PROTESTS AND UNREST

90 Days of Protests (Global Heatmap)

90 Days of Protests (US Heatmap)

Forward Assessment

With continued global economic distress likely, and increasingly unpopular elected leaders failing to manage economic and political conditions to the satisfaction of the respective local populace, we assess protest activity will ramp up heading into the summer.

Expect larger-scale protests, more violence and government crackdowns in response. Many nations are in danger of revolution or coup.

Despite this assessment, the likelihood of a series of large-scale violent protests in the United States, like the 2020 BLM protests, is unlikely. However, due to the volatility of a wide variety of conditions, that assessment could quickly change. Stay tuned.

Methodology

We use alert tools to talkwalker to compile news articles, social media posts, forum posts and blog posts that mention protests. This media is manually reviewed to determine if the claimed protest appears to be legitimate and timely.

Photos, video, police reporting, and new media estimates are used to estimate the size and nature of each protest. Only protests with an estimated total participation of 500 people or more are recorded.

The protest heat map shows the intensioty of protest activity across various regions over the last 90-days. Larger heat map nodes correspond to larger protests as a percentage of their total population. Protests involving several percent of the population have a high likelyihood of inducing change. For this reason, protests are displayed with visually larger nodes as a larger percent of the population participates: This clearly identifies the significance of a given protest.

The color of each node corresponds to the intensity and relevance of the protest. More violent and more recent protests have higher weighting resulting in nodes with more red color. Older protests that remain peaceful are colored primarily in yellow with a small red core: Nodes that are almost solid red in color indicate an extremely violent, recent protest.