  The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed multiple public health, socio-economic,
and institutional crises. Measures taken to slow the spread of the virus have
fostered significant strain between authorities and citizens, leading to waves
of social unrest and anti-government demonstrations. We study the temporal
nature of pandemic-related disorder events as tallied by the "COVID-19 Disorder
Tracker" initiative by focusing on the three countries with the largest number
of incidents, India, Israel, and Mexico. By fitting Poisson and Hawkes
processes to the stream of data, we find that disorder events are
inter-dependent and self-excite in all three countries. Geographic clustering
confirms these features at the subnational level, indicating that nationwide
disorders emerge as the convergence of meso-scale patterns of self-excitation.
Considerable diversity is observed among countries when computing correlations
of events between subnational clusters; these are discussed in the context of
specific political, societal and geographic characteristics. Israel, the most
territorially compact and where large scale protests were coordinated in
response to government lockdowns, displays the largest reactivity and the
shortest period of influence following an event, as well as the strongest
nationwide synchrony. In Mexico, where complete lockdown orders were never
mandated, reactivity and nationwide synchrony are lowest. Our work highlights
the need for authorities to promote local information campaigns to ensure that
livelihoods and virus containment policies are not perceived as mutually
exclusive.
