From Hong Kong To New Delhi, 2019 Emerged As A Year Of Anti-Establishment Rage. Here's Why?

'Youthquake' was the word of the year 2017. It basically means a cultural, social or political change arising from the actions and influence of young people. It appears that the youth in many parts of the world learnt and internalised this word in 2018 and brought it to practice in 2019. Yes, the year 2019 can be called as a youthquake year.

The relationship between the state and its people saw tumultuous twists and turns this year as angry citizens swelled the streets of cities across the globe, pushing back against a disparate range of policies but often expressing a common grievance -- the establishment's failure to heed their demands for a more equitable future.

For example, what were your expectations from the year 2019? India was headed into General Elections and most political and social discourse revolved around it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP achieved a thumping majority. Life was meant to move on and people were supposed to go about their daily lives but that was never to be. By the end of the year, people across India are out on the streets in thousands protesting against a controversial Citizenship law moved by the regime, and drawing parallels between the same leader they elected with Adolf Hitler.

While street protests are nothing new, experts attributed by news agency AFP, said the intense 2019 flare-ups reflect a growing sentiment that the social contract between governments and citizens has broken down, with voters paying the price but unable to affect meaningful change.

"What unites the protests is that all are responding to a sense of exclusion, pessimism about the future, and a feeling of having lost control to unaccountable elites," Jake Werner, a historian at the University of Chicago, was quoted as saying by AFP.

The financial crisis of 2007-08 in particular, he said, exposed systemic failings and induced years of austerity and insecurity for millions of people. It also produced an acute sense of unfairness, in particular among young people who see their prospects of earning a decent living slipping away with every price hike or benefits cut.

"What was previously experienced as proper or natural is now increasingly experienced as a form of domination and injustice," Werner said.

As a result, it often takes only a small move to spark a protest -- in Chile it was a metro ticket increase, in Iran and France it was higher fuel costs, in Lebanon a "WhatsApp tax" -- that balloons into a wider revolt demanding better living standards.

Elsewhere, as in Hong Kong, Algeria and in India, calls for greater political freedom have become a potent rallying force. In Iraq, fury over corruption and unemployment boiled over into fiery clashes which have left hundreds of people dead and forced the prime minister to resign.

"The belief in democracy's capacity to change people's lives is undoubtedly eroding," said Erik Neveu, a sociologist at the Sciences Po political science university in Rennes, western France.

For Olivier Fillieule, a specialist in social movements at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, this year's protests built on the same dynamics which produced movements as diverse as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, or the Russian opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

"Don't forget that Time magazine named 'the Protester' its person of the year in 2011," Fillieule said.

"The rejection of neo-liberalism is the main driver of most of these movements," he said, noting that "the state's abdication of some of its responsibilities leaves people alone against the market".

The impression that big companies and the wealthy seem to get a free pass -- despite calls to force multinationals to pay more taxes -- only further inflames the sense that the game is rigged.

"Society is fed up with paying and paying. They've squeezed us like a lemon," Marcela Paz, a 51-year-old teacher, said during a protest in Santiago, Chile in October.

And if the traditional rungs for climbing the social ladder are out of reach, experts say more people will feel that protests, and potentially violence, are the only recourse.

In some countries like Iran and Egypt, authorities have tried to curtail the social movements by cutting off the internet -- India this month cut mobile access in parts of Delhi amid protests against a citizenship law deemed anti-Muslim -- but without much success in the long term.

These are not only "Facebook revolutions", says Geoffrey Pleyers, a sociology professor in Belgium and France. These are profound movements where young people often take the lead, but then become intergenerational, he added.