Student activism
The student wings of ruling parties dominate the campuses and residential halls through crime and violence to enjoy various unauthorized facilities.
Their first significant feat occurred during World War II when they successfully pressured Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas to join the side of the Allies.
The FLQ (Quebec Liberation Front) was considered a terrorist organization, causing the use of the War Measures Act after 95 bombings in the October Crisis.
[19] Since the 1970s, PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) have been created as a result of Student Union referendums across Canada in individual provinces.
Pink Shirt Day) was created by high school students David Shepherd, and Travis Price of Berwick, Nova Scotia,[21] and is now celebrated annually across Canada.
Beyond the specific demands regarding education, the protests reflected a "deep discontent" among some parts of society with Chile's high level of inequality.
[29] While nationalist Anti-American movements led by some students and intellectuals during the Chinese Civil War were instrumental in winning enough support for the CCP in urban areas to prevail, there remained lots of polarization on campuses in the late 1940's with a wide range of views.
[30] In 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests, led by students, inspired ended in a brutal government massacre of thousands, damaging the reputation of the Chinese Communist Party as it moved towards a more repressive approach to speech and dissent.
In Czechoslovakia, one of the most known faces of the protests following the Soviet-led invasion that ended the Prague Spring was Jan Palach, a student who committed suicide by setting fire to himself on January 16, 1969.
Though the Velvet Revolution began as a celebration of International Students' Day, the single event quickly turned into a nationwide ordeal aimed at the dissolution of communism.
Student activism and their use of the social sciences played a role in the 1991 fall of the following government, the Derg, and in the implementation of the rule of Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front during the following three decades.
The White Rose society in Nazi Germany lasted from 1942–1943, during which students mailed anti-nazi leaflets around the country until the leaders were caught and executed.
Following the imposition of the dictatorship, the Athens Polytechnic uprising in 1973 triggered a series of events that led to the abrupt end of the regime's attempted "liberalisation" process under Spiros Markezinis, and, after that, to the eventual collapse of the Greek junta during Metapolitefsi and the return of democracy in Greece.
Kostas Georgakis was a Greek student of geology, who, in the early hours of 19 September 1970, set himself ablaze in Matteotti square in Genoa as a protest against the dictatorial regime of Georgios Papadopoulos.
The Movement finally led to the expulsion of the contemporary Vice Chancellor of the university, Mr. Abhijit Chakraborty,[63] who allegedly ordered the police to do open lathicharge over the students.
During the political turmoil of the 1960s, right-wing student groups staged demonstrations calling for then-President Sukarno to eliminate alleged Communists from his government, and later demanding that he resign.
[67] Student groups also played a key role in Suharto's 1998 fall by initiating large demonstrations that gave voice to widespread popular discontent with the president in the aftermath of the May 1998 riots.
Upon taking office after Suharto stepped down, B. J. Habibie made numerous mostly unsuccessful overtures to placate the student groups that had brought down his predecessor.
Both religious and more moderate students played a major part in Ruhollah Khomeini's opposition network against the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
In 2006, he died at Evin prison after a hunger strike protesting the refusal to allow him to seek medical treatment for injuries suffered as a result of torture.
[71] At the end of 2002, students held mass demonstrations protesting the death sentence of reformist lecturer Hashem Aghajari for alleged blasphemy.
[77] After Mahsa Amini died on September 16, 2022, massive nationwide protests erupted throughout Iran, with schoolgirls playing a historically central role.
[80] In the subsequent student uprising in 1968, leftist activists barricaded themselves in universities, resulting in armed conflict with the Japanese police force.
However, in October 2011, the Court of Appeal ruled that the relevant provision in Section 15 UUCA was unconstitutional due to Article 10 of the Federal Constitution pertaining to freedom of expression.
[87] It began as opposition to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Enrique Peña Nieto and the Mexican media's allegedly biased coverage of the 2012 general election.
Student activism in the Philippines saw a surge during the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the First Quarter Storm before the declaration of Martial Law.
[103] One instance saw a debate between students and Education Minister Nataphol Teepsuwan[104] who used to be a part of the anti-democratic People's Democratic Reform Committee that called for Prayuth to staged 2014 Thai coup d'état.
During the 1930s students began to become more politically involved with the formation of many socialist societies at universities, ranging from social democratic to Marxist–Leninist and Trotskyist, even leading to Brian Simon, a communist, becoming head of the NUS.
It also saw the first major teach-in in Britain in 1965, where students debated the Vietnam War and alternative non-violent means of protest at the London School of Economics, sponsored by the Oxford Union.
At Fisk, students' concerns surrounding disciplinary rules designed to undermine black identity coalesced into demands for the resignation of President Fayette Avery McKenzie.
