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Introduction
The wave of antigovernment protests washing over every region of the world is reshaping the global landscape of governance. Protests have been a crucial barometer of whether governments are delivering for their citizens. The explosion in citizen mobilizations suggests that many governments are not.1 Protests in democracies have laid bare the deep divisions that are realigning pluralist politics, often reflecting a view that traditional mechanisms of representation have failed to address fundamental problems. In authoritarian states, where there are fewer connective mechanisms between governments and citizens, protests are perhaps the single most important tool for citizens to call attention to grievances.
Amid the current climate of pessimism about the state of democracy and fear of rising authoritarianism, protests in authoritarian political environments have sometimes been overlooked. A few major protests in autocracies have attracted significant attention, such as the Hong Kong protests of the past two years and the more recent antigovernment movement in Belarus. However, many other such events, including those in Algeria, Bangladesh, Guinea, and Jordan, have also shaken authoritarian powerholders but not gained a high degree of international visibility or scholarly attention.
This article seeks to help rectify this imbalance by reviewing significant antigovernment protests in authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning states since 2015. It addresses four main questions. First, how common are protests across authoritarian contexts and with what frequency are they occurring within particular states? Second, what are the main triggers of these protests? Third, what forms do they usually take and how long do they last? And fourth, what responses do they engender and what effects do they have—are protests in non-democracies usually consequential or futile?
How Common are Protests in Authoritarian States?
Before addressing the question of how common protests are in fully authoritarian or authoritarian-leaning states (which, for the sake of simplicity, will be referred to herein as "authoritarian states") it is necessary to define the set of countries under study. Given the high degree of variability among the different global political indices in the use of terms relating to authoritarianism, we developed a categorization formula that draws on a mix of the four main indices, as described in endnote 1. This produced a list of 65 states, representing approximately one-third of all states globally. The resulting...