September 22, 2025 ☼ The Intersection ☼ geopolitics ☼ Information Age ☼ hyperdiversity ☼ social capital
Why revolutions are rare and why social diversity might reduce their probability
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint.
A revolution is almost always an emergent phenomenon. The ingredients for one might exist for a long time but they do not always come together in a politically explosive form. This explains why mass protests, leave alone revolutions, are relatively rare in history and current affairs. If the existence of poverty, corruption, injustice, misgovernance, young people and smartphones were enough to cause revolutions many countries around the world would be in constant upheaval. It is important, therefore, to be humble when commenting on what caused a revolution. Any revolution.
Manu Joseph had an insightful commentary on this month’s “Gen Z protests” in Nepal last week, arguing that a lot more went into them than merely outraged young people incensed by the government cutting off access to social media. “At the heart of all revolutions,” he reminds us, “is the second rung of power, aristocracy, wealth or clergy, attempting to bring down those above them. For this, they recruit a moral reason and the youth and poor.” After the protests, power vests with an upright septuagenarian no-nonsense prime minister, a politically cautious army chief and a number of actors who have entered politics through unconventional routes. There are rap stars, television anchors, humanitarian relief workers and business entrepreneurs vying to capture political power.
The forms of political negotiation are impressive — Discord servers being used for debate and decision-making is a first — but the substance of it is the same-old, even if Gen Z believes “throwing out the old corrupt establishment” is a new idea. But let us hope that Nepal enters a new phase of political stability, economic growth and social harmony: maybe good government is also an emergent phenomenon.
Nepal’s upheaval follows those in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh in recent years and in Jakarta last month. The nepotism memes that fuelled resentment in Nepal initially crossed over from Indonesia. In 2025, it would be naive to believe that memes and trending topics on social media remain there organically for too long. A half-decent political operation anywhere in the world opportunistically exploits otherwise ephemeral trends and uses them to advantage. This is not to say that all memes and hashtags are manufactured, but that it would be a mistake to underestimate the role of organised efforts to stoke public anger and try to push things toward the brink. Cui bono, after all?
Canada’s Cascade Institute, a specialist in complexity science, has a simple framework to understand how crises happen. It involves two types of causal factors: slow boiling ones called stresses and fast processes called triggers. Sometimes they come together in a hard to predict manner and become crises. Rough calculations show that the probability of protests increases significantly when the proportion of young people in a population exceeds 20%, smartphone penetration and urbanisation levels cross 50%. All countries in the subcontinent and Indonesia fall somewhere into this spectrum. By such measures the countries at even higher risk of revolution are Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Turkey, all Central Asian republics, Mongolia and the Philippines. It is impossible to predict triggering events, but one lesson these countries might take from Nepal is perhaps not to mess around with social media bans.
That brings us to the question of the relationship between transnational technology platforms and sovereign states. Much of the media reportage demonises the Nepal’s Oli government for banning social media, as if it were a sudden, arbitrary act of censorship. It was not. The ban followed a wilful refusal by foreign social media platforms to comply with a lawful directive that was, in turn, a result of a judicial order requiring them to comply with Nepalese law. You can accuse the Oli government of being ham-handed and lacking political sensitivity, but you cannot blame it for acting illegally. The events in Nepal have emboldened social media platforms who can now dare democratic governments to try and hold them to account. Again, it is 2025 and no one can claim social media companies are upholding principles such as free speech. They are not neutral actors. They are, at best, acting to promote their commercial interests, and at worst as instruments of information warfare of their home governments. Social media has empowered platforms more than it has people. And that is something all sovereign states — especially democracies — must be concerned about.
Revolutions are rare because societies — even authoritarian ones — tend to have lower risk options for people to make their voices heard. They are also rare because ‘people’ are not monolithic or even stratified into classes as many believe. A century ago Communists, inspired from their European experience, thought that peasants and workers in India constituted a class that could be inspired to rise against their alleged oppressors. Their hoped-for revolution didn’t happen because the fabric of Indian society was constructed differently. Indeed, the complexity in many societies masks their resilience and their capability to effect change without violent upheaval. Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on who you are. And, in these times, perhaps on how old you are.
There are many more The Intersection columns here
If you would like to share or comment on this, please discuss it on my GitHub
Previous © Copyright 2003-2024. Nitin Pai. All Rights Reserved.