bec8750246f86f400946d304_dr2402c.jpg Dean Rohrer

The Language of Global Protest

Indignation has become a watchword for movements in France, Spain, and elsewhere. And language matters here: indignation, unlike outrage, suggests that some social actors – a government or elites in general – have violated shared norms or moral understandings.

PRINCETON – The protest movements that have flared up across the West, from Chile to Germany, have remained curiously undefined and under-analyzed. Some speak of them as the greatest global mobilization since 1968 – when enragés in very different countries coalesced around similar concerns. But others insist that there is nothing new here.

The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, for example, has claimed that what we are actually experiencing is 1968 “in reverse.” “Then students on the streets of Europe,” he says, “declared their desire to live in a world different from the world of their parents. Now students are on the streets to declare their desire to live in the world of their parents.”

No name and no clear interpretation have yet attached itself to the movements. But how they describe themselves – and how analysts describe them – will make an important difference in the direction they might take. Such self-understandings should also influence how citizens generally should respond to these movements.

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