Severe unrest, including riots and episodes of mob violence, has erupted in several countries, in many cases involving younger people. In that situation, there is a possibility of a broader pattern that deserves our scrutiny. It is absolutely true that global economic stagnation, as well as geopolitical or domestic political instability, has made life difficult for marginalised communities and the middle class in many countries.
But what can explain the fire that engulfed the historic Limoges city hall in France recently, or the bulldozer that vandalised the historic museum on Dhanmondi Road No 32 in Bangladesh, which survived the Pakistani atrocities, the Liberation War, and subsequent military rule?
These events raise questions about whether our collective capacity for restraint is weakening. These acts are not just destructive; they represent collective desecration of civilization, where enraged mobs can turn on anything.
When we see crowds burn what survived world wars and genocidal atrocities, the core issue is no longer their so-called grievances, but what collapse turns them into an instinct for barbarity.
This kind of antagonistic behavioral change may arise from multiple interacting factors, including economic instability, poor living standards, childhood trauma, and digital radicalization amplified by new media algorithms, the normalization of violence, propaganda, fast-paced consumption trends, and even environmental chemical exposure.
Each of these factors plays a role in shaping human behavior, particularly under conditions of social and economic adversity.
In states, from West to East, where policymaking can, under appropriate conditions of course, be done through peaceful discourse and movements, serious violence has erupted instead.
Does this represent a measurable worldwide change in protest, rather than just a series of highly visible episodes?
Even movements with sensible, logical political agendas, such as the quota reform movement in Bangladesh or France’s recent protests demanding reduced military spending in favor of education budgets, resort to widespread violence where peaceful change is possible.
This disconnect suggests that there is something else.
This issue with impulse control isn’t just limited to any specific class of people; it’s a problem affecting the entire nation and subsequently affecting the entire globe. In Bangladesh’s background, after 2024, we are witnessing a society that seems to have no impulse control whatsoever.
Thinking about these things reminds me of Tofazzal Hossain from Dhaka University. So-called “sane” students beat up a mentally ill man until he was half-dead; then, after a brief pause, they fed him rice, and they beat him again. This time, they beat him to death.
Next, I am reminded of Dipu Das. A mob beat him, hung his body from a tree, and burned it, while bystanders cheered, and yet no one thought, “Shouldn’t we stop?”
Absorbing the venom of extremism, a group attacked a shrine in Rajbari, exhumed the body of a man named Nurul Pagla from his grave, and set it on fire simply to express their hatred against Sufis.
These acts are committed by new generation of people who simply do not know how to stop. They keep beating even a lifeless body. A terrifying breakdown of law and order and anarchy has been ongoing in the country since the 2024 political change.
But can that discontinuity of political sanity really explain such raw, brutal violence? But how are these people becoming so monstrous in the first place? People gather quickly there to launch an attack, escalating with the swiftness of a jaguar charging at a stray deer in the jungle.
Immediately, people stand by with their cameras, smiling and ready to record. A widely cited line of research on nonviolent political movements suggests that campaigns mobilising a relatively small proportion of a country’s population, even approximately 3.5 % of the body politic, have historically achieved meaningful political change.
Research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, studying major resistance campaigns, found that nonviolent campaigns were generally more successful than violent ones in achieving their stated objectives.
However, the 3.5% threshold should not be interpreted as a universal rule guaranteeing success. It tells about patterns observed in particular historical cases rather than an automatic formula for political transformation, as Chenoweth herself said. Yet violence has erupted in various contexts where mass mobilisation initially came from legitimate grievances or aspirations for peaceful change.
This raises an important question: why do recent movements experience severe escalation or the emergence of violent tactics?
Yes, yes, I heard the quote, “when peaceful revolution becomes impossible, violent revolution becomes inevitable.”
But how does that argument apply to protests or mob violence in France, a liberal democracy in Europe, where citizens can openly protest outside the offices of the Prime Minister or President, openly insult their leaders, and publicly denounce government policies without having to resort to violence to make their voices heard?
Recent demonstrations in France, for example, have involved demands concerning school conditions, teacher shortages, declining public services, inequality, and the rising cost of living.
However, within the same demonstrations for stated political agendas, we have seen mobs, sometimes forming the majority of the crowd, attacking businesses and homes, looting, and vandalising. But the existence of violence where peaceful political participation is possible does not, by itself, establish that hidden agendas or organised sponsorship were responsible.
A more rigorous way for us to understand this phenomenon is to distinguish between the legitimacy of a movement’s grievances, the methods through which it mobilises, and the political consequences of its actions.
A movement may come from genuine socioeconomic frustration, yet its mobilisation can subsequently be shaped by misinformation, political opportunism, or the intervention of organised actors.
Moreover, the transition from protest to violence should not be treated as an automatic or inevitable outcome of public anger; rather, it is a process that requires its own explanation. Including the role of group dynamics, digital information networks, and actors who seek to exploit or intensify disorder for political or economic gain.
Identifying the beneficiaries of unrest does not, by itself, prove that they orchestrated it, just as establishing the legitimacy of a movement’s grievances does not automatically justify every method employed in its name.
Digital communication adds another dimension to this process. Internet platforms can reduce the cost of mobilisation, accelerate the circulation of information, and enable people to coordinate protests without conventional organisational structures.
However, these same mechanisms and cyber algorithms can reward outrage, amplify sensationalist content, and circulate unverified allegations, creating the impression that extreme positions enjoy greater public support than they actually do.
It can function as a complete gateway to mass violence, even massacre or genocide, which we have seen in Myanmar when social media was literally used as a medium for the Rohingya genocide of 2017 in Rakhine, Myanmar.
A similar example was evident in Bangladesh in 2024 and subsequently in 2025, when social media was used not merely to broadcast and celebrate the vandalism of a museum and the subsequent attacks on the country’s two leading national dailies, but also to facilitate mobilisation and coordination surrounding these incidents.
Just as demands for educational reform and better public services in France do not explain or justify the vandalism. Bangladesh’s 2024 quota-reform movement and broader demands for accountability should not be conflated with the subsequent terror and breakdown of political order.
The circulation of organised propaganda and the celebration of violence further amplify its impact. In many situations, people may not fully understand how to respond to unfolding events that are happening so fast. Once a coordinated response appears and gains momentum, many people may simply follow the prevailing trend without critically thinking about its implications.
Although not every episode of mass violence requires a centrally coordinated conspiracy, this should not obscure the possibility of organised action in specific cases.
Consider the difference between the mobs in France and Bangladesh. Many of the participants in France’s unrest may belong to far-left or anarchist fringes, whose actions, however destructive,may be rooted in an identifiable ideological lineage.
But what ideology, if any, explains the brutality of the mobs in Bangladesh?
Do these mobs even understand the political ideas they might claim to represent?
Or has violence itself become the purpose, with them joining a collective frenzy without fully understanding its motives, consequences, or even its supposed political objectives?
A related but often overlooked dimension of this issue is the potential long-term behavioural impact of environmental neurotoxins, particularly lead.
In his 2007 study, Rick Nevin, an economist who has worked to eliminate childhood lead poisoning, studied the relationship between preschool blood-lead levels and subsequent crime trends across the United States.
He also extended his analysis in Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. His findings identified a strong statistical association between childhood lead exposure and later trends in violent crime, with time lags consistent with the possibility that early-life neurodevelopmental damage may influence behaviour later in life.
He demonstrated that the rise and fall of violent crime in America completely correlates with the timeframe of adding lead to gasoline, following a more than two-decade time lag.
The correlations were reportedly above 0.9 in the analyses discussed, an unusually high level in the social sciences. Although correlation does not establish causation, the strength and consistency of these associations across multiple countries, combined with the apparent temporal relationship between childhood chemical exposure and later crime trends, make the findings difficult to dismiss outright.
In Bangladesh, childhood exposure to neurotoxic substances includes unregulated lead-acid battery recycling, lead-containing paints, contaminated turmeric, industrial pollution, and arsenic-contaminated groundwater.
The World Health Organization emphasises that no blood-lead concentration is known to be safe and that lead exposure can adversely affect children’s intelligence and behaviour. The Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2025 reported that approximately 38% of children aged 12-59 months had blood-lead concentrations at or above 5 micrograms per decilitre (µg/dL).
A 2022-24 study by icddr,b and Stanford University, testing 500 children aged 2 to 4 in Dhaka, found lead in every child’s blood, with 98% exceeding the threshold that the U.S. classifies as requiring “immediate attention.”
Where is this lead coming from?
One of the primary sources is unregulated battery recycling. Over 3 million battery-run rickshaws operate in the country, each using five lead-acid batteries with a lifespan of only 6 to 11 months.
These batteries are melted in open furnaces across more than a thousand unregulated smelting yards (bhattis) scattered nationwide, mostly within residential areas, according to UNEP and Pure Earth data. In the Stanford study, children living within 1 kilometer of such sites had blood lead levels 43% higher than others.
But lead isn’t the only poison.
The tanneries of Hazaribagh have submerged generations in chromium, and tens of millions in rural areas have been drinking arsenic-contaminated tubewell water for decades.
A developing brain can barely defend itself against even one of these toxins; when several hit during the same childhood, it stands almost no chance. Now, let us consider whether the approximately two-decade lag identified in Nevin’s research raises questions in the Bangladeshi context.
Most of the individuals committing murder in the 2024-26 mob violence were born in the early 2000s and later.
That was precisely the era when Bangladesh’s vehicle fleet tripled, battery recycling proliferated, and Dhaka’s air, soil, and water were absorbing the very chemicals that icddr,b is only now measuring in the blood of today’s two-year-olds. However, the argument need not depend entirely on the precision of this temporal calculation.
Even if the specific 22-year lag observed in the American context cannot be directly transposed to Bangladesh, the broader question of environmental harm on human behavioral development remains important.
Another critical dimension is the political economy of disorder, as discussed earlier.
Political or socioeconomic instability rarely affects all actors equally. Governments may use disorder to justify exceptional security measures; opposition groups may exploit it to delegitimise incumbents; and businesses may benefit from certain forms of reconstruction expenditure.
Yet the conditions shaping human behaviour begin to develop long before individuals enter the political arena. Persistent poverty, unemployment, financial insecurity, and repeated setbacks impose chronic psychological strain, narrowing attention towards immediate survival and leaving fewer cognitive resources for deliberation and emotional regulation.
Economists Anandi Mani and her colleagues found that financial scarcity can impair cognitive performance, while other research links failures of self-control to aggression, and adverse childhood experiences can affect long-term development.
Under accumulated frustration, humiliation, and perceived deprivation, individuals become more vulnerable to impulsive reactions, particularly when provoked or mobilised by others.
This argument challenges explanations that treat violent behaviour exclusively as a product of ideology, political allegiance, or cultural values.
If environmental conditions can affect emotional regulation and impulse control, and poverty and prolonged adversity can undermine psychological development, then the origins of social behaviour are more complex than conventional political analysis acknowledges.
What appears on the surface as intolerance or an inability to exercise restraint could, in many circumstances, be shaped by developmental, psychological, and environmental factors that have received insufficient attention. This is not to suggest that political beliefs, moral responsibility, or human behaviour can be reduced to brain chemistry.
Rather, biological, psychological, and social-political dimensions may interact, and an adequate explanation of collective violence should not exclude any of them without sufficient evidence.
If we continue to ignore the conditions that make violence easier to unleash while tolerating those who deliberately unleash it, we will remain trapped in a cycle of destruction, addressing its consequences while neglecting its deeper roots.
Tasin Mahdi, an interdisciplinary essayist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.