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which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. The Iranian military resorted to violence to quell the demonstrations, resulting in the killing of several protestors, including a young Iranian woman called Neda, who became a symbolic figure of the protests.
These examples of violent demonstrations by citizens acting in support of various causes were not one-off events that were peculiar to the Arab revolutions; rather, they were the dominant trend throughout the first decade of the 21st century. In 2009, Thailand’s famous red-shirt protestors (who operated under the banner “United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship” [UDD]) blocked major roads, railways, and bridges; surrounded city halls in several Thai provinces; and attacked senior government officials and the police. Escalating violence forced the Thai government to declare a state of emergency, but this served only to fuel the rage of the red-shirt protestors. In 2008, in support of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the red-shirt demonstrators seized Thailand’s Government House and occupied Bangkok’s two airports for 6 straight weeks (“Red Shirts Run Amok,” 2009). Similarly, for 9 consecutive nights in November 2005, deprived immigrants, members of the poor working classes, and unemployed people in Paris (and other French cities) protested their demeaned social and economic status by engaging in coordinated acts of vandalism and arson. The protestors used homemade gasoline bombs to torch some 900 cars and buildings while gangs of youths participated in fierce clashes with Parisian police. The French government likened this eruption of protest to “genuine guerrilla warfare” (“French Protests Turn Violent,” 2006; “Nights of Rage,” 2005).
Far from France in the so-called periphery, thousands of prodemocracy activists and supporters in April 2006 converged on the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu for 14 days in forceful opposition to the autocratic reign of King Gyanendra. Blocked roads, burning tires, brick throwing, police-citizen clashes, antigovernment poetry, marches, and police use of tear gas, rubber bullets, live rounds, and savage beatings were the dominant themes of this citizen mobilization (see “Nepal Protestors Defy Curfew,” 2006). Likewise, angry mobs took to the streets of the Solomon Islands in April 2006 to force the resignation of the newly