This book began with the premise that the optimism about the state of democracy that characterized the end of the Cold War is over. Instead of seeing a steady rise of democracy across the globe, the level democracy has not advanced since 2006. This democratic slump has generated widespread concerns among analysts and policy-makers over the current trajectory of democracy around the world. The book sought to answer the question of why this is the case and the processes by which democracies are falling apart. To do so, it has covered a large body of research on democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence within the context of contemporary global political and economic dynamics.
In spite of this gloomy picture, the historical record demonstrates that democratic development has experienced many ups and downs, and nowhere is that more evident than in the late 2010s. As the previous chapter explained, 2019 was the year of the protest. There were over sixty protest movements worldwide in autocracies and democracies alike, against autocratization. Varieties of Democracy reported that 2019 had the highest global average of pro-democracy protests of all time, with higher levels of mobilization than even during the fall of the Soviet Union or the Arab Spring (Lührmann et al, 2019). These protests are promising signs for the future of democracy. But just as mobilization efforts were spreading around the globe, the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic (for more on this see Box C.1). This initially stalled protests efforts in the spring of 2020, but by late May the US was seeing some of the largest and most prolonged protests in recent history over police brutality against African Americans and other systemic injustices.
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