In the run-up to last November’s presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cassandras were easy to findMore…
All posts tagged Tahrir Square
Global Solidarity and the Occupy Movement
On December 1, 2011, twenty-four people joined together in a small Pennsylvania town to show their solidarity with the protesters of Tahrir by targeting a company that makes tear gas used in the suppression of crowds in Tahrir Square. Their numbers were not great, but their example anticipates the kind of consequential solidarity that could develop globally. More than a message gone viral or a day of simultaneous protest about inequality’s injustice, focused actions that publicize the chains of injustice linking distant sites can transform the ways in which we think not only about solidarity, but the conditions movements seek to change.
The Resurgence of the Civic
Occupy Wall Street and cognate groups around the world are part of a protest movement that is both global and local. It is global in terms of geographic scope, thematic range, and social composition. It is local in terms of the specific objects of protest and the protesters’ goals. The organic blending of the global with the local is reflected in the very unfolding of this worldwide wave.
The Global Street Comes to Wall Street
There is an epochal quality to the current wave of street protests, no matter their enormous differences, from the extraordinary courage and determination of protesters in Syria, to the flash crowds convoked via social media to invade commercial blocks in Chile, the United Kingdom, and the United States, to the unarmed Occupiers being tear-gassed, beaten, and arrested by militarized police forces across America.
