How flower power can overturn a system

Reacting to the police's brutal crackdown on demonstrators following the contested reelection of longtime President Alexander Lukashenko, Belarusian women adopted powerful symbols of peace to pursue the protests. Dressed in white and bearing flowers, they marched and formed solidarity chains in the streets of Minsk, the country's capital. Flowers have often served as a revolutionary symbol.

Military rule ran for nearly 50 years in Portugal. Arbitrary torture and censorship were imposed by generals such as Carmona and later Salazar. In 1974, army dissidents led to the fall of what was then Europe's oldest dictatorship. The citizens of Lisbon celebrated the nearly bloodless uprising with revolutionary red carnations. The period that followed was called the Third Portuguese Republic.

Another flower revolution is the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, named after the country's national flower. In January 2011, demonstrators overthrew the autocratic ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had led the country for over 20 years before fleeing from the protests to Saudi Arabia.

The popular uprising in Tunisia marked the beginning of the Arab Spring, a wave of revolutionary protests which then followed in Egypt, Libya and other countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Tunisia still serves as the best example of a successful revolution. Although further protests followed the overthrow of the government, the country is considered relatively stable.

The multi-sided civil war is still ongoing in Syria, where this picture was taken in May 2013. The photo shows a Kurdish rebel of the Syrian Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) in Aleppo with a flower in his Russian AK-47. Seven years later, there is still no end in sight to the conflict.

Inspired by the successful uprisings in the Arab world, pro-democracy protests also started in China in 2011. In a clear reference to the events in Tunisia, protestors wore jasmine flowers. The Chinese authorities reacted quickly: Jasmines were banned in flower markets. On the internet, searches for the term "jasmine" were also blocked.

Though perhaps not as famous, another flower revolution took place in Georgia. In 2003, the protests that came to be known as the "Rose Revolution" led to the resignation of President (and former foreign minister of the Soviet Union) Eduard Shevardnadze. Protesters literally applied a quote from the first Georgian president: "We will throw roses instead of bullets on our enemies."

After parliamentary elections in February 2005, popular unrest in Kyrgyzstan led to the overthrow of President Akayev. Rioters used the symbol of the opposition, the mountain tulip. The situation remained unstable until Kyrgyzstan established a parliamentary republic in 2010. Human rights organizations nevertheless still report restrictions on freedom of the press and of expression.

The Tulip and Rose Revolutions are among the so-called color revolutions, a wave of protest movements in the former Soviet Union during the early 2000s, which also includes the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Flowers were already used in political protest much earlier: For instance, social democrats adopted the red rose as a symbol. Hippies protested against the Vietnam War with flowers too.

Reacting to protests in 2013, the Thai government reversed the usual roles and let policemen distribute flowers to the demonstrators. After months of power struggles between the pro-government "Red Shirts" and the opposition coalition of "Yellow Shirts," the military seized power in a coup in 2014 and imposed martial law on the country.