Venezuela protests February 2014 image via aandres/flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 license . If anyone had hoped that the Arab Spring and Occupy protests a few years back were one-off episodes that would soon give way to more stability, they have another thing coming. The hope was that ongoing economic recovery would return to pre-crash levels of growth, alleviating the grievances fueling the fires of civil unrest, stoked by years of recession. But this hasn’t happened. And it won’t . Instead the post-2008 crash era, including 2013 and early 2014, has seen a persistence and proliferation of civil unrest on a scale that has never been seen before in human history. This month alone has seen riots kick-off in Venezuela , Bosnia , Ukraine , Iceland , and Thailand . This is not a coincidence. The riots are of course rooted in common, regressive economic forces playing out across every […]