Civil Unrest on The Rise Around The World: Fatigue With The Ruling Class And Their Musical Chairs?
Dear Nyaaba,
From Santiago to Seoul, Nairobi to Paris, a collective murmur is swelling into a roar. Civil unrest is no longer a regional tremor, it is a global drumbeat of dissatisfaction.
Protests erupt not as isolated spasms but as symptoms of a deeper systemic exhaustion. Across continents, people seem united by a growing skepticism of the ruling class—those political lifers and technocratic heirs whose solutions resemble more a game of musical chairs than true leadership.
In many Western democracies, the ballot box has become less a tool of empowerment and more a mechanism for recycling mediocrity. Left, right, center—it hardly matters. The faces change, the suits get tailored, but the policies remain tethered to corporate donors, militarized economies, and inert bureaucracies. Voters are not naïve; they see the choreography. What’s being paraded as “choice” is often a rigged carousel of compromise and vested interests.
Even populism, which once rode in on a tide of indignation, now reads as another instrument of elite retention. Leaders who championed “the people” have too often slid into authoritarian habits, consolidating power rather than distributing it. The crowd cheers, until it doesn’t.
In non-democratic regimes, civil unrest simmers under the surface or bursts forth with grim consequences. From Belarus to Iran to Hong Kong, calls for reform are met with baton charges and digital surveillance. The international community, always eager to voice “deep concern,” rarely moves beyond lip service. Human rights are invoked like passwords, not principles—used when convenient, ignored when uncomfortable.
And yet, the very authoritarian tactics that silence dissent abroad are now creeping into the democratic world—police militarization, anti-protest legislation, mass surveillance—all justified by “security” or “public order.” The line between democracy and autocracy, once clear, is now smudged by pragmatism and fear.
Beneath the unrest lies a deeper economic and existential anxiety. Global inequality, turbocharged by financialized capitalism, has become grotesque. The working class subsidizes the speculative class. Young people face a future of climate collapse, housing crises, and gig-economy servitude. In the Global South, debt traps and IMF prescriptions strangle sovereignty. It is not simply that the system isn’t working—it is that the system is working exactly as designed, and people are no longer willing to tolerate it.
Leadership—real leadership—is in perilously short supply. Statesmen have been replaced by influencers with polling data. Policy has been replaced by optics. What we are witnessing is not merely unrest—it is the violent friction between lived reality and political theatre.
But let us be clear: while the ruling class deserves criticism, chaos is not a strategy. Burning down institutions may feel cathartic, but it does not guarantee progress. The choice is not simply between revolution and stagnation—it is between honest reform and the accelerating erosion of public trust.
Civil unrest is the canary, not the collapse. It is a warning—a chorus of global voices demanding better. If elites continue to play musical chairs while the floorboards rot, they should not be surprised when the whole structure gives way.
We are witnessing the failure not just of individual governments, but of a political imagination that no longer inspires. If the world’s leaders cannot muster the humility to listen and the courage to act, then what follows will not be mere unrest—it will be reckoning.
Sincerely yours,
Kasise Ricky Peprah
The Honourrebel Siriguboy
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