Publishers Weekly
07/31/2023
The 2010s saw left-wing protest movements around the world shake the establishment, but accomplish the opposite of what they wanted, according to this elegiac history. Journalist Bevins (The Jakarta Method) explores progressive uprisings in 10 countries, most of them following a fashionable “horizontal” model that eschewed hierarchy, leaders, programmatic demands, and political negotiations with governments. He gives the most attention to the 2013 protests in Brazil, which began as a demonstration against public transit fare hikes and swelled to encompass a broad swath of discontent; in ensuing years, Brazilian rightists adopted the same demonstration tactics, media strategies, and antiestablishment rhetoric to get the left-wing president, Dilma Rousseff, impeached and bring right-wing president Jair Balsonaro to power. Bevins surveys other political upheavals, including Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square protests; fizzled prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong; and the 2019 protests in Chile, a rare success story, when politicians leveraged street demonstrations to bring a left-wing government to power. Bevins’s colorful reportage captures the élan of militants—“If We Burn, You Burn With Us” warned a Hong Kong banner—and their giddy joy as demonstrations gathered steam, and he’s also incisive in his critique of the protest movements’ feckless disorganization, incoherent message, and cluelessness about what to do when the protest ends. The result is an illuminating postmortem on a decade of false dawns. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
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.”—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth
“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, New Yorker
“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
“I was not expecting this, but I think If We Burn is even better than The Jakarta Method.”—Benjamin Fogel, editor, Jacobin
"Bevins has spent the last 10 years or so following and interviewing in search of answers. ‘The point was not just to notice that the mass protest decade hasn’t really worked out,’ he muses toward the end of the book. ‘The idea was to understand why.’ Fortunately, he comes away from his globe-trotting search with critical lessons for activists both here and abroad.”—The New Republic
“This book is phenomenal. A thrilling, blow by blow (and often live on-the-ground) analysis of how the various people-led movements and revolutions over the last decade succeeded or failed. Incalculably useful to anyone who’d like to make substantive, enduring changes to their town, country or even the world. I cannot think of a book that so soberly and forensically analysed the very recent past. If We Burn is about as good as journalism gets.”—Rob Delaney, author of A Heart that Works
“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 Amanhã Vai Ser Maior and The Rise of the Radical Right in the Global South
“Once you have read this incredible new book, you will start seeing its lessons absolutely everywhere, all around you.”—Dharna Noor, climate reporter at The Guardian
“The best book I read this year....If We Burn is a globetrotting journey of historical reportage. Bevins conducted more than 200 interviews in 10 countries. Attentive to local particularities, he diligently retells how each protest developed before zooming out to ponder the implications for the 'mass protest decade' and consider what would be required for such movements to succeed in the future”—Eamon Whalen, Mother Jones
“[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
“This insightful study should prove valuable to future activists across the globe.” —Kirkus
“Bevins’s colorful reportage captures the élan of militants…and he’s also incisive in his critique….The result is an illuminating postmortem on a decade of false dawns.”—Publishers Weekly
“Tremendous”—Ryan Grim, The Intercept
“Vincent Bevins emerged as a leading chronicler of US empire in his 2020 book The Jakarta Method, in which he explored the dirty legacy of the Cold War. His new book, If We Burn, is more personal and even more urgent. And somehow, a little hopeful, too.”—Jonathan Guyer, Vox
“[A] remarkable new history….For a full decade, mobilized by social media and inflamed by the inequities of globalization, the world was on fire with mass protest.”—David Wallace-Wells, New York Times Magazine
“Crucially, the book draws deeply on protestors’ own words. If We Burn thereby offers both a postmortem of the last decade of mass protest and a blueprint for the inevitable next. In searching for the missing revolution, Bevins may help others find it after all.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“A riveting, almost novelistic narrative."—Dazed
“This book is outstanding."—Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag
“Outstanding….[Bevins] cares enough about his subjects to do them justice. His memorable descriptions are among the book’s chief pleasures. It’s hard to forget the ‘rowdy and gregarious’ Mayara, fan of the all-woman Brazilian punk band Menstruação Anarquika (Anarchic Menstruation), or Bahar, the ‘wry and impish scientist’ who joined Turkey’s uprising.”—Current Affairs
“Bevins honed his skill for unpacking complicated political history in his last book, The Jakarta Method, a masterful account….In If We Burn, he sets the table for each mass uprising in a way that often feels like a conversation with an encyclopedically informed globetrotting friend.”—Los Angeles Times
"The critically acclaimed Jakarta Method was a scathing exposé of the central role the C.I.A. played in orchestrating Indonesia’s savage 1965 anti-communist pogrom. If We Burn is both more ambitious and more wide-ranging."—The New York Times Book Review
“This book tries to solve perhaps the most important puzzle posed by recent history"—Daniel Denvir, n+1 magazine book recommendations
“If We Burn achieves its very difficult aim – quite like what Naomi Klein’s landmark No Logo did as the last millennium closed – of getting a grip over events spread across the globe with solid reportage….This book is essential reading.”—The Wire (India)
Benjamin Fogel
I was not expecting this, but I think If We Burn is even better than The Jakarta Method.
Merve Emre
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 spontaneous 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.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of Greg Grandin
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.
author of Still Life with Bones Alexa Hagerty
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.
Kirkus 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.
