Seventh day of violent clashes between Albanian protesters and police

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1. 1

   Seventh day of violent clashes between Albanian protesters and police

   BBC NewsPublished Oct 20, 2026Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “Protesters in Albania have fought with riot police on the seventh consecutive day of violent clashes. The protesters, many of them high school and university students, are trying to oust embattled Prime Minister Edi Rama. Official figures said 295 people have been injured, 186 of whom are police officers, before Monday's violence. "The moment the state negotiates with this," Rama told grim-faced police chiefs, brandishing a rock hurled at police on Sunday, "the state has fallen". A police station and government buildings in Tirana have been attacked during the protests, which are being driven by demands for better university conditions, anger over corruption and calls for Rama's resignation. The protesters included "young men and women who have been radicalised by dark forces in Europe and the US", Rama said. "Albania has become one of the targets of a well co-ordinated attack." In brilliant October sunshine in Rinia Park, also known as Youth Park, I watched people prising loose cobble stones - like that brandished by the prime minister - as ammunition for later battles with police. They did not have long to wait. People in Rinia park loosen cobblestones to use as ammunition against riot police A convoy of police vehicles advanced down a broad boulevard, led by an armoured truck firing water cannon and tear gas canisters among the fleeing protesters. Squads of riot police chased the predominantly student crowd through the park.”

2. 2

   Global civil unrest: contagion, self-organization, and prediction.

   PloS one (Braha)Published Oct 31, 2012Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion in the context of modeling and identification of universal patterns of behavior. In contrast, the possibility that civil unrest activities, across countries and over long time periods, are governed by universal mechanisms has not been explored. Here, records of civil unrest of 170 countries during the period 1919-2008 are analyzed. It is demonstrated that the distributions of the number of unrest events per year are robustly reproduced by a nonlinear, spatially extended dynamical model, which reflects the spread of civil disorder between geographic regions connected through social and communication networks. The results also expose the similarity between global social instability and the dynamics of natural hazards and epidemics.”

3. 3

   The Polarizing Impact of Political Disinformation and Hate Speech: A Cross-country Configural Narrative.

   Information systems frontiers : a journal of research and innovation (Vasist et al.)Published Apr 17, 2023Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “However, digital spaces have also emerged as a fertile ground for fake news campaigns and hate speech, aggravating polarization and posing a threat to societal harmony. Despite the fact that this dark side is acknowledged in the literature, the complexity of polarization as a phenomenon coupled with the socio-technical nature of fake news necessitates a novel approach to unravel its intricacies. In light of this sophistication, the current study employs complexity theory and a configurational approach to investigate the impact of diverse disinformation campaigns and hate speech in polarizing societies across 177 countries through a cross-country investigation. The results demonstrate the definitive role of disinformation and hate speech in polarizing societies. The findings also offer a balanced perspective on internet censorship and social media monitoring as necessary evils to combat the disinformation menace and control polarization, but suggest that such efforts may lend support to a milieu of hate speech that fuels polarization. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.”

4. 4

   The psychology of offensive and defensive intergroup violence: Preregistered insights from 58 countries.

   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Kunst et al.)Published Mar 24, 2026Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “Across nations, a two-factorial structure was observed that was invariant at the scalar level. Defensive extremist intentions were consistently higher than offensive extremism in 56 out of 58 countries, suggesting greater moral acceptance of protective violence. While psychopathy was positively related to both types of violent extremist intentions, those high in Machiavellianism and narcissism demonstrated particularly higher levels of defensive extremist intentions. By contrast, those scoring high on religious fundamentalism and social dominance orientation demonstrated particularly higher levels of offensive extremist intentions. Unexpectedly, liberal political group identification was associated with higher offensive but lower defensive extremist intentions. Crucially, offensive (but not defensive) intentions were associated with macrolevel societal dysfunction, including political terror and internal conflict. These findings establish that defensive and offensive violent extremist intentions represent two conceptually different forms of extremism across a large and diverse range of countries, with consequences for research and practice.”

5. 5

   Politics of Albania (Wikipedia)

   WikipediaChecked Oct 20, 2026

   “Albania is a unitary parliamentary constitutional republic, in which the president of Albania is the head of state and the prime minister of Albania is the head of government in a multi-party system. The executive power is exercised by the Government and the prime minister with its Cabinet. Legislative power is vested in the Parliament of Albania. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. The political system of Albania is laid out in the 1998 constitution. The Parliament adopted the current constitution on 28 November 1998. Historically Albania has had many constitutions. Initially constituted as a monarchy in 1913, Albania became briefly a republic in 1925, and then a authoritarian monarchy in 1928. In 1939 Albania was invaded by Fascist Italian forces, imposing a puppet state, and later occupied by Nazi German forces. Following the partisan liberation from the Nazis in 1944 a provisional government was formed, which by 1946 had transformed into a communist one-party state. In March 1991 democracy was restored with multi-party elections.”