Most protests are directed against a fairly immediate authority. When you march on a picket line, you’re protesting to get more leverage over your boss. When you and your neighbors fill up your downtown chanting “Black lives matter,” you’re protesting (in part) to get more leverage over your local government and police department. But protests have other audiences, many of which are farther away – physically and conceptually – than the people the protest is aimed at. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at new research about how protest movements impact third parties.

Sometimes the audience that takes an interest in your protest isn’t even in your country. That happened to Arab Spring protesters in a variety of different ways. People around the region looked at early protests in Tunisia and took inspiration. Then Twitter took an interest and decided that it was the hero of the protests. In the end, though, for many protesters, it was foreign governments that were among the most effectual audiences for their protests. For protesters in Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, that meant military interventions by foreign powers in response to their protests, most of which have had devastating consequences.

In a new article in the journal International Politics, political scientist Shamiran Mako develops a theory about why protests led to interventions in those four countries and why those interventions played out the way they did. In Mako’s telling, though the uprisings in each country were aimed at securing concessions from that country’s government, the reality of the near-simultaneous uprisings throughout the region changed not just the situation of each individual country but the entire regional order. Each individual movement on its own did little to change the international structure, but when they all rose at the same time it upended the regional balance of power.

With the regional balance of power up in the air due to the protests, Mako argues, regional powers saw opportunities to meddle in their neighbors’ affairs in ways that were not possible before. Because the legitimacy of so many governments had been called into question, all of a sudden regional powers could intervene not just at the level of the state but with the elements of the coalition of groups that, in normal times, formed the state.

In Yemen, for example, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Saudi-led regional group responded to protests by trying in 2011 to broker a transition that would remove dictator Ali Abdellah Saleh and replace him with another GCC-oriented leader. In a situation where Yemen was the only country in the region undergoing transition, the GCC effort might have succeeded, since there would be little reason for other parties to upset the balance of power. As negotiations continued in the post-Arab Spring era, however, other players joined and initiated or increased their support for other Yemeni factions. Qatar and Turkey backed groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and Iran directed some resources to the Houthis. By 2015, with the Houthis gaining ground militarily and Saudi Arabia responding with direct military intervention, the promise of democratization in Yemen had faded almost completely. Instead, the country had become a battleground for factions seeking to stake or expand their claim to a piece of the new regional order being born.

Basically, chaos is a ladder, but ladders go both up and down. Foreign powers pay particular attention to domestic social movements because, when successful, they create moments when the rules of the international game can change. In the Arab Spring, the pace and scale of the rule changes created incentives for regional and world powers to target states that could be profitably be divvied up into factions. For people in those states, who began protesting hoping to resolve the contradictions in their societies, the effect of foreign intervention was often disastrous.

Lucía Benavides profiled an Argentinian tango collective that pairs its members’ feminist politics and love of dance. Historically, tango songs have often reflected the patriarchal values of 19th century Argentina, where the style was invented. Some songs that are still popular today hinge on themes of domestic violence. Yet a new generation of tango musicians and dancers are working to create a new tango canon, drawing on the art and experiences of women. Collectives like La Empoderosa Orquesta Atípica in Buenos Aires promote the music of trans and cis women who sing about modern political issues and how those issues affect their lives.

George Lopez argued for urgent reforms to US sanctions regimes to lessen the burden they impose on civilians in sanctioned countries. These sanctions regimes, ostensibly instituted in the name of human rights, have immiserated millions while producing precious little policy change from the targeted governments. Lopez in particular advocated for the Biden administration to make arrangements to allow crucial food aid and other forms of lifesaving materials to enter countries like Syria and Venezuela, as well as loosen foreign exchange restrictions on regular Iranians.

Rebecca Kanthor reported on the celebration of the Daoist goddess Mazu in China and Taiwan. Mazu, who is said to have been born on an island between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, is a major cultural and religious figure on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. As a result, festivals for Mazu have become important sites of cultural exchange between Taiwan and China. The Chinese government in particular has promoted the festivals, because it seeks to increase social and financial ties between the two countries as part of its effort to reincorporate Taiwan back into China.

It’s hard to overstate the work that “alleged/provisional” is doing in this drawing.

Tired: The world of Pokémon is little more than a dystopic parable about the evils of carceral capitalism, as demonstrated in the classic film, "Pokemon Detective Pikachu." (2019)

Wired: Whatever is happening in this conceptual oroboros.

He’s got no thumbs, extremely long claws, and those chess pieces are very small, so his job seems plenty hard already.

Critical State usually takes no position on the relative merits of violent versus nonviolent protest, but in this case it really seems like they should’ve held a rally.

Never let it be said that STEM education failed among US millennials.

Hooah, Rocco.