Haiti, Ecuador, Chile, Lebanon, Catalonia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Algeria… almost weekly, a new protest front opens, and dispatches from streets and squares across the globe make it seem as though, in the words of Paul Mason, it's kicking off everywhere.
I am reminded of the now half-forgotten Bosnian protests that took place in 2014, during which I wrote a comment in The Guardian arguing that events in Bosnia-Herzegovina represented a terrifying image of our potential common future, but also a possible way out. The country is a patchwork of territories, divided among ethnonationalist chiefs and their gangs (commonly known as political parties), with a weak central government, kleptocracy at every level, and enormous social inequalities. It is the result of a successful peace treaty between these warlords, brokered by the US, which ended the war by cementing its core injustice.
Now, no one is happy, but no one wants a return to violence, and this is the ideal scenario for ethnonationalist rulers who seek to retain power forever by occasionally agitating inter-ethnic strife.
