YESTERDAY was World Refugee Day. It’s a day dedicated to raising awareness of the situation of refugees throughout the world, and right now their numbers are staggering.

It tells us a lot about the world we live in that last year the number of people fleeing war, persecution and conflict exceeded the scarcely believable figure of 70 million, the highest level the UN refugee agency has seen in almost 70 years.

Many of these desperate people, of course, are fleeing countries where authoritarian rule is the order of the day and might themselves have become the victims of persecution as a result of standing in defiance of such regimes.

It never ceases to amaze and inspire me how much of a risk ordinary people are prepared to take when their fundamental freedoms and rights are threatened. Right now, from Khartoum to Hong Kong, we are witnessing the most vivid reminders of that.

Last week while in the Afghan capital Kabul, I was lucky enough to meet some of those working against the odds to defend their rights. What incredible courage it takes to simultaneously take on both the Taliban and a government riddled with corrupt self-serving elites.

Right now I’m writing this column in Spain, a country that historically knows a thing or two about what happens when dictatorship takes grip. Flicking through an English language edition of the daily newspaper El Pais this week, I was intrigued to come across an article that asked: what has a bigger impact, elections or street protests?

The piece went on to outline how holding elections and referendums has become more frequent in both democracies and dictatorships and that there are now more elections than ever before.

This year, for example, 33 countries will have presidential elections and 76 nations will hold parliamentary votes. But it also highlighted the importance of that other form of political expression, street protests, which by all accounts are becoming more frequent than elections.

While on the one hand it’s a worrying measure of how frustrated, angry and concerned people have become over feeling disenfranchised, it’s also a sobering reminder of why the right to participate in an activity we call politics is not, and cannot be, restricted to just elections.

Taking politics on to the streets is nothing new, of course, even if its capacity to bring about peaceful and long-standing change remains open to debate.

From removing corrupt despotic rulers such as Ahmad al-Bashir in Sudan to ending economic inequality in Venezuela or focusing on a specific issue such as preventing the approval of the extradition law in Hong Kong, street protests are motivated by many things.

To succeed, of course, they need a number of qualities, perhaps most notably the sheer weight of numbers. As many as two million citizens of Hong Kong took to the streets against the feared extradition bill, more than a quarter of the city’s population, making it one of the largest protests in modern history.

In response to street protests governments have also become increasingly adept in their capacity to manage and, if necessary, repress such voices of dissent when they prove too threatening.

But protesters, too, have learned lessons from the likes of the Arab Spring as is evident in places like Algeria and Sudan recently. In Sudan, protesters explicitly expressed the wish that their movement should not become another Egypt, learning from the military takeover there after the failed uprising of the Arab Spring.

In both Algeria and Sudan they aimed at creating broad appeal and stayed united, were also digitally and social media savvy and made sure never to trust the army.

Similarly in Hong Kong, current organisers have likewise taken heed of what happened during the stalled 2014 Umbrella Movement demonstration which saw young protesters occupy thoroughfares for 79 days to call for universal suffrage for Hong Kong. This time, unlike back then, there is the lack of clear leader.

Five years ago, Joshua Wong, just a teenager at the time, rose to be the central figure of the movement, with the Financial Times calling him “the teen doing battle with Beijing”.

Instead of a single person rising to Wong’s status, this time around the Civil Human Rights Front, a coalition of 50 organisations, including pro-democracy political parties, has been instrumental in building and helping sustain the protest movement.

Such strategies deny regimes the capacity to neuter a movement simply by removing any single leader, even though charismatic figures have often been crucial to the successful outcome of some protest movements.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to insist, too, that the driving force behind these latest acts of defiance is not the determination of Hong Kongers to protect their own legal system and rights but “foreign interference” by hostile governments.

BUT as the journalist Hilton Yip pointed out recently, Beijing has been steadily ramping up anti-foreigner campaigns in recent years.

“These have included expat nightclubs and bars in Beijing and Shenzhen getting raided by police for drug checks, public notices urging Chinese to report ‘suspicious’ Westerners, and cartoons depicting big-nosed Western spies seducing innocent Chinese girls,” Yip observed recently in Foreign Policy magazine.

The reality behind the Hong Kong protests, however, is something else entirely and shows what happens when people cannot choose their political leaders but can take to the streets to hold them to account.

If anything, the events of the past weeks show the extraordinary extent of grassroots political power and why it matters more than ever. It reveals too how ordinary people fed up with corrupt or dictatorial regimes can actively shape the room for dissent, creating new spaces when necessary often through the power of civil society.

As the American journalist and author William J Dobson makes clear in his book The Dictator’s Learning Curve, life as an authoritarian hardman has become increasingly fraught over the years in an era of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

It was Antoine Buyse, professor of human rights and director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, who recently pointed out that this same dictator’s learning curve is constantly being challenged by a new and refreshing phenomena called “the people’s learning curve”.

In places like Sudan and Hong Kong, what we are witnessing is the politics of the voice as opposed to the vote. To that end, street protests will always have their place in any democratic process.