Our Time of Resistance

Corruption, hardship, and autocratic overreach and brutality drive global protests, and the US is no exception

We are living through an astonishing global wave of protest, which is rarely given the headlines it deserves. We hear all about the supposedly inevitable march of autocracy, and not enough at the big-picture level about the mostly peaceful mobilizations that have swept the world in the last decade. A 2020 Center for Strategic and International Studies report that this wave of global protest is “historically unprecedented in frequency, scope and size” is even truer now.

Since 2017, Chile, the United States, Israel, China, Belarus, Tunisia, Kenya, Venezuela, Serbia, and Poland are among the countries that have experienced their biggest demonstrations in decades— or ever. In Turkey, outrage at the jailing of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu has sparked the largest protests since the 2013 Gezi Square manifestations, and millions are on the streets in Iran in the biggest challenge to the clerical regime in many years.

The United States is on this same path. The 2017 Women’s March was the largest demonstration in national history, only to be surpassed by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which engaged more than 20 million people. Both protests had electoral outcomes that renewed the political class from the bottom up, with thousands of people inspired by the protests to run for local, state, and national office in the 2018 and 2022 midterms. In 2025, we have seen robust organized protests (Hands Off, No Kings) as well as spontaneous mobilizations of individuals and the birth of networks of community assistance in response to ICE brutality.

People protest the killing of Renee Good, Minneapolis, January 10, 2025. Charly Triballeau/AFP, via Getty Images

“Gen-Z” protests have their own momentum. They have upended entrenched political elites in Peru and Madagascar, and toppled governments in Nepal and elsewhere. “Mass citizen protests have driven the region’s most dramatic political changes in recent years,” writes Paul Staniland of actions in South Asia.

Each protest is unique, and most are sparked by national or local events, although inaction on the climate crisis has engaged demonstrators worldwide, as have autocratic atrocities in Ukraine and Palestine.

Here I am focusing on people demonstrating against their governments in the name of dignity, bodily autonomy, the ability to earn a living wage, and basic human rights –the right not to be exploited and seen as a state enemy to be treated with abuse and violence.

“Corruption, [autocratic] overreach, and hardship” drove this category of protest in 2025, concludes a Carnegie Council article. A recent study of resistance in Thailand (2020) and Bangladesh (2024) argues similarly that institutional overreach and brutal repression by autocrats can create the conditions for mass mobilization.

In democracies, protests have expressed the desire for more democratic and equitable forms of governance, with protest rising due to frustration with entrenched elites and the acceleration of wealth concentration.

Flip the Script: People Want More Democracy, Not Less

Other protests take place in countries where democracy has been severely damaged due to autocratic power grabs that shred constitutional rights, engage in blatant corruption and human rights abuses, and may also militarize civil society by deploying state security forces and allied gangs as enforcers. The United States is now among these examples.

Protests in Established Dictatorships: Iran and China

Protest is growing even in places where it is very dangerous to dissent. in June 2022, Iranian women openly mocked the regime’s annual National Hijab and Chastity Day for the first time, “celebrating” the holiday by going bare-headed. When Mahsa Amini died in police custody three months later for violations of the morality code, tens of thousands of Iranian women were ready to take into the streets bare-headed, and some cut their hair in public. The protests, which continued into 2023, planted the seeds of future anti-authoritarian action.

Iranian women protesting, 2022-2023. Photo Credit: Arab Center, Washington D.C.

“This is a spontaneous civil rights movement made up of people at their wit’s end — unable to afford basic life necessities while forced to adhere to the oppressive rules of a religious autocracy that promised to take care of its people,” wrote journalist Suzanne Kianpour in January 2023. A new phase of that movement is developing all over Iran.

In China, a collective experience of dehumanization sparked the protests of 2022, which were the largest since 1989’s Tiananmen Square. They started as a reaction to draconian pandemic lockdowns of factories and residences. Young people also appear to have less tolerance for the inauthenticity that prevails in long-established autocracies, with everyone outwardly performing obedience to state propaganda, even when the facts contradict it. “Life in China is saturated with pretense,” writes the artist Al Weiwei, who lives in exile. “In a place where everything is fake...anyone who stands up to quibble about the truth seems naive, even childlike.”

When 10 people died from a fire in a locked-down high-rise in Urumqi, something shifted. An astonishing 79 universities had demonstrations, and some Chinese even called for Xi Jinping to step down. Thousands of people took to the streets, holding candlelight vigils and makeshift shrines in rare public shows of anger against the state. “I felt like finally I could say what I’ve wanted to say,” Kira Qao, a Shanghai sales manager, told a New York Times journalist, speaking for many.

The protests caught the Chinese regime by surprise. It abruptly ended the lockdowns, but sent university students home early, and arrested many protesters. As in Iran, Xi’s government has no response other than heightened repression to growing demands to be treated with respect and care.

Why Resistance Will Continue to Grow

This is one reason resistance will continue to spread in the coming years. Dictatorships are not built to navigate a future in which survival of climate-change, disasters, resource scarcity, a shrinking labor force, and armed conflict will require fact-based communications, community, care, altruism, and other things such states work hard to suppress.

Time and again, when the state becomes a hostile force, or is absent at times of crisis, people have come together to mourn the dead, forge networks of assistance and solidarity, and engage in spontaneous and righteous action to help those being targeted. Resistance rises when the toll of organized lying and negligent and malevolent governance becomes difficult to ignore. All of this is now unfolding in the United States. It is our turn to mobilize peacefully in the face of abuses of power.