From Protest to Network to Platform to Movement: Carnegie's "Climate Protest Tracker," and the Signification of Protest

 

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Noah Gordon, Acting Co-Director, Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently circulated a press release announcing the creation of a "Climate Protest Tracker."

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Climate change and the responses to it can make people angry. Many activists are upset about governments’ failures to cut emissions and protect them from devastating wildfires and floods. Meanwhile, others fear new windmills, taxes, or regulations, arguing that the cure is worse than the disease. Increasingly, these angry people are taking to the streets in protest, demanding political change. I am happy to announce that Carnegie has launched the Climate Protest Tracker. to help you follow these demonstrations, and written an accompanying analysis of climate protest trends in 2022. This first-of-its-kind interactive tool can be your one-stop source for following the progress of climate movements around the world.

 This joins the Global Protest Tracker that has been  in operation for a number of years. Use Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker to analyze and compare the triggers, motivations, and other aspects of many of the most significant antigovernment protests since 2017. Designed for researchers, decisionmakers, and journalists, this comprehensive resource helps illustrate how protests impact today’s global politics." (About Global Protest Tracker).

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Quantification is the necessary essence of the authoritative construction of the reality around us from the identification and signification of objects (signified points of data) that are first given meaning as information, and then as information, aggregated in a way that reflects values, objectives, and principles, into the pieces of a larger landscape of legitimately narrated reality. This has always been the essence of political--and cultural--management. But contemporary technologies, and the possibilities for marketplaces of reality producing platforms where consumers and producers of curated facts might intermingle, now provides a quite distinct landscape for the management of knowledge and of the perception and interpretation of knowledge against the ideals of an ideologically structuring communal order. 

Put more crudely, perhaps: (1) if one cannot count it, it doesn't exist; (2) the foundation of influence/power/management/control lies in the authority (vested ot taken) to choose what is counted; (3) to choose what is counted, in turn, furthers and also constructs the underlying principles and ways of looking at the world from which it is possible to encounter an object (protest), identify it as such and vest it with importance (it is to be counted); (3) the way one counts objects so signified itself contributes to the elaboration of a governing ideology and provides an instrument through which one can identify the gaps between an unreached ideal state of communal expression of that ideology, and the current state of things; ($) the power to produce that reality is also the power to shepherd  those within that reality space toward action; (6) that action is legitimated by its alignment with the ideological ideal; (7) that power, then, is founded on the interpenetration of the abstract (principles producing an idealized goal or state of things) and the concrete (technology for current description of the state of things); (8) that alignment is effectively realized through structurally compatible platforms--spaces where the consumers and producers of quantified reality may interact, both producing and consuming  the curated data driven analytics that point to an ideologically compatible solution or program of action; and (9) these platforms leverage their power/authority as they both shape perception (by aggregating data bits into a narrative of reality that is coherent and strategic--what can then be put forward as truth/composite-fact) and become the foundation of reaction and response both in markets (private law/governance systems) and institutions (public law and policy). 

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 Once only a small set of formally constituted natural and legal persons (including the institutions of religion) has access to the techniques and methods of fact making in this form. But technology and the realities of a power diffusing globalization has substantially democratized the availability of these structures and methods.  What remains constant, though, is the recourse to funds, and status enhancing status. That, as well, as been democratized, or rather access has been broadened, because of the character of the influence/power spaces that technology has made possible.  At its limit, virtually any collective can participate. And many collectives in related enterprises may amalgamate their own knowledge platform work with others within meta-platform activity. 

It is in this respect that the Climate Protest Tracker becomes far more interesting, and its potential importance in the complicated communication for the masses (and their managerial elites) supporting action becomes more important. The power of these narrative producing platforms is not to be underestimated.  This is especially the case where synergies are possible. "Carnegie’s Climate Protest Tracker identifies episodes of mass activism relating to climate policy around the world since 2022. Building on Carnegie’s existing protest research, the Climate Protest Tracker aggregates key climate-related protests around the world and presents their objectives, participants, and outcomes. Designed for researchers, decisionmakers, and journalists, this resource helps illustrate how demands around climate policy are spurring civic action." (Climate Protest Tracker).

 

In a backhanded kind of way it has been recognized recently by some officials. The ability to craft platforms for the organization and production of knowledge threatens the ability of sovereigns to retain their monopoly or gatekeeper authority where these platforms seep between regulatory spaces. This applies irrespective of the ideological basis for organizing political authority. Take for example, China Envoy Blames ‘Foreign Forces’ for Covid Protests-- Chinese ambassador to France says some protesters were paid: Beijing frequently blames civil disobedience on foreigners. The quoted diplomat got it half right: interpenetration challenges the control of internal meaning making within states; but the failure here is not so much the success of the interpenetration (in this case through the seepage into China of the effects of a different form of COVID policy than the one cultivated by the state); but rather the inability of the state to effectively manage its own production and consumption of these realities applicable to their own communities.  The failure to recognize the power of transnational platforms for the constitution of a structuring signification of reality that points to specific action choices, continues to hobble states and others who fail to recognize the narrative power of creating fact-composites that explain-describe the world and its distance from an ideal. Their own narratives get in the way of effectively responding to narrative and reality-altering strategies and knowledge platforms changes around them (eg, US’ NED ‘mastermind’ behind global separatist riots, color revolutions, political crises: Chinese FM report) . That is the reality that is emerging--and with great force in the field of climate related action, policy, and perception.