An Australian historian who specializes in the French Revolution says that we live in a world that is undergoing rebellious challenges to the situation in countries ranging from Chile and Iraq to Hong Kong and Catalonia in Spain.

Peter McVeigh said in an article on The Conference website that the protests that hit these countries are presented in the media as just an expression of anger against the "regime", and wonders: How can we understand these uprisings? Are they revolutionary movements or just "outbursts" of anger? Is it doomed to failure?

Attributes of the Revolution
"As a historian of the French Revolution (1789-1799), I often ponder the similarities between the five great revolutions of the modern world: the English Revolution (1649), the American Revolution (1776), the French Revolution (1789), the Russian Revolution (1917) and the Revolution," McVeigh said. Chinese (1949) ".

For him, the important question today is whether the protests we are witnessing are also revolutionary in nature.

From the model of the revolution derived from the five great revolutions, the reasons for their occurrence and their paths, it is concluded that the main features of any revolution include, first, long-term causes and the ideology of social-political ideology at odds with the regime.

There are also short-term drivers that trigger widespread protests, and there is a violent confrontation that power holders are unable to contain as members of the armed forces defect and join rebel ranks.

Protesters are seeking to establish a broad anti-elite coalition vying for power, and a new order is finally being re-established if a revolutionary leader succeeds in consolidating his power.

One of the most influential approaches to understanding the nature and history of protests and protests has been noted by American sociologist Charles Tilly in his studies of European history, and has identified two main features of the protests.

The first is that forms of protests change over time as a result of broader changes in economic and political structures. Food riots in pre-industrial society, for example, have been replaced by strikes and political demonstrations in the modern world.

The second feature, according to Tilly, is that mass protests, whether peaceful or violent, are of a continuing nature and are not limited to specific years, as was the case in the revolutions of France and Russia in 1789 and 1917 respectively.

Protests of this kind are a constant expression of a struggle between competitors for power and are part of the historical fabric of all societies.

Protest and revolution
But there is nothing to prevent the current and growing protests from turning into a revolution. The above features suggest that the uprisings of our modern world are not yet considered to be revolutions.

But the protest movement that is likely to become revolutionary is the one that is ravaging Iraq, where the regime has shown a willingness to kill its citizens (more than 300 last October alone).

People are more likely to anger regimes than to rebel against them. Insurrection movements rarely turn into revolutions. This requires a distinction between major revolutions that change social and political structures, military coups and common forms of protests on specific issues.

An example of this was the massive and violent demonstrations that ultimately succeeded in Ecuador last month, when the government was forced to cancel its austerity plan.

All successful revolutions, according to Peter McVeigh, are characterized by broad alliances at the beginning, while social strata with deep-rooted grievances join forces with opposition to the existing regime.

Mass protests also fail when they fail to unite against their core goals. Many of the dreams of the Arab Spring uprisings did not materialize, and with the exception of Tunisia, these movements failed to achieve the desired change.

The revolutionary alliances slipped into the quagmire of civil war, as happened in Libya, or did not succeed in neutralizing the army as in Egypt and Syria.

why all this anger?
Perhaps it is important to understand the feelings of anger in the masses at the moment to know the inability of democratic institutions to achieve the principles of parliamentary democracy. What is meant is public outrage over the divergent social outcomes of the peak of democratic reforms around the world in the 1990s, coupled with tempting but deceptive economic globalization.

One manifestation of this outrage was the phenomenon of xenophobia exploited by populist politicians, most notably US President Donald Trump, including Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, his Philippine counterpart Rodrigo Duterte and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Urban.

Some claim that Western liberalism has also failed.

However, anger varies in characteristic from region to region. In protests stretching from Lebanon to Iraq, from Zimbabwe to Chile, public discontent tends to rampant corruption in those countries, while elites underestimate basic standards of transparency and justice to loot state funds for their own good and those close to them.

Economics and Politics
The broader context of the current protests includes the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from international engagements, opening up new opportunities for two "authoritarian" superpowers - Russia and China, who dream of establishing two new empires, Peter McVeigh said.

There is the United Nations which is stumbling in its attempts to establish alternative leadership through an international system governed by specific rules.

The state of the world economy also plays a role. In regions where economic growth is stagnant, slight price increases are more of a factor for the masses than a mere component. They soon turn into protests, such as the issue of taxes levied by Lebanon on WhatsApp voice calls, and an increase in metro tickets in Chile.

We do not know, of course, how these protest movements will end. Although none of these protests is likely to result in revolutionary change, we are clearly witnessing uprisings in the twenty-first century with new and undeniable characteristics.