Posts tagged protests
Picture of the Day: Moscow, Russia. Police attempt to disperse anti-Putin protesters.
News: After a stint as prime minister under Medvedev, Putin has once again been sworn in as president. He has nominated Medvedev as his prime minister. That’s not an endless revolving door or anything…. His inauguration was met with lots of protesting, and police rounded up anyone wearing the opposition’s symbolic white ribbon, arresting roughly 700 protesters as of Monday evening, and referring many of the young male detainees to the draft office.
Read: Julia Ioffe for the New Yorker’s News Desk: “Putin’s Inauguration: Satire and Violence” and Regina Smyth for the Monkey Cage: “Russia’s Growing Opposition.”
Watch: Video of riot police cracking down on anti-Putin protests.
Credit: Sergey Ponomarev/AP. Via.
View more Picture of the Day posts. Submit a photo.
It’s like 1989 again. But in China, not the Soviet Union. Very odd.
But, seriously, Russia became a model for the new “competitive authoritarian” regime classification. Left unresolved has always been the question of when a “competitive” authoritarian regime simply becomes a traditional authoritarian regime. Has Russia crossed that line yet? Or nyet?
“Shock,” Ana Tijoux’s tribute to Chile’s burgeoning student protest movement. See also the video for “Sacar la Voz.”
I was actually going to use this in class today while we discussed Chile’s unique binominal electoral system.
The unique electoral system—which uses two-seat districts with an open-list PR formula—is a legacy of the Pinochet era. It was consciously designed to ensure that conservatives (about 1/3 of the electorate) could ensure nearly 50% of the seats.
Two decades after the transition to democracy, many Chileans (particularly younger ones with little or no memory of the Pinochet dictatorship) are demanding reforms to the Pinochet-imposed institutional framework.
BTW, you should check out Ana Tijoux’s autobiographical “1977”.
Russians voted today in a hotly contested presidential election—the first truly contested election in recent memory. The official results will certainly favor Putin (that was known months ago). It’s the aftermath that maters.
From newshour:
Margaret Warner reports from Moscow:
“I’ve covered every American presidential election since 1976, and I have to say, I’ve not seen voters more determined than they seemed today in Russia. “In former times, we just lay in the bed,” 60-year-old art historian Natalya Simonova, voting in the village of Desna, told me. But not this time. “This year … we feel we’re not slaves, and we can do something.”“
People are, of course, tweeting about Syria, but interest seems to be more concentrated among activists or Middle East specialists.
The wider social media audience hasn’t engaged in the way it did with Iran and Egypt. As we can see from these estimates below, the volume of Syria-related tweets (as a percentage of overall tweets) appears considerably lower than the volume related to the uprisings in Egypt and Iran.
The estimates were constructed using multiple published Web sources reporting on number of tweets for the observed events as well as total Twitter traffic over time, including Twitter’s blog, Customer Insight Group, Mashable, the Sysomos blog, and a dataset acquired via Twapperkeeper.
The estimates are not precise but should be roughly representative of the average Twitter traffic at the observed time period.
Slate: Social revolution fatigue - why don’t we care about Syria?
This is fascinating.
From newshour:
In Syria, the ongoing uprisings have claimed the lives of over 3,500 people since the uprising began eight months ago.
FRONTLINE PBS reporter Ramita Navai went undercover to report from inside Syria, embedded with some of the country’s most wanted dissidents and activists.
She talked about her experience, at NewsHour here.
Watch the full feature at FRONTLINE , replay a live chat from FRONTLINE and check out this interactive map.
For a sobering slap in the face, check out the 99 percent Tumblr blog.
Looking at that, I’m not sure whether to be more upset that so many of my students don’t seem to be interested in seizing every opportunity in my classroom—or sympathetic since, well, what’s the point?
An interesting example of the intersection of pop culture & global politics.
From globalvoices:
Dressed like the Na’vi tribe from the 2009 science-fiction film Avatar, Cambodian villagers protested the plan to clear the Prey Lang forest to make way for the establishment of plantations and mines.
This is a documentary about Prey Lang, “One Forest, One Future”, by Jocelyn and Ben Pederick.
The Rock Band of timelines, and other good interactive features on the protests
This interactive feature on the Middle East protest wave from The New Yorker is just too awesome.
Economist Daily Chart: The Shoe Throwers Index. This week we crunched lots of statistics to predict where the next Arab revolution could most likely occur. Click through to find out how we put together this “index of unrest”, and to suggest ways it could be improved.
While undoubtedly important for the Tunisian people, the larger question is whether Tunisia could turn out to be the Poland of the Arab world: the first transition away from a regime long thought to be immutable that sets in motion a path of regime change throughout the region.
Will 2011 be the next 1989? | The Monkey Cage
An interesting rundown of similarities—and differences—between the ongoing protests across the Middle East in 2011 (which many people suggest may be an “Arab Spring”) & the rapid (and unexpected) collapse of the communist bloc in 1989. Very useful for any discussion on cross-regional comparisons or on transitional dynamics.
