This is one of the beauties of democracy however, and the main reason nearly every major country on Earth has adopted it as a system of government. Democracy, I think you'll find, isn't as different from a more dictatorial form of government as you'd think. People aren't inherently more peaceful and reasonable in a democracy. Their anger however, is much more easily managed. Rather than have a revolution or civil war, we bring about changes in government through elections, a much more peaceful method.
Often however, in countries democratic or not, we aren't able to agree on issues peacefully, at which point things can potentially grow violent. Having watched events such as the Arab Spring unfold in recent years, I've noticed there's a general ladder up which events tend to escalate. From protests to riots to full-blown civil wars, the way a country collapses into chaos tends to follow the same stepping stones. Here I'll try and list the various stages. Note that a society does not automatically proceed all the way up the ladder from step one, in fact it usually doesn't, but at each stage they are warning signs any government should be wary of. Placating the people by giving them what they want is usually preferable to letting such a pressure-cooker boil until it explodes completely.
So anyway, lets begin.
1 - students protests
Students, I can vouch from long experience, will protest just about anything. This is true of university students in particular. Combined with high unemployment, this is a potent mix, as countries like Spain and Greece have seen in recent years. Even in my own country of Australia, a country which one can't deny is pretty damn free and prosperous, there's never any shortage of issues for student activists to get excited about - the treatment of asylum seekers, education cuts, the carbon tax, the mining tax, logging in Tasmania, dredging on the Great Barrier Reef, fracking, the East-West tunnel, indigenous rights, the Trans Pacific Partnership, coal power in the Latrobe Valley...and that's just 2014 so far.
Believe it or not, there are about six people I know in this picture...
By and large, I don't think governments take these protests all that seriously, precisely since they're so easy to provoke. Still, I wouldn't say they serve no purpose. I find something comforting about it. It bolsters your faith in humanity a bit that there are certain sections of society who will try and protest anything they perceive as evil at every point, regardless of how reasonable or necessary it may be. Its a useful check on our own morality, and sure, people may get annoyed at groups of teenagers in bright red Che Guevara shirts holding up 'F*ck Tony Abbott' signs and screaming about how conservatives are such racists, but what else do you expect from young people? At least they're not out torching cars and ingesting crystal meth. Billy Joel, I think, put it best -
2. Worker's protests
A step above student protests, I might as well have called this 'grown-up's protests'. When you have actual adults, i.e. busy people who have full time jobs, walking around, waving signs and chanting slogans, chances are you have a real issue at hand. This could take a wide variety of forms however, including organized political rallies or workers from one industry or another marching for better working conditions. I recall a protest in Melbourne a few years ago where Taxi drivers did just that.
Workers marches are, it would seem, a lot less common in the western world now then they used to be. I would attribute this to two main reasons. First of all, a lot of the demands of worker's unions from the 19th and 20th centuries have long been fulfilled, from the minimum wage to the forty-hour work week. Secondly, due to globalisation, many workers have feared their jobs going overseas if they pushed the management too hard. Only groups like the aforementioned taxi drivers, whose jobs obviously can't physically go overseas, are exempt from this. In the third world however, where worker's rights are still stuck in the 19th century, I feel we are just witnessing the beginning of this transition. The frequency of protests in China for instance has apparently shot up tenfold over the past twenty years, to beyond 100,000 annually. These have been held to protest everything from corruption to environmental degradation to human rights abuses, often no doubt prompting action on the part of the Beijing government.
3. Strikes/sit ins
The next step up. These have also grown increasingly rare in Australia and other western countries, with the last notable one here perhaps being the Waterfront Dispute in 1998. Probably the closest America ever came to a communist revolution was in the early 1930s at the height of the Great Depression when literally millions of workers went on strike country wide. The authorities, in typical fashion, treated the protests with disdain and reacted harshly. A number of strikers and police were killed and in most cases the strikers were laid-off and the efforts of the unions failed. However, governments should take note that if thousands of people are not just peacefully marching in the streets, but actually risking their financial livelihoods, for a cause, its probably a worthy one.
4. Public worker's strikes
Similar to the category above, but potentially a lot more serious. By 'public' workers I mean people like teachers, nurses and in particular police and other armed government branches. A few years ago some fifty thousand teachers in Victoria walked off the job demanding higher pay, with most of their demands eventually being met. Police strikes in particular (not to mention the military, which is when you really run into trouble) can bring governments to their knees very quickly. Rarely does a government here in Victoria last long after getting on the wrong side of the police union for instance.
Basically, while strikes in the private sector can often be safely ignored by a government, public sector strikes are a shade more serious. If the government cannot carry out its core functions any more it won't last long. The demands of public sector workers tend to be taken a lot more seriously, as by striking they tend to cause a lot more economic damage in a short amount of time.
5. General protests
This is perhaps where things start to get very serious, where government inaction can cause things to inevitably escalate further. This is when you don't have select groups of people - from miners to factory workers to teachers, marching in the streets, but instead what you could basically call the people rising up as one. This is the point at which the Arab Spring really came into the news, with scenes from places like Tahrir Square broadcast around the world.
^ What three hundred thousand angry people look like
The key element of these protests is really just their sheer size, as well as the diversity of the participants. They'll generally still be young, angry, underemployed people, but there's no set pattern. People are simply angry at the government, and generally are calling for major political changes, if not its outright overthrow, and from here things can quickly escalate. Even if they don't, many government may be worried enough at this point to send in the military to quell the protests. Tienanmen Square in 1989 would be an example of this, although by that point, things may be overlapping with the next category.
6. Riots
The different between 'protest' and 'riot' is really just an element of violence. If people are throwing bricks through windows and overturning cars, you're got a riot. Its not necessarily October 1917 yet of course, but if people are this angry about something, any government worth its salt is going to have to react. Violent crackdowns are often a result of this where things come to a head. Either order is restored, and the state survives, or it doesn't, and the government is at risk of falling.
Think Ukraine, right about now-ish...
As far as I'm aware, nobody's been killed in riots in Australia in recent years. Even the infamous Cronulla riots in 2005 concluded without any fatalities, though there were a number of injuries and arrests. This is, of course, the stage at which those occurrences start to happen, though some arrests and the occasional injury might have occurred before this point. Having said all this however, just because a riot occurs doesn't mean the government is in immediate danger of being overthrown. Most riots tend to be small and last no more than a few hours. They are much rarer than strikes or peaceful protests, but are going to occur sometimes even in the most stable countries. Alcohol and testosterone are often their fuel, but its only when that's mixed with determined ideology that things start to spiral out of control.
7. Bombings/Assassinations
This is the stage where, rather than being merely spontaneous, you start to have premediated violence. However at this point we're still talking about isolated or small groups of individuals, often carrying out poorly planned attacks which tend to have low casualties, though they often cause a disproportionate reaction in the media nonetheless.
In Australia this is basally unheard of. Aside from the occasional act of violence by crime gangs against the police (such as the Russell Street Bombing in 1986 or the Walsh Street Shootings in 1988) rarely has anyone actually plotted terrorism against the government. Even then, such acts were generally personal rather than political in nature. One should distinguish between mere 'crime' such as assaults or murders, and actual 'terrorism' that has a political element, whether against the government or other people in society. No Australian Prime Minister has ever even been targeted for assassination as far as I'm aware.
Events like the Oklahoma City bombing would probably count, as it was motivated by a hatred of the federal government in the US. Assassinations will usually fall into this category as well, as they almost always require a degree of planning, though sometimes when the assassin is just declared plain mad rather than murderous, it may not be. It is also worth noting that in some cases this category may actually be where the ladder begins, with events escalating from here, as the case of Archduke Franz Ferdinand demonstrates.
8. Insurgency/Coup
I feel there is a need for this category, between 'bombings' and 'revolution' as it relates to the number of people involved and the scale of the changes that occur, respectively. Bombings can be carried out by lone individuals, while a civil war requires the participation of large sections of society. This is somewhere in the middle, where you have one or more groups of people, numbering anywhere from a few hundred to many thousands, waging a campaign of violence against a central government, or else plotting to overthrow it.
Bus bombing in Russia 2013, courtesy of Islamic separatists
At any given time probably dozens of countries worldwide are dealing with this level of violence from certain elements in their population. They've been at least three suicide bombings in the southern Russian city of Volgograd alone in the past few months for instance. The country is far from in a state of civil war, but there has been a sustained campaign of violence from certain groups. Other recent examples of this would be the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or the Taliban in Afghanistan. Wikipedia has a succinct list of ongoing conflicts worldwide here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts.
Note that in the list, they distinguish between 'minor' conflicts with less than 1,000 deaths per year and 'major' ones with death tolls higher then that. The number is arbitrary, and not entirely relevant, but you get the gist of the idea. Currently they list ten 'major' conflicts and thirty-one 'minor' ones. Most of them I think would fall under this category. Syria in particular however, and arguably Iraq, Somalia and Sudan as well, fall into the category of 'civil war'.
Another event that usually falls here would be a coup d'etat, as they tend to be carried out not by lone individuals or large sections of society, but by a connected conspiracy of individuals. Looking at what happened in Egypt in 2011, we can see that following the protests in Tahrir Square (category 5/6) the government did not fall from a complete revolution, but the military removed Hosni Mubarak from power (category 8) in a swift coup and called for fresh elections (an attempt, at least, at category 9). Following the elections however, protests began anew against the newly elected Muslim Brotherhood, quickly jumping past category 5 into 6 and 7. The military then stepped in once more, and since then the Islamic insurgency in the Sinai has increased in intensity lately (both category 8). Given that Egypt is still under military rule, it has not undergone a full political revolution (category 9) but it has thankfully avoided the category after - that of a civil war.
9. Revolution
The lines between the definitions blur somewhat here, but there are differences between 'coup', 'revolution' and 'civil war' that are worthy of mention. While they do not all automatically follow each other, all three of these involve the government being overthrown, though through different means and to different degrees.
Both a coup or a revolution can be largely bloodless, but the difference is that while a coup involves a change in a specific government, a revolution generally means an outright change in the system of government. If we look at Russia in the 20th century for instance, we have seen all three occur on occasion. The February 1917 revolution, where the Tsar was removed from power and replaced by a provisional government of noblemen and liberals would be category 8. When the Bolsheviks usurped their power later in that year, and declared the formation of a Communist state, that's when we're talking a real revolution, and of course, things quickly escalated into a civil war. Russia in 1991 as well, when the Soviet Union was dissolved, would be category 9, as the country went from a one-party state to a (nominal) democracy. This occurred with no more than a few hundred casualties, mercifully low for the scale of the change.
So this is how liberty's born? With the roar of tanks...
10. Civil War
The result of this stage is essentially the same as in category 9 (or maybe even just 8) but the route there is much more winding, and generally much bloodier. This is the point when the violence is no longer isolated to certain individuals or groups in society. This is where the battle lines have been drawn, and large numbers of people within a state are fighting each other to the death. We can assume casualties are going to be in the thousands at a minimum, and often in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. Libya got to 30,000 in six months during its brief civil war in 2011. Syria, after three years of war, is somewhere around 150-200,000.
Recent civil wars in places like Yugoslavia, Rwanda and the Congo have been even bloodier. America in the 1860s, Russia from 1917 to about 1923, or China from the 1920s right up until 1949 saw chaotic periods like this. These conflicts, as with virtually every step on this ladder, can take on political, economic, ethnic or religious undertones, as well as many others.
So there you go, an approximate ladder up which all good revolutionaries may have to climb. In addition, I'll mention here two further categories, which expand the scale of human conflict beyond the boundaries of a single state.
11. Conventional war
This can certainly overlap with a civil war, but generally doesn't. Most rebel armies fight in an asymmetric style, waging a guerrilla war against a central government. Wars between states however will tend to involve organized armies, equipped with advanced weaponry like tanks, artillery and aircraft, and fighting on open battlefields or from fortified positions. Wars like this have been much less common since 1945, as the nuclear arsenals of the great powers have made conventional fights between them far too risky, but they still occur quite regularly. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s is one example, or Yom Kippur in 1973. These wars can be a stalemate (Korea 1950-53) or a slaughter (Kuwait 1991). The key point is that organised armies from two different states are taking part. If the pessimists are correct, Ukraine versus Russia might be the next conflict of this nature.
12. Nuclear war
This is a stage in human conflict that is only newly emerged, and has been resorted to very rarely. It could also be called 'warfare with weapons of mass destruction' as it is not confined just to nukes, but can include chemical or biological warfare as well. It is worth noting that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction did not really begin during the Cold War after the invention of nuclear weapons, but some time earlier. Even at the height of the Second World War neither side dared use chemical weapons like poison gas against each other for fear of retaliation by the other side. If the planes of the Luftwaffe and Royal Air Force had been carrying pellets of poison gas in their bomb-bays during the battle of Britain, many of Europe's major cities may have been rendered uninhabitable within months. Even Hitler was not mad enough to use WMD's against the Allies, although the defenseless Jews were another matter...
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