The Decade in Pictures

The image shows a rebel fighter in Libya thrusting his Kalashnikov straight into the air as a truck-mounted rocket fires toward forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi, the Libyan dictator. It was the start of 2011, the heady early days of the Arab Spring. The photo is heroic. It is also foreboding.

A short time after that image was shot, Gadhafi was dead, a dictator removed and a popular uprising triumphant. But any celebration was fleeting. The photographer, Chris Hondros, died tragically covering the indiscriminate and interminable war there. The brief, flickering notion that the revolutions of the Arab Spring would herald a new era of openness and representative democracy in the world vanished quickly as well.

Instead, it now seems clear, the 2010s will be remembered as a decade of unceasing upheaval. The impulse to overthrow the entrenched elite reached every continent, sometimes with violent uprisings, sometimes with populist insurgencies that shook the institutions of leading democracies. As the decade closes out, it seems clear that a long period of fission, defined by the fraying of norms, the weakening of traditional political parties and the upending of post-Cold War alliances, has yet to fully run its course.

There have been other decades in history in which a revolutionary fervor or populist unrest went viral. A wave of uprisings against monarchy shook Europe in the 1840s. Indebted farmers in the United States revolted against the railroad barons and the Eastern elites in the 1890s. Mass protests at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s overthrew governments or transformed much of the communist world.

The unrest of the 2010s seems more varied and more global. But it is not difficult to imagine that the period will be remembered by history as another fateful era of populist tumult.

Few of the photographers illustrating the stories of the day could have seen that coming 10 years ago. Yet many of the most memorable images document its spread. During the early days of the anti-government uprising in Yemen, an unforgettable photograph of a woman cradling a wounded relative inside a mosque turned hospital, by Samuel Aranda, is the counterpoint to Chris Hondros’ rebel fighter — the pain of conflict, in Yemen as in Libya, still searing a decade later.

The war in Syria began in 2011 as an isolated revolt against the dictatorship of Bashar Assad. There, too, civil war became a breeding ground for other discontents. Turkey’s aerial bombing of Tilsehir Hill in Syria, captured in a 2014 photo by Bulent Kilic, is a reminder of the many forces, ethnic, religious and geopolitical, drawn into Syria’s turmoil.

And then there were those who were pushed out. They risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean, some through now-porous Libya on the northern coast of Africa, others fleeing the uninhabitable cities across Syria for the apparent safety of Europe. Sergey Ponomarev’s photograph in late 2015 of migrants arriving on the island of Lesbos, in Greece, looks biblical, a desperate crossing made on faith and rickety boats.

Those migrants served as more than a release valve for conflict in the developing world. They also set off discontent, fueling a series of populist insurgencies in Europe, most notably Brexit, but also the Marine Le Pen movement in France and the rightist AfD in Germany. All were inspired by — and helped spread hostility toward — immigration and the globalist, free trade, open-border ideals of the European elite.

The United States never agreed to accept more than a tiny share of those displaced by conflicts in Northern Africa and the Middle East. But immigration of people from predominantly Muslim countries and Latin America was one factor that helped power the rise of an especially unlikely populist, Donald Trump. The iconic images of the second half of the decade as often capture the newly exposed rifts in American society as ongoing instability abroad.

At one end of the spectrum is a photograph of Ieshia Evans, who made a defiant stand against police officers at a protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to call for action against excessive force by the police against black men and women. At the other, in Georgia, in the spring of 2018, is the lighting of a swastika after a rally of the National Socialist Movement, amid a rise in white supremacist violence.

The enduring photos by Damon Winter, Doug Mills and Erin Schaff capture both the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency: an ardent young follower at a rally; a crisply cuffed president in the Cabinet room; a meeting with Kim Jong Un of North Korea at the DMZ; and Nancy Pelosi’s “clap back” at the State of the Union address. Each recalls a distinct moment in presidential history: an American leader who stokes division and celebrates defiance of past presidential norms.

The decade closes with the House of Representatives voting to impeach Trump, ensuring that instability will continue to define politics at the opening of a new decade as it did the one we leave behind.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .