If We Burn

July 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.

August 1, 2023
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.

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