If We Burn - The Library of the Uncommons

Hardcover, 368 pages

English language

Published Oct. 2, 2023 by PublicAffairs.

ISBN:: 978-1-5417-8897-8

The story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world — and what comes next

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. Over four years, acclaimed journalist and author of The Jakarta Method Vincent Bevins carried out hundreds of interviews around the world. The result is a stirring work of history built around one question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine's Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, If We Burn renders street movements and their consequences in gripping detail. Bevins draws on his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government …

The story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world — and what comes next

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. Over four years, acclaimed journalist and author of The Jakarta Method Vincent Bevins carried out hundreds of interviews around the world. The result is a stirring work of history built around one question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine's Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, If We Burn renders street movements and their consequences in gripping detail. Bevins draws on his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.

Careful investigation reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change has been gravely misguided. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, and reflect on what they wish they had done differently, offering urgent lessons for the future.

6 editions

loppear reviewed If We Burn by Vincent Bevins

a decade of non-US protest, to what ends?

5 stars

Outstanding journalist's history of 2010s protests and mass-media enabled uprisings, covering Arab Spring, Brasil & Chile, Hong Kong, and Ukraine. Using first-hand accounts and succinct late 20th-century local and global context about what power dynamics came before for each case study, this follows the movements in the streets and the outcomes over subsequent years. Ultimately challenges the narratives of horizontalism, leaderless movements, and corporate-tech-mediated uprisings as a path for change, with particular focus on co-opting of the same by right-wing elements and a need to pragmatically account for what power will fill the vacuum once regimes are toppled to realize any popular demands.

pdotb@wyrms.de reviewed If We Burn by Vincent Bevins

Interesting account of the last decade's protests

4 stars

Really good as a journalistic account of the major protests of the 2010s, combining historical background with chronologies of the protests and lots of interviews with those involved. Significantly skewed towards Brazil, where the author lived for a number of years. Somewhat weaker on analysis, besides the impression that leaderless horizontalism can lead to a protest 'succeeding', but then just opening up space for someone more organized (and, often, more right-wing and/or authoritarian) to sweep in. Apparently I need to read Rodrigo Nunes next :)

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