If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

by Vincent Bevins

Overview

“A remarkable new history” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times Magazine) of a decade aflame—and what we can learn from its embers

From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. Acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins carried out hundreds of interviews around the world, guided by a single, puzzling question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

The result is a stirring work of history that connects events in a dozen countries and reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change is gravely misguided. From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, Bevins provides a blow-by-blow account of street movements and their consequences, recounted in gripping detail. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541788978
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post after serving as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Bevins previously worked for the Financial Times and now contributes to outlets like the New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books. His first book, The Jakarta Method, came out in 2020.

Editorial Reviews

2023-07-11
A former journalist in Brazil and Indonesia looks at the global protest movements from 2010 to 2020 and wonders how so many led to the opposite outcomes of what they were demanding.

Bevins, who covered Brazil for the Los Angeles Times and Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, was intimately involved in the Brazilian street protests in 2013, among other events, and he spent four years interviewing people around the world to get a deeper understanding of this “mass protest decade,” beginning in Tunisia in 2011. The author seeks to reveal why the demands were simply repudiated or worse—e.g., military crackdown in Egypt or the election of right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018. Much has been written about the role of social media in spurring a global democratic movement, and there was the tremendous role of Al Jazeera in reporting on the Arab Spring. However, in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and elsewhere, things went very differently, as Bevins amply demonstrates. Despite initial encouragement in Hong Kong, the crackdown by China has been nearly complete. In Ukraine, the so-called Orange Revolution was successful in kicking the Soviet-backed leader out of Kyiv, yet Russia later invaded. Chile has been perhaps the lone success story. In 2021, Gabriel Boric, “the leader of the 2011 student protests who entered congressional politics in 2013 and signed the ‘peace accord’ in 2019, was elected president” at age 35, famously declaring, “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” Particularly incisive is the author’s questioning of protest leaders and other relevant figures about what they would have done differently, in hindsight. Bevins is correct about how little the media understand the Global South, and he shows how “the horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass protest is fundamentally illegible.”

Questions remain, but this insightful study should prove valuable to future activists across the globe.

Kirkus Reviews

This book is outstanding.” —Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sontag

“Ambitious, diligently researched, and provocative, If We Burn will transform the way you think. Vincent Bevins’ detailed, comparative reporting offers a riveting look at the contradictions, unexpected consequences, and lessons of mass protests.” —Alexa Hagerty, author of Still Life with Bones

“[This is] hands down the best account—scholarly or journalistic—of the protest decade (2010‑2020) across the world. Absolutely brilliant, sensitive, thoughtful, and so wonderful to think with.” —Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade

“A must‑read for anyone trying to make sense of the profound global transformations since 2008. If We Burn brilliantly interweaves lived experiences and historical context to explain the confusing and effervescent years that changed not only Brazil, but the world as we know it. And the prose is delightful. I started reading and could not stop.” —Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, author of The Rise of the Radical Right in the Global South

“In this remarkably assured and sweeping history of the present, Vincent introduces us to the activists, hackers, punks, martyrs, and the millions of ordinary people whose small acts of bravery spurred the mass protests of the last decade. Bevins’s clear‑eyed, sympathetic account of the unfulfilled promise of these protests leaves his reader with a bold vision of the future—one in which his book’s lessons are used to transform an uprising into a true revolution.” —Merve Emre, critic at New Yorker

“Once you have read this incredible new book, you will start seeing its lessons absolutely everywhere, all around you.” —Dharna Noor, climate reporter at Guardian

“I was not expecting this, but I think If We Burn is even better than The Jakarta Method.”—Benjamin Fogel, editor at Jacobin

From the Publisher

Ambitious, diligently researched, and provocative, If We Burn will transform the way you think. Vincent Bevins’ detailed, comparative reporting offers a riveting look at the contradictions, unexpected consequences, and lessons of mass protests.

author of Still Life with Bones Alexa Hagerty

I was not expecting this, but I think If We Burn is even better than The Jakarta Method.”

Benjamin Fogel

In this remarkably assured and sweeping history of the present, Vincent introduces us to the activists, hackers, punks, martyrs, and the millions of ordinary people whose acts of bravery spurred the mass protests of the last decade. Bevins’s clear-eyed, sympathetic account of the unfulfilled promise of these protests leaves his reader with a bold vision of the future—one in which his book’s lessons are used to transform an uprising into a true revolution.

Merve Emre

This is a wondrous work of mystery writing, an effort to solve the riddle: Why has a decade of large-scale rolling revolts produced no revolution, no significant structural reform? I can’t think of any journalist other than Bevins who would dare to ask such a question, or be capable of weaving together seemingly discrete global events into a stunning history of now. Have we planted seeds for a better future, or have the gears of change frozen for good? Bevins lets the people he talked to, those on the street, answer.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of Greg Grandin