Youth in Revolt

by Gordon Brown  | January 14, 2013 12:00 AM EST

Why protests in India and Pakistan herald a trend.

The new year has begun—just as 2012 ended—with young people on the march. Literally. This week it is young Indians, shocked by the murder of a medical student, who dominate the street rallies that are demanding proper protection for women against rape. 

A few weeks before, it was thousands of young Pakistanis who responded to the shooting of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, forming the majority in the mass protests calling for an end to the discrimination that locks girls out of school.

 Defying doom-laden forecasts that social progress is not possible in today’s fragile world economy, 2013 is likely to be marked by a rising number of demonstrations for young people and by young people—demanding that their rights be taken seriously and opportunity be delivered.

For these recent assertions of their rights by young people in Pakistan and India are not isolated incidents but part of a new wave of change. In Bangladesh, would-be teenage brides and teenage boys are now, for the first time, leading grassroots campaigns to declare their communities “child marriage-free zones.” Even before the Indian rape, Nepal had been witnessing widespread demonstrations condemning violence against women. In Burma, a campaign against child trafficking brought 200,000 young people to that country’s first open-air pop concert of modern times. And again in India, a march against child labor was led by 100 boys and girls who, at ages as young as 8, 9, and 10, had been rescued from bonded labor.

Of course, the outrages we have witnessed in India and Pakistan would certainly have evoked an angry response at any time—but, left to adults alone, the protests would almost certainly have come and gone, to be filed in the category of one more terrible rape, one more awful shooting, one more disgraceful act of violence against girls.

What is new is that today’s generation of young people have themselves become far more assertive in demanding that their rights be upheld than the adults who are responsible for watching over them.

If the years 2010 and 2011 signaled the start of a rights revolution led by young adults in the Middle East and North Africa, in the years 2012 and now 2013 the rights of even younger girls and boys are being thrust on to the agenda by teenagers themselves. After decades of adult complacency dominated by a false assumption that progress to end child exploitation—whether it be child labor, forced marriage, or discrimination against girls—was only a matter of time and somehow inexorable, it is the victims of the world’s inaction who are forcing the world to wake up to the reality that change will only happen if it is made to happen.

And, fortunately, there is no sign of this demand for change abating in 2013. Late last year, more than 2 million signed petitions calling for free universal education in Pakistan, not least because of the campaigning genius and technology of the activist group Avaaz, which rallied the international community in response to Malala’s shooting. But in the first few days of 2013, 1 million Pakistani girls and boys who have themselves been denied education have been signing an updated petition demanding urgent action on their behalf to deliver basic schooling. 

An anti-child-labor petition, also supported by Avaaz, calling on India to end child slavery has already attracted 600,000 signatures—mainly from young people themselves. The organizations V-Day and One Billion Rising have called for young women in Africa and Asia to rise up on Feb. 14 and be part of what they call “a catalytic moment” to demand an end to violence against females. Young women in Africa, from Kenya to Somalia to Ghana, are planning what, for thousands, will be their first-ever major demonstrations against rape and violence.

And, as a result of this growing and insistent pressure from young people, long-delayed, long-overdue change is starting to happen. Next month, the Indian Parliament will be under pressure to vote to outlaw, for the first time, all child labor for children under 14. Following a decision last month by the Burmese government—prompted by a great philanthropist, Andrew Forrest, and the anti-slavery organization Walk Free—to sign a historic agreement to outlaw all forms of slavery, a host of other countries are being pressed into change. And the world’s 27 largest multinational businesses, worth $5 trillion in sales, are now also under pressure from Walk Free and young people who are demanding that by April this year they pledge to remove slave labor from every part of their supply chains—or face criticism and, potentially, boycotts or direct action.

So why in these austere financial times, when the world is reeling from low growth, high unemployment, and financial volatility—and when you might expect a pause in progressive change—is a movement for basic rights that might have expected to do better in times of affluence starting to flourish?

The answer lies in the very nature of the changes wrought by globalization itself. Today’s globalization is characterized by two massively transformative forces: first, the free flow of capital and second, the global sourcing of goods and services, both of which play a key role in opening up the world. And, in their wake, globalization is being defined by a third force: our capacity to communicate instantaneously with anyone, anywhere in the world. Of course, there is a huge and as-yet-inconclusive debate about the difference new media made to the Arab Spring—but what is undeniable is that, with the Internet, mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube unlocking an infinite set of opportunities for people on one continent to talk to people on another, we can never return to the times a decade ago when, in many countries, sentries stood over fax machines to prevent outside influences from infiltrating their nation. 

And it is this, our ability to know, share, and compare knowledge and experience across old barriers and all frontiers, that is now showing it has the potential to radicalize a new generation. In places where for centuries your rights have been only what your rulers decreed and your status and wealth what someone else ascribed to you, young people are asking questions. In countries where for centuries it was accepted that if your grandparents and parents were poor you must be too—and if you were born without the chance to flourish, so too must your children and your children’s children be—young people are saying this is not the way they see it. In continents where, if you were a girl, you were inevitably trapped in the circumstances of your birth, all your life’s choices dictated by ¬centuries-old patriarchal assumptions, young people are starting to defy the ancient ruling orthodoxies and to assert that, irrespective of gender, race, or religion, every single person has basic rights, that power derives from the people, and that the duty of the state is to meet your needs, uphold your rights, and advance your opportunities.

And as young people find out more about what is happening to other young people, their aspirations rise and they start to discover the emptiness of some of the central claims we have made about the benefits of globalization. For every day the myth that we are now in a world where there is opportunity for all who aspire and strive—that we are all now, somehow, free to rise as far as our talents and work can take us—is being exposed.

And as young people compare their experiences with others across the globe, they are discovering that the vast inequalities in their material circumstances are not so much to do with how intelligent they are, how much merit they have, or how little or hard they work, but where they were born and whom they were born to.

That is why at the heart of protests from the Arab Spring to the Global March Against Child Labour in India to the campaign for child marriage-free zones in Bangladesh is a rejection of the view that one’s status at birth is a permanent condition. Instead, we are starting to see an assertion of the truth that what should matter is not where you come from but where you are going, and that, even if we cannot shape our original circumstances, we can at least shape our response to that fate. It is a demand for opportunity founded on a desire to be treated with dignity—¬regardless of where or to whom you are born. If we are not careful it will unlock a generational battle—between an older generation who will try to hold on to their social security, health, and pension benefits, irrespective of what is happening to youth employment, and the young, who will feel pushed out of the free education and employment opportunities that previous Western generations of young people had as a right.

This growing global consciousness poses some difficult questions for the richest countries too. We will be asked why, when we know that as much as 80 percent of global inequality is due to birth and background and that education is the one real driver of equality of opportunity, there is still so little international support for investment in education.

We will have to explain why our patterns of educational spending compound rather than correct or compensate for these inequalities—why, for example, we invest just $400 on the education of the typical African child from birth to 16 compared with $100,000 for a Western child; why a paltry $14 is the total amount of all annual international aid supporting that African child; why London, with a population of 8 million, has almost 20,000 girls in the final year of secondary education and South Sudan, with a population of 10 million, has just 400.

You do not need to subscribe to the politics of envy—indeed, I have never believed that for some to do well others have to do badly—to agree that bridging the gap between what young people are and what they have it in themselves to become is what Condoleezza Rice has called “the civil-rights issue of our generation,” and that mobilizing the talent of their young through better schools and higher teaching standards is the only sure way of unlocking the potential of the poorest countries in the world.

An April summit in Washington led by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Kim will require concrete action from off-track countries to move children from the exploitation that is leading to today’s protests to the education that is now denied but can help correct this. A century ago, in his younger, more radical days, Winston Churchill talked of the gap between the excesses of accumulated wealth and what he called “the gaping sorrows of the left-out millions.” We will hear more of this in 2013—and it will come from the voices of youth.

Twenty reasons why revolutions are everywhere

Paul Mason | 19:07 UK time, Saturday, 5 February 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/correspondents/paulmason/

We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.

What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?

My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study this and also the participants themselves.

At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for.

In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:

1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future

2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany.

3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable.

4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected.

5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman.

6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.

7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.

8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.

9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.

10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.

11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.

12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.

13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas twith he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village.

14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met people who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy; then they're writing a book about something completely different. I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this week.

15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be more complex because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline.

16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour revolutons - the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a "meme" that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak.

17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here - it is for example the things people swap by text message, the music they swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc which those in authority fail to spot.

18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed.

19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites.

20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the individual.

Some complications....

a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such.

b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters.

c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to go online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the oppositional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world.

d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out.

e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than just the protesters.

(For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has quickly become a "meme" that crosses political tribal boundaries under the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the contents of Hansard.)

That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments.

Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you may, vent your analog-era spleen below.

Shared symbolism of global youth unrest

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22976409?print=true

The language and the time zone changes but, from Turkey and Bulgaria to Brazil, the symbolism of protest is increasingly the same.

The Guy Fawkes masks, the erection of tent camps, the gas masks and helmets improvised in response to the use of tear gas as a means of collective punishment. The handwritten signs - scrawled in defiance of the state's power and the uniformity of the old, collective protests of yesteryear.

And the youthfulness of the core protesters.

In Gezi Park, Istanbul, before it was cleared by police, I saw school-age teenagers turn up regularly, each afternoon in small groups, colonise what was left of the lawn and start their homework.

The pictures coming out of Sao Paulo tell a similar story.

Bypassing the state

In both cities, people born in a post-ideological era are using what symbols they can to tell a story of being modern, urban and discontented: the national flag and the shirt of the local football team are memes common to both Istanbul and Sao Paulo.

But what is driving the discontent?

When I covered the unrest in Britain and southern Europe in 2011, the answer was clear. A whole generation of young people has seen economic promises cancelled: they will work probably until their late sixties, come out of university with lifetime-crippling debts.

And, as American students famously complained in 2009, the jobs they get when they leave university are often the same jobs they did, part-time, when they were at university. I've met qualified civil engineers in Greece whose job was waiting table; the fact that I met them on a riot tells you all you need to know.

With the Arab Spring, it seemed different - from the outside: these were fast-growing economies - in Libya's case spectacularly fast. But here you hit something that makes this wave of unrest unique: this is the first generation whose lives, and psychology, have been shaped by ready access to information technology and social media.

We know what this does: it makes state propaganda, censorship and a government-aligned mainstream media very easy to bypass. Egyptian state TV totally lost credibility during the first days of the uprisings against President Hosni Mubarak. This month, when Turkish TV stations tried to pull the same kind of non-reporting of unrest, they were bombarded with complaints.

"But," one politics professor told me, "most of the complaints were from people aged over 35. The youth don't watch TV, and in any case they have never believed what's on the news."

Social media makes it possible to organise protests fast, to react to repression fast, and to wage a quite successful propaganda war that makes the mainstream media and the spin machines of governments look foolish.

At the same time, it encourages a relatively "horizontal" structure to the protests themselves. Taksim Square in Istanbul was rare for having a 60-strong organising group; the protests in Sao Paulo have followed the more general pattern of several organising groups and an amorphous network of people who simply choose themselves where to turn up, what to write on their banners, and what to do.

As I arrived in Istanbul, some of my contacts in financial markets were mystified: why are they protesting when it is one of the fastest growing places on earth?

Get down to street level and the answer was clear. In the first place, many of the young educated people I spoke to complained that "the wealth is going to the corrupt elite"; many pointed out that despite being doctors, civil engineers, dotcom types etc, they could not afford a place to live.

'Perfectly ordinary people'

But then there was the bigger grievance: they felt the religious conservative government of the AK Party was impinging on their freedom. One Turkish fashion writer- no natural revolutionary - complained of "a growing, insidious hostility to the modern".

And they saw the heavy police action against the original tent camp in Gezi Park - an environmental protest - as a symbol of this unfreedom.

In Sao Paulo, the grievances are more clearly social: "Fewer stadiums, more hospitals", reads one banner. The rising price of transport, combined with the government's determination to prioritise infrastructure and sports stadia, are what this has come to be about.

But again, last week, it was an allegedly disproportionate police action - the arrest of a journalist for carrying vinegar (to dull the sting of tear gas), the shooting of four journalists with rubber bullets - which led to escalation.

In each case, the effects of police action are magnified by the ability of protesters to send images of brutality around the world immediately. And as a veteran of reporting more than 30 years' worth of "non-lethal" law enforcement, my impression is that the use of CS, baton rounds, water cannon is pushing police procedures all over the world towards "near lethal" levels that are increasingly unacceptable to protesters who go on the streets with no violent intent.

Though smaller by comparison, the Bulgarian protests that on Wednesday removed a controversial head of state security speak to the issues that unite those taking to the streets in many countries: it is not about poverty, say protesters, it is about corruption, the sham nature of democracy, clique politics and an elite prepared to grab the lion's share of the wealth generated by economic development.

In short, just as in 1989, when we found that people in East Europe preferred individual freedom to communism, today capitalism is becoming identified with the rule of unaccountable elites, lack of effective democratic accountability, and repressive policing.

And what the events of the last three years have shown is that perfectly ordinary people, with no ideological axe to grind, have found the means to resist it.