39 Discussion and conclusions Scope and limitations The present report provides rapid descriptive analysis of protests about the cost of living, mainly high energy prices, in the 12 months between 1 November 2021 and 31 October 2022. In the wake of the COVID19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the global energy price index rose more than three times higher than its 2016 base price. Food prices also rose rapidly, and particularly sharply in countries that are dependent on foodgrain imports, such as Sierra Leone and Lebanon, suffering from both wheat shortages and rising costs of transport. Analysis of the ACLED data found over 12,500 protests in 148 countries in all regions of the world about the cost of living in the period November 2021 to October 2022. Protestors specified the cost or availability of food in(fewer than 600), energy(7,500) and the cost of living(more than 4,000), with protest slogans and protestor testimonies stating clearly that their basic needs were under threat, and demanding governments act to protect them against the crisis. It should be noted that these are conservative estimates of the extent of contention about these issues: to maintain consistency, the analysis excluded a range of closely-related protests which did not fit the specification, including protests by organised labour around wages, farmers around fertiliser, political protests in which the cost of living was one of many grievances, and a range of other relevant contentions. In particular, the analysis excludes most of the later periods of broader uprisings such as in Sri Lanka, Haiti and Iran, which were to differing degrees triggered by protests about food or energy prices. Protest data can offer insights into broad patterns, but not into the dynamics at work in specific contexts. The selected case studies presented here provide initial insights into the specific social and political contexts in which the protests occurred, and into their political and policy effects. However, this report is unable to provide a conclusive analysis of the social and political impacts of these protests, some of which are still unfolding, and all of which are highly complex interactions that warrant expert analysis by country specialists and actors on the ground. Global responses to a global crisis The cost of living protests of 2022 were distributed across the world, across all types of political systems and levels of economic development. They occurred in countries that are energy producers and exporters, as well as those that rely on energy imports. Similar waves of global or multi-regional protests about the cost of living in 2008 and 2010-11 had been seen as threats to global economic and political stability. Although the data for 2022 are not strictly comparable with those documenting these earlier waves, in 2022 there appear to have been a larger number of protests, focused more on crises of energy(fuel, petrol, gas, cooking gas and electricity in particular). Comparable waves of global protest earlier this century were fragmented by geography and time, featuring food and fuel riots in the global South, particularly Africa, in 2007-08; the Arab Uprisings of 2010-11; and the various Occupy and anti-austerity protests mainly in the global North, throughout much of the 2007-12 period. By comparison the 2022 wave was relatively unified: people all around the world protested about similar grievances, articulated in broadly shared terms and demanding in common that their governments act to protect them. One implication of this unusually unified wave of global protests is that it signals broad discontent with the state of the global economy. This broad discontent was sufficiently deeply and widely felt to trigger collective action by unknown numbers of protests across at least 12,500 separate events in thousands of locations in 148