Over the past two years, social movements have erupted around the world with unprecedented frequency and scale. According to the Carnegie Endowment's Global Protest Tracker, as of August 2025, large-scale protests had taken place in at least 120 countries, covering hundreds of major incidents. Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) shows that the total number of global protests in 2024 exceeded 140,000, an increase of about 15% compared with 2023.
Scale wise, the recent unrest in Indonesia is emblematic. What began as student demonstrations in Jakarta quickly spread nationwide in less than two weeks, escalating into arson, looting, casualties, and mass transportation paralysis. Many observers see it as Indonesia's most serious social upheaval since the riots of 1998 that toppled President Suharto. In the United States, Columbia University's campus occupation spread in a similar fashion. In the early hours of April 17, 2024, more than 70 students erected 50 tents on the East Butler Lawn and raised Palestinian flags. Within days, the protest had extended to New York University, Yale, the University of California system, and dozens of other campuses. Within two months, police had arrested over 4,000 students nationwide. By May, the wave had crossed the Atlantic, spreading to universities in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain, drawing more than 10,000 participants.
These movements are not isolated incidents stitched together. As noted by ANBOUND's founder Mr. Kung Chan, they are the product of globalization's accelerating shift towards deglobalization. The disruption of long-established trade, industry, and economic structures has further squeezed political and social space. Deglobalization not only weakens cross-border trade and capital flows but also amplifies domestic vulnerabilities through supply-chain restructuring, resource misallocation, and cost spillovers. The nature and intensity of the shock differ by country: in some, they are related to industries and jobs; in others, the cost of living and generational equity; elsewhere, the core issues are political trust and institutional reform.
Strikes and demonstrations triggered by industrial and supply chain disruptions are a direct result of localization, "friend-shoring", and excess-capacity competition under deglobalization. These shifts have shaken manufacturing and related labor markets. Each disruption and reconfiguration of supply chains creates rifts in wages, working hours, and safety standards, leading to layoffs and pay cuts that frequently escalate into social actions.
A typical case came in late 2024 to early 2025, when Volkswagen faced mass worker protests and strikes in Germany. The immediate cause was the company's announcement of a 10% workforce reduction, affecting tens of thousands of German workers, alongside the closure of three factories. This happens to be the first closures in Germany itself in Volkswagen's history. Deeper causes included soaring natural gas prices due to the Russia-Ukraine war, higher transport and insurance costs from the Red Sea conflict, rising procurement prices, delayed deliveries, and falling production efficiency. More importantly, as a highly globalized industry, the auto sector has been squeezed by missteps in Volkswagen's electric transition and shrinking market share, especially in China. To stay competitive, the company was forced to cut capacity and costs worldwide, including in Germany.
In the U.S., Amazon's warehouse network has faced similar pressures. Rising living costs combined with strict performance targets sparked rolling walkouts at warehouses and delivery hubs across multiple states, involving anywhere from hundreds to thousands of workers. The pattern typically followed: localized action, amplification on social media, and cross-state imitation. Protest demands centered on higher wages especially for night shifts and peak seasons, longer breaks and better injury protections, and greater transparency in algorithm-driven scheduling. This is not unique to Amazon but reflects the broader squeeze of supply chain tightening, leaner inventory strategies, and the passing of fulfillment costs down to workers. Unions have called it the largest strike against Amazon in U.S. history.
As the dividends of global division of labor recede and economic growth slows, rigid expenses such as living costs, education, and housing keep climbing, while opportunities for generational and class mobility narrow. Social movements have thus expanded from factories to campuses, increasingly drawing in groups marginalized by structural pressures. Under economic strain and misgovernance, resistance often shifts from policy bargaining to political accountability, making this the most common type of social movement today. These movements cut across social groups and institutional boundaries, mobilizing a far wider range of participants.
In recent years, European countries, caught between industrial restructuring and energy shocks, have faced systemic challenges to maintaining an "affordable life". Beyond worker strikes, mass rallies over "energy bills" and the "cost-of-living crisis" have been staged in Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, and other cities since late 2022, often drawing tens of thousands. Organized alternately by unions and community groups, their slogans target inflation and the far-right, but the underlying drivers are energy import costs and disrupted supply chains, which hit low- and middle-income households hardest. Protesters have demanded electricity and heating subsidies, tax cuts on essentials, targeted relief for low-income families, and profit-sharing mechanisms in certain sectors.
In Africa, large-scale social movements have erupted in Niger, South Africa, Senegal, and elsewhere over the past two years. Kenya's anti-tax and anti-high-cost-of-living protests in June 2024 stand out in both scale and persistence. The trigger was parliament's passage of the Finance Bill 2024, which sought to raise an additional 346.7 billion Kenyan shillings (about USD 2.6 billion) to pay sovereign debt interest. The tax hikes covered essentials such as fuel, eggs, sanitary pads, and diapers, while extending to the digital economy, freelancers, and small businesses. Protests broke out nationwide, especially in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu. The core force was a highly educated but underemployed and financially unstable Gen Z, joined by wage earners, informal workers, small traders, online creators, unions, and civic groups. Demands expanded from opposing taxes to reforming quotas, lowering education costs, expanding urban jobs, and regulating private education and training markets. In the broader deglobalization context, Kenya's youth have grown increasingly disillusioned about upward mobility amid global apparel and light industry shifts and volatile export orders, which further fueled the protests.
In March 2025, Iran's truckers' strike highlighted similar economic disorder. Long-haul truckers, intercity and urban transport drivers, bus operators, and logistics workers at petrochemical plants, ports, and warehouses joined in. Labor groups estimated tens of thousands across at least 20 provinces participated, with major hubs like Isfahan, Shiraz, Bandar Abbas, and Tehran heavily disrupted. The immediate spark was a 30% hike in diesel prices, tighter fuel quotas, and higher tolls, seen as the final straw for the industry. Demands quickly broadened from fuel subsidies and freight rate adjustments to anti-corruption measures, price controls, and greater transparency in law enforcement.
When economic downturns combine with sluggish political response, corruption and governance failures become cross-border themes, and social movements increasingly rally under the banner of "institutional reform". Indonesia's recent unrest, triggered by a parliamentary housing subsidy scandal, drew tens of thousands of young people to the streets. While initially focused on individual accountability, the protests soon expanded to calls for transparency, conflict-of-interest regulations, and independent oversight. Public dissatisfaction with government handling of inflation, jobs, and corruption had been building for years, and the scandal proved to be the breaking point.
In South Korea, doctors' strikes revealed a similar political turn. When sectoral policies are pushed through as "fait accompli", professional communities elevate their demands into broader issues of procedural justice and public governance, seeking wider sympathy and support. This escalation, from "industry protest" to "institutional bargaining", is a classic symptom of political distrust under deglobalization pressures.
Notably, Asia has seen some of the largest street upheavals, from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Indonesia, of which the first three directly led to government collapse. This suggests that the transition from globalization to deglobalization and beyond is unlikely to be peaceful, but instead marked by turmoil.
Under deglobalization, economic pressures, corruption, and poor governance often escalate social movements from narrow, sectoral protests to broader demands for institutional reform, signaling deep public distrust of existing political systems. As global economic uncertainty grows, the clash between social demands and structural reform will only become sharper.
Final analysis conclusion:
The world is currently in a high-incidence cycle of social movements. From Indonesia's street riots to U.S. and European campus occupations, from Africa's anti-tax protests to strikes across West Asia, these events may differ in form but share a common root: deglobalization is reshaping supply chains and factor flows, unsettling economic structures and social balances. As changes in energy, supply chains, and markets converge with inflation, job strain, and governance failures, localized discontent readily escalates into broad political and institutional demands. This has fueled a surge of cross-group, cross-regional unrest, and indeed, this is an alarming global trend.
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Dr. Wei Wei is a Research Fellow at ANBOUND, an independent think tank.
