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| Iran’s widening protests, though challenging that country’s government forcefully and in rising numbers, may also embody a global trend that does not augur well for the Iranian movement. | 虽然伊朗不断加剧的抗议活动参与者越来越多，对该国政府构成了有力挑战，但也可能体现出一种对伊朗的这次运动来说不利的全球趋势。 |
| Mass protests like the ones in Iran, whose participants have cited economic hardships, political repression and corruption, were once considered such a powerful force that even the strongest autocrat might not survive their rise. But their odds of success have plummeted worldwide, research finds. | 像伊朗这样的大规模抗议活动——参与者以经济困难、政府压制和腐败为由发起——曾被视为一股强大力量，即使是最强大的独裁者也可能无法在这些起义中坚持下来。但研究发现，在世界各地，这样的抗议活动成功几率已经直线下降。 |
| Such movements are today more likely to fail than they were at any other point since at least the 1930s, according to a data set managed by Harvard University researchers. | 根据哈佛大学研究人员管理的一组数据集，与至少自上世纪30年代以来的任何其他时候相比，此类运动在今天都更有可能失败。 |
| The trajectory of Iran’s demonstrations remains far from certain. Citizen uprisings still sometimes force significant change, for example in Sri Lanka, where protests played a role in removing a strongman president this year. | 伊朗示威的走向仍远未明朗。公民起义有时仍会推动重大变革的发生，例如在斯里兰卡，抗议活动在今年推翻一位强人总统方面发挥了作用。 |
| But Iran’s unrest follows scores of popular eruptions in recent months — in Haiti and Indonesia, Russia and China, even Canada and the United States — that, while impactful, have largely fallen short of bringing the sort of change that many protesters sought or was once more common. | 但伊朗发生骚乱前，最近几个月在其他国家爆发了数十次民众抗议——在海地和印度尼西亚、俄罗斯和中国，甚至加拿大和美国——虽然影响很大，但在很大程度上未能带来许多抗议者寻求的那种改变，或曾经很常见的那种改变。 |
| This sharp and relatively recent shift may mark the end of a decades-long era when so-called people power represented a major force for democracy’s spread. | 这种相对较新的急剧转变，可能标志着一个时代的结束，在长达数十年的时代里，所谓的人民力量代表了民主传播的主要力量。 |
| Throughout most of the 20th century, mass protests grew both more common and more likely to succeed, in many cases helping to topple autocrats or bring about greater democracy. | 在20世纪的大部分时间里，大规模抗议活动变得越来越普遍，而且越来越容易取得成功，许多情况下，它在推翻独裁者或带来更大民主方面发挥了作用。 |
| By the early 2000s, two in three protest movements demanding systemic change ultimately succeeded, according to the Harvard data. In retrospect, it was a high-water mark. | 根据上文提到的哈佛数据，到2000年代初，要求进行系统性变革的抗议运动中有三分之二最终取得了成功。回过头来看，这是一个很高的水平。 |
| Around that decade’s midpoint, the trend began to reverse. By the end of the 2010s, though protests continued to grow more common, their success rate had halved, to one in three. Data from the early 2020s suggests that it may have already halved again, to one in six. | 在2000年代的中点附近，趋势开始逆转。到2010年代末，尽管抗议活动继续变得越来越普遍，但成功率却减半，降至三分之一。2020年代初的数据表明，它可能已经再次减半，降至六分之一。 |
| “Nonviolent campaigns are seeing their lowest success rates in more than a century,” Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist who oversees the protest-tracking project, wrote in a recent paper. | “非暴力运动的成功率达到一个多世纪以来的最低点，”监测抗议追踪项目的政治学家埃里卡·切诺维斯在最近的一篇论文中写道。 |
| The years 2020 and 2021 “have been the worst years on record for people power,” Dr. Chenoweth added. | 切诺维斯博士还说，2020年和2021年“对于人民力量而言是有记录以来最糟糕的年份”。 |
| The causes of this trend are still in debate. But experts have converged on a few broad forces thought to drive it — some of which can already be seen in Iran. | 这一趋势的成因仍然存在争议。但专家们越来越认为，有几股广泛的力量推动了这一趋势，其中一些已经在伊朗可以看到。 |
| For one, polarization is increasingly prevalent worldwide, with income inequality, nationalist attitudes, fragmented news media and other forces deepening divisions across social and political lines. | 一方面，两极分化在世界范围内日益普遍，收入不平等、民族主义态度、碎片化的新闻媒体和其他力量加深了跨越社会和政治界限的分歧。 |
| Iran, whose political parties compete noisily even amid autocracy, is no exception. Some analysts see growing signs of polarization there along economic lines, urban-versus-rural divides and a moderate-versus-hard-liner split that is as much partisan as cultural. | 伊朗也不例外，即使在独裁统治下，它的政党也存在激烈竞争。一些分析人士认为，那里的经济、城乡以及温和派与强硬派之间的分歧出现两极化的迹象越来越多，这既有党派色彩，也带有文化色彩。 |
| Polarized societies, in moments of turmoil, become likelier to split over mass protests. This can bolster even despised governments, helping them to cast protesters as representing a narrow interest group rather than the citizenry as a whole. | 在动荡的时刻，两极分化的社会更有可能因大规模抗议而分裂。甚至被鄙视的政府也可以借此巩固自己，帮助他们将抗议者描绘成代表一个狭隘的利益集团，而不是整体公民。 |
| Social media, which enables protests to organize and gather in once-unthinkable numbers, often with little or no formal leadership, may also paradoxically undermine those movements, according to a theory advanced by Zeynep Tufekci, a Columbia University sociologist. | 根据哥伦比亚大学社会学家泽伊内普·蒂费克奇提出的理论，社交媒体使抗议活动能够以曾经不可想象的规模将抗议者组织和聚集抗起来，这样的抗议活动通常没有或几乎没有正式的领导者，而且可能自相矛盾地破坏这些运动。 |
| In earlier eras, activists might spend months or years building the organizational structures and real-world ties necessary to launch a mass protest. This also made movements durable, instilling discipline and chains of command. | 在过去，活动人士可能会花费数月或数年的时间来建立发起大规模抗议所必需的组织结构以及与现实世界的联系。这也使运动得以持久进行，同时逐渐树立纪律和指挥系统。 |
| Social media allows would-be protesters to skip those steps, spurring one another to action with as little as a viral post. The result is rallies that put thousands or millions of bodies in the street overnight — but that often fizzle just as quickly. | 社交媒体使得潜在的抗议者可以跳过这些步骤，只需一条广为传播的帖子就可以激发彼此采取行动。结果，成千上万甚至上百万人一夜之间聚集街头——但消散的速度同样很快。 |
| Without that traditional activist infrastructure, social media protests are less equipped to endure government repression. Leaderless, they more easily fracture and struggle to coordinate strategically. | 如果没有传统的行动基础建设，社交媒体抗议活动就无法承受政府的镇压。没有领导者，他们更容易分裂并难以进行战略协调。 |
| Protests were traditionally just one tool in activist campaigns to pressure governments, alongside back-room negotiations with political leaders or alliance-building with powerful actors. The use of social media, by channeling popular energy away from such organizing, means that mass protest is now often the only tool, and typically ineffective on its own. | 传统上，除了与政治领导人进行幕后谈判或与强大的行动方建立联盟以外，抗议活动通常是维权运动向政府施压的一个工具。社交媒体的使用将民众的能量从这种组织活动中引走，这就意味着大规模抗议现在往往成了唯一的工具，而且本身通常没有效果。 |
| At the same time, autocracies, responding to popular revolts in Arab and former Soviet countries at the start of this century, have learned to undermine mass movements with subtler methods than brute force alone. | 与此同时，在本世纪初，阿拉伯和前苏国家的专制政权在应对民众起义的时候，就已经学会用比暴力更巧妙的办法来破坏群众运动。 |
| “We live in an age of digital authoritarianism,” Dr. Chenoweth, the Harvard scholar, has written. Dictatorships, seizing on the internet and other tools, have developed new methods “from direct surveillance of activists’ communications to online harassment and intimidation to the rapid diffusion of state propaganda to the infiltration of movements to selective censorship.” | “我们生活在一个数字威权主义时代，”哈佛学者切诺维斯博士写道。独裁政权利用互联网和其他工具开发了新的方法，“从直接监视活动人士的通讯到网络骚扰和恐吓，再到国家宣传的迅速传播，再到运动的渗透，再到选择性审查。” |
| This is rarely enough for governments to quash all dissent. But, to prevail, they need only create enough doubt, division or detached cynicism that protesters fail to achieve a critical mass of support. | 这不足以让政府消除所有异议。但要想获胜，他们只需要制造足够多的怀疑、分裂或对痛苦的麻木冷漠，抗议者就无法获得足够的支持。 |
| Iran’s is one of many governments to develop such tools, combining digital shutdowns and censorship — narrow enough to frustrate activists without provoking a wider backlash — with online nationalist propaganda and disinformation. | 伊朗是众多开发此类工具的政府之一，它将数字封锁和审查（其范围可以缩小到足以挫败活动人士，而不会引发更广泛的反弹）与在线民族主义宣传和虚假信息相结合。 |
| And governments increasingly find allies against protests among their citizenry. Rising illiberal attitudes, which often see strongman rule as desirable and protests as lawlessness, sometimes manifest as popular support for government suppression of those movements. | 政府也越来越多地在民众中寻找反对抗议的盟友。不断上升的反自由主义态度往往认为强人统治是可取的，抗议是无法无天的，有时表现为民众支持政府镇压这些运动。 |
| One result of these changes is that protests’ success is no longer defined by crowd size, Dr. Chenoweth has argued. Rather, the most important factor may be a movement’s skill at persuading or pressuring key power brokers in a country to break ranks with the government. | 切诺维斯认为，这些变化的一个结果是，抗议活动的成功不再由人群规模来定义。相反，最重要的因素可能是一场运动是否拥有足够的技巧，能够说服或者迫使一个国家的关键权力掮客与政府决裂。 |
| Economically motivated protesters in Chile in 2019, for instance, faced violent suppression but won allies in the political system’s upper echelons, who channeled their rage into concrete demands and then helped to bring them about. | 例如，2019年在智利，出于经济原因走上街头的抗议者面临暴力镇压，但他们在政治体系的上层赢得了盟友，这些高层将愤怒转化为具体的要求，然后帮助实现这些要求。 |
| But what might sometimes look like a successful citizen uprising may, once the dust settles, turn out to be a case of political rivals seizing on unrest to grab power for themselves. | 但是，有的公民起义看似成功，待到尘埃落定，结果可能变成政治对手利用动乱为自己攫取权力的例子。 |
| In Zimbabwe in 2017, for instance, military leaders and other figures deposed the country’s longtime ruler, Robert Mugabe, claiming to deliver change on behalf of protesters. But the new government, once in office, largely ignored or quashed the ralliers. Much the same happened two years later in Sudan. | 例如，2017年在津巴布韦，军方领导人和其他方面推翻了该国的长期统治者罗伯特·穆加贝，声称要代表抗议者实现变革。但新政府上台后基本上无视集会者，或对他们实施镇压。两年后的苏丹也发生了同样的事情。 |
| For Iran’s protesters, one lesson is that they will need to win sympathetic allies within the government. | 对于伊朗的抗议者来说，一个教训是，他们需要在政府内部赢得同情他们的盟友。 |
| But such back-room lobbying typically requires experienced activist groups of exactly the sort that Iran’s government has spent years dispersing. | 但这种幕后游说通常需要经验丰富的活动团体，而伊朗政府多年来一直在打压这类组织。 |
| And it requires fissures among those ruling elite. While Iran’s system is notoriously fractious, its multiple power centers and factions all stand unified in defense of the country’s autocratic system, a legacy of that government’s emergence in violent revolution. | 而且这需要统治精英之间存在裂痕。虽然伊朗的体制出了名的难以控制，但它的多个权力中心和派系都团结一致地捍卫该国的独裁制度，这是伊朗政府通过暴力革命崛起留下的遗产。 |
| Iran’s protesters do have one thing going for them: the prominent role of women on their front lines. This has been shown to significantly increase an uprising’s odds of success, researchers say. | 确实有一件事对伊朗抗议者有利：女性在前线发挥了突出的作用。研究人员说，这已被证明可以大大增加起义成功的几率。 |
| Because women in any country come from all walks of life, their participation can transcend social or demographic divides associated with polarization. | 因为任何国家的女性都来自各行各业，她们的参与可以超越与两极分化相关的社会或人口分化。 |
| Observers also tend to see movements as more legitimate when women are visibly involved, research finds. And security forces may be somewhat less violent in responding. | 研究发现，当女性明显参与到运动中时，观察者也倾向于认为运动更具正当性。安全部队在回应时可能会减少一些暴力。 |
| Still, this is hardly a guarantor of success when other dynamics don’t align, as Sudan’s pro-democracy rallies, often led by women, have found. | 然而，当其他动力不一致时，这也难以成为成功的保证。就像我们在苏丹的民主集会（通常由女性领导）所看到的那样。 |
| While it is hardly the case that mass protests now necessarily fail in today’s world, their plummeting odds of success may have ripple effects beyond even the decline of democracy. | 尽管在当今世界，大规模抗议并不一定会失败，但其成功几率骤降可能产生的连锁反应甚至超过了民主的衰落。 |
| For one thing, armed rebellion, long disavowed by democracy activists as counterproductive, has seen its effectiveness decline more slowly than that of nonviolent protest, the Harvard data shows, making the two methods now nearly tied in their odds of succeeding. | 例如，哈佛大学的数据显示，武装叛乱长期以来被民主活动人士认为适得其反，但其有效性的下降速度比非暴力抗议要慢，这导致这两种方法的成功几率如今几乎不相上下。 |
| “For the first time since the 1940s, a decade dominated by state-backed partisan rebellions against Nazi occupations,” Dr. Chenoweth has written, “nonviolent resistance does not have a statistically significant advantage over armed insurrection.” | “非暴力抵抗与武装起义相比，在统计学上没有明显优势，自20世纪40年代以来，这种事还是第一次出现，而在那个十年里，国家支持的、反对纳粹占领的游击式反抗占据了主要地位，”切诺维斯博士写道。 |
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