LAST December, Muntadar al-Zaidi threw his shoe at former US President George W. Bush — an act that left an indelible mark on the collective consciousness of protesters the world over.

Since that protest, "shoe-ing" appears to have become the favoured protest statement, from Ahmedabad to Latvia. Such incidents have inspired comedy shows, video games and social networking groups.

Even the month-long Indian general election in April succumbed to what one commentator described as the "ultimate non-violent weapon".

The global phenomenon even prompted the publication of an academic paper — The Art of Shoe Throwing — by UK media lecturer Yasmin Ibrahim, in which she argued that:

"Popular acts of communication and protests enter new forms of relationships with audiences and global spectators beyond the political context and the shoe-throwing incident is no exception.

"It has been consummately appropriated into popular culture and entertainment in the multimedia platforms of the Internet, transforming political images and political protests into voyeuristic entertainment for the masses."

Even Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva found the shoe metaphor too good to pass up. Just days after the Bush incident, at a meeting of presidents and top officials from Latin America, he jokingly threatened to throw a shoe at Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Mr Bush's then fiercest critic in Latin America, if he spoke beyond his allotted time.

Elsewhere, the New Year was heralded with two separate shoe-throwing protests on the same day. In Sarajevo on Jan 3, a few hundred Bosnian protesters vented their spleen at effigies of leading Croat, Muslim and Serb politicians. Shoes had been provided by the organisers.

And in London — to the chants of "Shame on you, have my shoe" — demonstrators threw some 1,000 shoes at the official residence of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in protest against British inaction in Gaza. Scotland Yard said at the time that its police officers were "not troubled" by the shoe throwing.

A similarly phlegmatic approach was taken by court officials in Cambridge, UK, in June, when they found that there was insufficient evidence to prove that a German student who had hurled a shoe at Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had intended to cause harassment, alarm or distress.

Martin Jahnke had been attending a lecture by Wen in Cambridge in February, when the student branded the Chinese leader a "dictator" and threw a trainer. He missed him by a few metres.

Jahnke explained that he thought that just placing the shoe on the stage would be "universally understood". He defended his protest as a symbolic act of defiance, and said he had been inspired by the notorious shoe attack on Bush.

In China, some newspapers expressed anger over the incident while others praised the calm response of both citizens of mainland China and Premier Wen himself.

The Israeli ambassador to Sweden was also the target of a shoe-missile — this one actually made contact — while he was addressing an audience in Stockholm University.

Even the usually sober confines of the boardroom have not escaped the shoe throwers. In April, in a move that gave a new meaning to the phrase "voting with their feet", shoes were aimed at board members of the troubled Belgian-Dutch financial group, Fortis, during a meeting of shareholders in Ghent.

But the most prolonged shoe-throwing campaign emerged in India during the general election. In one incident, the perpetrator was none other than a Hindu sadhu, or holy man, who hurled his footwear at a prime ministerial candidate.

In another, a 21-year-old computer scientist took aim at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a rally in the western city of Ahmedabad.

A journalist who threw a shoe at India's Home Minister P. Chidambaram, during a news conference in the capital Delhi, later said he should not have chucked his shoe but had been "emotionally overtaken".