THE RESEARCH FOR '19 YEARS'

19 Years is an attempt to visualize the extent of popular mass-protesting on a global level since 1989. The animation displays almost two thousand events on a political world map in chronological order, in approx. 30 seconds. The data was extracted from numerous sources and added to a database, which was used to produce the animation.

When I started to work on this project I coudn't find any source that presented the data I needed the way I needed it and I decided therefore to make the research myself. The main source was New York Times' excellent online archive, but there are many complementary sources such as Wikipedia, BBC, WSW, IPS News, Amnesty International, Eurozine and many more. You'll find the links to the sources in the leftmost column in the data table. I am specially grateful to IPS News who gave me free access to their articles.

View the database content

DEFINITIONS

I'm defining a "popular mass-protest" as a demonstration, march, rally or similar expressions of protest, in which at least 10,000 people participated in one day in one city or region.

I have, in some cases, included general strikes but not petitions, internet-based campaigns or the like. Nor have I included actions that were directly and overtly organized by a government, nor rallies that were held as a part of a "normal" election campaign, even though exceptions occur. Most of these actions were intended to be peaceful from the outset, but some may have escalated to riot or even to civil war.

It is, for obvious reasons, difficult to get correct estimates of the number of people involved these kinds of events, and I've often included events even if it's unclear if as many as 10,000 participated. Many news articles count crowds in the "thousands" or "tens of thousands", or in a similar fashion, and in such cases "thousands" of participants have been an acceptable limit for inclusion. In some cases I've also taken into account the numbers of inhabitants in the country where the event occured.