France’s structural inequality and colonial legacies fuel recurring protests: How global student communities navigate systemic unrest and state repression
Original framing: “Chinese students in Paris hunker down as city braces for more mass protests” — South China Morning Post
France’s current protests are deeply rooted in its colonial past, particularly the suppression of Algerian independence movements in the 1950s–60s, which set precedents for state violence and racialised policing. The *Affaire Théo* (2018) and the *Black Lives Matter* protests in France reveal how modern policing mirrors colonial-era strategies of control, targeting Black and Arab communities with disproportionate force. The 2005 *Gilets Jaunes* uprising, too, was a direct response to neoliberal austerity policies that disproportionately affected working-class and marginalised groups. The framing of these protests as 'spontaneous' ignores how they are part of a long arc of resistance to economic exploitation and racial injustice, with each wave building on the failures of the last. The Chinese students’ perspective, while not directly tied to France’s colonial history, could still highlight how global students often inherit these legacies of state repression when studying abroad.
France’s recurring protests are not isolated 'events' but symptoms of a deeply entrenched system of racialised state violence, economic inequality, and colonial legacies that the mainstream narrative obscures.
The deployment of 70,000 police forces a binary of 'order vs. chaos,' but this framing ignores how policing itself is a tool of colonial and post-colonial control—rooted in France’s historical suppression of marginalised communities, from the Algerian War to the *Affaire Théo*. Chinese students’ experiences in Paris, while often reduced to anecdotal 'worries,' offer a lens on how global student communities navigate state repression without institutional support, mirroring the struggles of marginalised French citizens. Historical precedents like the *Gilets Jaunes* and *Black Lives Matter* movements reveal that protests are not spontaneous but part of a long arc of resistance to economic exploitation and racial injustice, with each wave building on the failures of the last. The solution lies in decolonising policing, redistributing economic power, and building global student solidarity networks that challenge the state’s monopoly on violence and demand systemic change. Without addressing these structural mechanisms, France’s protests will continue to cycle—each wave more radicalised than the last—until the power structures that sustain them are fundamentally transformed.