World-historical structure and dynamics of protest waves on the global south, 1894–2010

In this research, I attempt to examine the world-historical structure and dynamics of protest waves on the global South over the twentieth century. From a world-historical perspective, we can find the process that each single protest located in different regions is linked to each other by the world-scale layer of governance structure and the incidence of popular protest is related to cyclical rhythms of the world-economy, particularly to cycles of global hegemony and rivalry. For overall mapping out world-historical pattern of protest waves, I use the New York Times Index and the Times Index to generate systemic and long-term records of popular protest.

One of the most immediately distinguishable features of the world-historical protest wave in the global South is the interrelationship between worldwide radical mobilizations and the worldwide intensification of nationalism and democratization. In the initial observations, there are found that key movement clusters of the period in overall popular protests in the global South are the year during the great resistance for national liberation and democratization in Latin America, Asia, and Africa in 1929-1937, 1958-1968 and in Asia and Eastern Europe in 1986-1990. The results show to concentrate on charting temporal and spatial diffusion of antisystemic movements across a large set of countries.

From this overview, I draw out the following questions to compare each period and location: First, why did protest activity frequently appear in 1930s, 1960s, and the late 1980s than others? Second, what were the social bases of the protest waves and where were the geographic locations of these clusters? Third, what was the main issue of each protest cluster? Fourth, what kind of movement ideology did support the mobilization? Fifth, what is the interrelationship between the current protest waves and the past protest waves?