Defending Identity at the Square: Ukraine’s Euromaidan and Antimaidan Reconsidered

Abstract

Since 2008, mass protests have swept across the world, captivating global audiences. Driven by digital media and popular frustrations with economic crises, corrupt governments, and democratic institutions that have failed them, these movements of the square, as Paulo Gerbaudo has called them, represent a new form of popular resistance. From Tunis and Cairo to Madrid, Istanbul, and Wall Street, these protests involve occupying a square and uniting nations against tyrannical rule and unjust political and economic systems. They lead to new forms of social organization, new forms of activism, and new communal identities that speak for the nation. Mark Beissinger, who refers to such movements as urban civic revolutions, argues that these protests have the potential to mobilize opposition to oppressive regimes in the name of the nation. Participants take over public squares near key centers of state power and put pressure on regimes to collapse or make considerable concessions. These revolutionary movements since the Cold War’s end have become more frequent, as attested by the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring. Yet even cases of successful regime change fail to transform political systems and resolve the issues that had sparked them in the first place.