Review of Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023).
Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – At the end of 2019, there was no shortage of articles looking retrospectively at the events that had shaped the decade of the 2010s. One of them was aptly titled “A decade of revolt.” From Tunis to New York, Madrid, Hong Kong, Tehran, or Khartoum, the past decade was marked by protests, demonstrations, and uprisings. If the notion that history is an almost continuous march towards the progress of human kind (a popular view among Western intellectuals in the 1990s such as Francis Fukuyama) still had some currency, the last decade should have put this idea to rest.
That is because, in hindsight, it is difficult to be optimistic about the results of this decade of revolt. This is a feeling shared by many and examined in the book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” The author, Vincent Bevins, is a US journalist who was highly praised for his previous book, “The Jakarta Method”, which discusses the US support for human rights abuses during the Cold War in the name of anti-Communism.
The question at the core of Bevins’ second book, “If We Burn”, is a very straightforward one: “How is it possible that so many mass protests led to the opposite of what they asked for?”[1] With the temporal focus set on the 2010s, but having a global geographical scope, Bevins conducted around 200 interviews in twelve different countries with activists, politicians, and other people with key insights on this decade of mass protests.
“If We Burn” discusses many different cases of protests during the last decade, but special attention is paid to Egypt, Hong Kong, Chile, and, above all, Brazil. This is no coincidence because, from 2010 to 2016, Bevins worked as a foreign correspondent based in São Paulo for the Los Angeles Times. The chapters on Brazil are a pleasure to read, but the strong focus on the country is somewhat disproportionate when considering that the book is presented as a work of global history. An alternative approach would have been to focus on a smaller number of cases, perhaps narrowing it down to a few Global South countries.
Bevins appears a bit uncomfortable when moving away from the countries he knows best. For instance, when he refers to the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square in 2013, Bevins writes that after coming to power in 2003, Turkey’s ruling party AKP embraced “more conservative Muslims and small business owners (as long as they were ethnic Turks).”[2] This is actually not the case, as the AKP has historically outperformed the main opposition party CHP – which has a much stronger Turkish nationalist discourse – in the Kurdish areas of Turkey.
Notwithstanding this inaccuracy, and the fact that the geographical scope of the book often works against the final result, there is much to be praised in “If We Burn.” A key success of the book is that Bevins strikes the perfect balance between critically examining what protests achieved in terms of tangible results and remaining deeply respectful of the protesters and their sacrifices. Tunisian President Kais Saied might have entrenched himself in power after 2021 and established a dictatorship similar to the one headed by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, brought down by mass demonstrations in 2011. But this does not take anything away from the personal stories of people like Jawaher Channa, a university student who joined the protests against Ben Ali in December 2010. Jawaher explains to Bevins how she was tortured for her political activity in a Tunisian police station before the regime collapsed.
Bevins’ reporting allows us to see how relatively unknown people shaped and were shaped by this decade of protests. Take the example of Mayara Vivian, who was a teenager when in 2005 she joined the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) that demanded free transportation in Brazil. In 2013, Fernando Haddad, the mayor of São Paulo from the center-left Workers’ Party, announced a rise in the price of public urban transportation. Mayara and her colleagues at MPL mobilized the streets against Haddad’s decision, forcing the mayor to cancel the price increase. Mayara and other members of the MPL were even granted a meeting with then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, also from the Workers’ Party, who was trying to understand the growing discontentment with her government.
Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Click here.
The likes of Mayara would soon be replaced in the streets by right and far-right-wing groups. These protesters, in conjunction with sympathetic judges like Sergio Moro and media conglomerates like Grupo Globo, pushed for Rousseff’s impeachment on flimsy charges. Rousseff was ousted in 2016. Two years later, Fernando Haddad, the Workers’ Party candidate, was defeated in the presidential election by far-right and Brazilian dictatorship apologist Jair Bolsonaro. Mayara, then living in Santiago de Chile, wept while lamenting the election loss of the man she had opposed in the streets, explains Bevins.
Mayara soon joined the protests against the conservative Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, who was forced to accept the election of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. After two referendums, Chile still does not have a new constitution. What is has, though, is Gabriel Boric as president, someone who became famous in the student protests of the early 2010s. Boric represents like no other the difficult relationship between activism and institutional politics, which is often manifested in the tensions between protesters who want to use their leverage to gain political concessions and those who prefer to keep pushing for maximalist objectives. A congressman since 2014, Boric was seen as a traitor by many protestors when he agreed to a constitutional referendum as a way to resolve the conflict with the Piñera government in 2019. After he was elected president of Chile in 2022, many of those who perceived Boric as too compromising in 2019 saw his decision in a more positive light, observes Bevins.
A key topic covered in “If We Burn” is the importance of traditional and social media in defining the protests of the last decade. Their relevance was accentuated by the fact that these were mostly de-centralized protest movements with no clear spokespersons. The protesters who had the opportunity to present their views to the traditional media were not necessarily those who put their bodies on the line when it mattered or were more representative of the whole movement. Instead, those who were interviewed were usually the more Western-media friendly. Writing about the protests in Egypt that led to the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Bevins graphically explains that despite how bravely street youth had fought against the police, Western journalists “were not likely to grab a teenager who lived on the street, addicted to drugs.”[3] Equally relevant was managing the narrative in social media platforms. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, open fights emerged over who controlled the movement’s social media accounts.
“If We Burn” does not provide any conclusive answer on why so many protest movements failed to achieve their objectives during the 2010s, and this only makes the book better. Anyone claiming to have a perfect explanation for such a complex puzzle should be approached with caution. Still, Bevins presents reflections that help us make sense of what he calls ‘the mass protest decade.’ One of them is that horizontally structured, leaderless mass protests are “fundamentally illegible.”[4] As Bevins sees it, “movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for”, with the ensuing danger that the protesters’ goals will be misrepresented. [5]
Strongly connected to this idea is the fact that successful protests will lead to a momentary political vacuum. Influenced by the experience of Brazil, where reactionary forces took the streets against Rousseff using some of the protest repertoire of the MPL movement advocating for free public transportation, Bevins notes that “unclaimed political power exerts an irresistible gravitational pull on anyone who might want it.”[6] Therefore, he argues, a protest movement that believes in creating a better society needs to be ready to enter the political vacuum that will emerge if successful.
In the absence of a plan, someone else will step in, most likely with a very different agenda but equally relying on the power of street mobilizations. The greatest merit of Bevins’ latest book is that it leaves a deep imprint on the reader and will serve as a prompt for many fruitful discussions. We cannot know which kind of retrospective articles will be published by the end of 2029. Still, it is reasonable to assume that protests in the 2020s are likely to play at least as important a role as they did in the previous decade.
[1] Vincent Bevins, “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023), p. 3.
[2] Ibid., pp. 108-109.
[3] Ibid., p. 68.
[4] Ibid., p. 276.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., p. 263.
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