. Another wave. This time the mechanism included television, which was a qualitative shift. You could see, in motion, what was happening in Paris from a couch in Tokyo. But you saw it hours or a day later, edited, framed. And the infrastructure for taking that inspiration and organizing was still telephone, mimeograph, and physical meeting.

1989 is the next landmark. The collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. The wave ran through Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania in sequence over a few months. Television was central. So was fax. A West German broadcast could be seen in East Germany and that shaped the Berlin protests. A printed Polish Solidarity leaflet could reach Prague in days.

In each case — 1848, 1968, 1989 — something traveled. Ideas, tactics, courage. But the speed of transmission never exceeded the speed of state response.

What changed, starting roughly in 2009 with the Iranian Green Movement, was that the speed flipped.

The internet gets blamed or credited for a lot. Let me be more precise about what the specific affordances are.

Live imagery. Smartphones mean every protest has cameras. Hundreds, thousands of cameras, from inside. You are no longer dependent on the state broadcaster or the stringer from Reuters. You see what's happening from the eye level of a participant. The emotional bandwidth of this is massive.

Lowered coordination costs. Clay Shirky's old observation still holds. Getting fifty people to show up at the same time at the same place used to require a week of phone calls. Now it's a Telegram group. The marginal cost of adding participant 51, and 500, and 5,000, is roughly zero.

Asynchronous sustained narrative. Twitter/X, TikTok, Instagram let a movement maintain a narrative arc across days and weeks without needing a newspaper. This is different from 1968, where attention from mass media came and went on a news cycle.

Tactical transfer. Specific techniques invented in one context can be documented and shared. The "be water" tactic from Hong Kong — decentralized crowds that form, dissolve, reform elsewhere — was adopted in Belarus, in Thailand, in Iran. The laser pointers aimed at police cameras, invented in Hong Kong, showed up in Chile. The leaderless model, borrowed from Occupy, spread to Arab Spring, then back westward into BLM.

Translation. As covered elsewhere in Law 1, the translation layer means that a Spanish-speaker can see a Hong Kong protestor's post in near-real-time with reasonable fidelity.

Diaspora networks. Every major protest movement has a diaspora layer. Iranians in Los Angeles amplifying the 2022 protests. Hong Kongers in London coordinating after 2019. The diaspora is both an amplifier and a safe-haven for organizing.

These affordances together produce a qualitatively different diffusion pattern. Movements don't just spread. They learn. Each one builds on the last.

Two bodies of research are essential here.

Asef Bayat on the Arab Spring. Bayat, who is Iranian-American, has been writing about Middle Eastern social movements for decades. His key argument in Revolution Without Revolutionaries (2017) and earlier work is that the Arab Spring was not the product of organized revolutionary parties. It was the product of what he calls "nonmovements" — loose, decentralized, aspirational practices that millions of people were already engaged in (dressing a certain way, using the internet, living certain lifestyles) that became political in the moment. When the trigger came — Bouazizi's self-immolation in Tunisia — the nonmovement could become a movement because the latent coordination already existed in lifestyle.

This is important for understanding why some protests spread and some don't. You don't need pre-existing organization. You need pre-existing aspiration.

Erica Chenoweth on nonviolent mobilization. Chenoweth's work, most famously Why Civil Resistance Works (with Maria Stephan, 2011), is statistical. They looked at 323 major violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006. Their finding: nonviolent campaigns succeeded about 53% of the time. Violent campaigns succeeded about 26% of the time. The 3.5% rule — that no campaign has failed once it mobilized 3.5% of the population in active participation — comes from this work.

Chenoweth has since updated the data. Nonviolent campaigns are getting less successful over time (down to 34% success in the 2010s). The hypothesis: digital organization makes movements faster to mobilize but more fragile, less institutionally deep, more vulnerable to co-option and suppression.

This is a crucial finding. The same infrastructure that lets solidarity travel may be producing shallower movements. The spread is real. The depth is declining.

Zeynep Tufekci on networked protest. Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas (2017) argues that digitally-organized movements reach larger initial size faster but struggle with "the logistics of tactical flexibility" — they have less institutional memory, less negotiation capacity, less ability to do the unglamorous work of sustaining pressure over years. Her example is Tahrir Square: enormous, inspiring, and then the revolutionary coalition had no capacity to negotiate a political settlement when Mubarak fell. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had decades of institutional depth, walked in.

These three bodies of work together tell a coherent story. The internet era produces more, faster, more transnational protest than ever before. It also produces, on average, shallower, more fragile, more easily-defeated protest.

Not every horror goes global. Why?

Some of the factors:

Narrative legibility. A story has to be translatable into a short, transportable form. George Floyd's death had a nine-minute video, a clear villain, a clear victim, a clear moral stake. The Uyghur genocide — arguably a worse ongoing horror — has been harder to translate into a single legible narrative and has mobilized less solidarity. Sheer magnitude does not predict spread.

Identification. People mobilize for people they can imagine being. The George Floyd protests in Europe were partly about local racial issues — Afro-Europeans saw themselves in the story. The 2022 Iran protests spread because women everywhere could imagine a hair-cutting as themselves. Movements that feel "local" to a specific culture travel less.

Tactical legibility. "Cut your hair" is a transportable tactic. "Go block the central square for forty days" is not. Movements that offer a short, personal, performable act of solidarity mobilize broader participation than movements that require deep context.

Platform amplification. What the algorithms lift matters. Twitter amplifies certain kinds of moral outrage. TikTok amplifies certain kinds of aesthetic performance. Instagram amplifies certain kinds of visual clarity. The platform's taste is part of whether a movement spreads.

Geopolitical frame. Movements that fit the current geopolitical narrative of Western powers get amplified by Western media. Movements that don't fit get less. The 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests fit. The ongoing farmer and labor protests in India have not received proportional attention. This is a constraint on the "global solidarity" narrative worth noticing.

Backlash cost. If being seen supporting a movement is dangerous in your context, the movement spreads less. Movements that are cheap to signal support for (a hashtag, a profile frame) get more than movements that require actual risk.

The picture that emerges: solidarity is not uniformly distributed. It concentrates along channels that are narratively, tactically, and geopolitically legible. This is not Law 1 fully realized. It is Law 1 filtered through the current architecture of attention.

Here's a specific chain worth tracing because it shows the mechanism.

Serbia, 2000. The Otpor movement uses a particular set of tactics — ironic branding, decentralized cells, disciplined nonviolence — to bring down Milosevic. Otpor members go on to train activists from other countries.

Ukraine, 2004. Orange Revolution. Otpor-trained organizers involved. Tactics of prolonged encampment in central square, color branding, systematic nonviolence.

Lebanon, 2005. Cedar Revolution.

Georgia, 2003. Rose Revolution.

Egypt, 2011. Tahrir Square. Wael Ghonim and others had been influenced by earlier movements. Otpor training materials circulated in Arabic.

Ukraine, 2013–2014. Euromaidan. The Maidan camp is almost an iteration on Tahrir, which was an iteration on the earlier color revolutions.

Hong Kong, 2014 and 2019. Builds on prior tactics, iterates heavily, produces the "be water" innovation.

Thailand, 2020; Belarus, 2020. Adopt Hong Kong-style tactics — hand signals, umbrellas, decentralized coordination.

Iran, 2022; Bangladesh, 2024. Further adaptations.

At every step, organizers studied the previous movement. Read the memoirs, watched the footage, analyzed what worked and what didn't. Training materials from Otpor have been translated into multiple languages. Workshops have run for decades.

This is tactical knowledge accumulating across the species. It is, in its own way, a CERN of protest — shared, iterated, improved over generations.

States are also studying. The same transfer happens on the other side. Russian, Chinese, Iranian security services have developed sophisticated responses to color-revolution tactics. The cat-and-mouse is global.

It's tempting to treat global protest solidarity as an internet phenomenon. It isn't, or not entirely.

There has always been cross-border protest solidarity among people who felt they shared something. Abolition in the 19th century was genuinely transatlantic — Frederick Douglass in Ireland, British abolitionists funding American allies, Brazilian writers in correspondence with British ones. The labor movement of the late 19th century was explicitly international — the First International met in 1864, May Day was declared globally in 1889. Anti-colonial struggle in the 20th century was transnational — the Bandung Conference of 1955 brought together African and Asian leaders who saw each other as part of the same struggle against Europe.

The feminist movement has always been transnational. The peace movement of the 1960s was explicitly global. The anti-apartheid movement moved goods, people, and money across continents for three decades.

What is ancient is the intuition that the oppressed in one place share something with the oppressed in another. That injustice is a common condition, not a local incident. That the human family is larger than the national family.

What's new is the speed of the mechanism. We have always recognized each other. We now do so faster.

This is worth holding onto. Because the impulse of solidarity is not a product of the internet. It is older than the internet, older than the nation-state, older than writing. The internet is only the latest substrate on which an ancient capacity is running.

Here's the thing that keeps me up at night about this topic.

Global protest solidarity is, by every measure, at an all-time high. The sheer number of people who, in 2020, marched for a stranger killed in a country they will never visit is unprecedented in human history. The infrastructure for this to happen faster, at larger scale, with more sophisticated tactics, continues to improve.

And yet.

World hunger has not been ended. World peace has not been achieved. The trillion dollars that would eliminate extreme poverty has not been raised. The climate transition has not been accomplished.

Why?

Because protest movements, even at their best, are good at stopping specific things. They are less good at building the replacement infrastructure. Mubarak fell; Egypt did not become a liberal democracy. Apartheid ended; South Africa did not become equal. Black Lives Matter forced a global conversation about policing; the global share of GDP going to the bottom quintile has not increased.

Acute mobilization, which is what the new infrastructure is optimized for, is not the same thing as institutional construction.

This is the ceiling Law 1 is hitting. We are better than we have ever been at the flash of recognition — the shared moment of "we are the same, this is wrong, I stand with you." We are not yet better than we have been at the slow work that comes after — the treaty-building, the policy-designing, the agency-forming, the norm-maintaining work that translates moral clarity into lasting change.

What would it take to break that ceiling?

Roughly, I think: movements that plan for the institution-building phase from the start. Movements that explicitly transfer tactical knowledge not just about how to protest but about how to govern. Movements that build and hold enduring organizational capacity, not just viral moments. Movements that are as good at day 1,000 as they are at day 7.

The 3.5% rule works for removing regimes. The much harder number — which we don't yet have data for — is what percentage of a population, sustained over how many years, in how many countries, it takes to build the positive thing on the other side.

Law 1 says we are human, singular species, no real division. Global protest movements are the largest-scale behavioral evidence in history that this is lived, not just said.

They also show the limits of the current infrastructure.

The lesson for Law 1 is twofold.

First: the underlying orientation is not scarce. Tens of millions of people can, in a week, behave as if national borders are less real than shared human dignity. That orientation exists. It can be mobilized. It is not utopian to expect it — it is observable, every few months, somewhere on Earth.

Second: orientation is not enough. The orientation runs through infrastructure, and the current infrastructure is optimized for the sprint, not the marathon. If we want Law 1 to produce not just moments of recognition but sustained human flourishing, we need the equivalent of CERN-grade institutional design paired with the mobilization capacity of 2020.

The premise of this book is that if every person said yes, world hunger ends and world peace arrives. The protest movements show that the yes is closer than we think. The challenge is what happens after the yes.

That's not a failure of the human spirit. It's a failure of institutional imagination.

And the institutional imagination is catchable.

On nonviolent civil resistance: - Chenoweth, Erica & Stephan, Maria. Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia, 2011). The foundational statistical study. - Chenoweth, Erica. Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2021). Accessible updated summary. - NAVCO dataset (Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes). Publicly available.

On the Arab Spring and movement diffusion: - Bayat, Asef. Revolution Without Revolutionaries (Stanford, 2017). Essential. - Lynch, Marc. The Arab Uprisings Explained (Columbia, 2014). Edited volume of scholars. - Khosrokhavar, Farhad. The New Arab Revolutions That Shook the World (Paradigm, 2012).

On networked movements: - Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale, 2017). The sharpest analysis of digital protest. - Castells, Manuel. Networks of Outrage and Hope (Polity, 2012, rev. 2015).

On specific cases: - Ghonim, Wael. Revolution 2.0 (Houghton Mifflin, 2012). Egypt from the inside. - Lee, Ching Kwan & Sing, Ming. Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Political Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell, 2019). - Alpher, Rogel et al. writing on Israeli and Palestinian protest movements for context.

On tactical transfer: - Popovic, Srdja. Blueprint for Revolution (Spiegel & Grau, 2015). The Otpor founder's practical manual. - Sharp, Gene. From Dictatorship to Democracy (1993 and later editions). The foundational playbook that has been translated into over 30 languages.

Exercise 1: Map one diffusion chain. Pick a tactic that caught your attention in a recent protest movement — the Hong Kong umbrellas, the Chilean lasers, the Iranian hair-cutting, the Ukrainian maidan encampment. Trace where the tactic came from and where it went. You will find a genealogy. Notice who was teaching whom, and what was lost or added in translation. This is the real architecture of global solidarity.

Exercise 2: The sustained yes. Think of a cause you have "supported" in the last five years — a hashtag, a donation, a protest attended. Ask honestly: what did I do in the 11 months after the acute moment? What institutional work, however small, did I sustain? The honest answers are usually uncomfortable. The uncomfortable answer is the diagnostic for the ceiling Law 1 is hitting in our era.

Exercise 3: Build one thing. Identify one small institutional capacity — a mutual aid network, a skills-sharing group, a local policy campaign, an international solidarity committee — that could persist for ten years. Commit to it for one year as a pilot. Notice the difference between protest-energy and institution-energy. The first is easy to mobilize. The second is the thing we don't have enough of. Contribute to the second.

The evidence is overwhelming that people across borders increasingly see themselves as part of the same human family. Global protest movements are the most vivid demonstration. They are not a fluke. They are not a Western fantasy. They are a real and growing capacity of our species, running on infrastructure that didn't exist twenty years ago.

But Law 1 is not satisfied by recognition alone. The premise is that if every person said yes — really yes, not just for a week — the impossible becomes possible. The protest movements show we can say yes together. The question is whether we can stay saying yes long enough to build what comes after.

The saying yes, it turns out, is the easier part.

The building is the work.

That's the next chapter of Law 1, and every one of us is already writing it.