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The gilets jaunes movement in France is a leaderless political uprising.
It isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.
Occupy – the Arab spring and #MeToo are other recent examples of this new politics.
Some of it is good.
Some of it is not: a leaderless movement – self-organised on Reddit – helped elect Donald Trump.
But leaderless movements are spreading and we need to understand where they come from – what is legitimate action and if you want to start one – what works and what doesn’t.
The Arab spring began with the self-immolation of one despairing young man in Tunisia – the revolt rapidly spread across the region – just as protests have proliferated in France.
In highly connected complex systems such as the world today – the action of a single agent can suddenly trigger what complexity theorists call a ‘phase shift’ across the entire system.
We cannot predict which agent or what event might be that trigger.
But we already know that the multiplying connections of our world offer an unprecedented opportunity for the rise and spread of leaderless movements.
Leaderless movements spring from frustration with conventional top-down politics – a frustration shared by many – not only those on the streets.
Polls suggest the gilets jaunes are supported by a large majority of the French public.
Who believes that writing to your MP – or signing a petition to No 10 makes any difference to problems such as inequality – the chronic housing shortage or the emerging climate disaster?
Even voting feels like a feeble response to these deep-seated problems that are functions not only of government policies but more of the economic system itself.
What such movements oppose is usually clear but what they propose is inevitably less so: that is their nature.
The serial popular uprisings of the Arab spring all rejected authoritarian rule, whether in Tunisia – Egypt or Syria.
But in most places there was no agreement about what kind of government should replace the dictators.
In Eygpt the Tahrir Square protests failed to create an organised democratic political party that could win an election.
Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood – long highly organised and thus prepared for such a moment – stepped into the political vacuum.
In turn this provoked further mass protest – which eventually brought to power another dictatorship as repressive as Hosni Mubarak’s.
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