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

'as good as journalism gets'

By: Vincent Bevins

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Paperback | 3 October 2023 | Edition Number 1

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From 2010 to 2020, more people took part in protests than at any other point in human history. Why has success been so elusive?

From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine's Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, the second decade of the twenty-first century was propelled by explosive mass demonstrations. But few people got what they wanted. In too many cases, the protests led to the opposite of what they asked for.

If We Burn is a stirring work of global history built around that strange but fundamental paradox. Acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins interviewed hundreds of people around the world, and weaves their insights and recollections into a fast-paced, gripping narrative. We follow his own troubling experiences in Brazil, where a protest movement ignited by leftists and anarchists led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.

In the mass protest decade, humanity demonstrated a deep desire for change, and brave individuals started something that has been left unfinished. In this ground-breaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors offer urgent lessons for those who wish to understand geopolitics today, and create a better world tomorrow.

About the Author

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist and correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, reporting from across the entire region and paying special attention to the legacy of the 1965 massacre in Indonesia. He previously served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, also covering nearby parts of South America, and before that he worked for the Financial Times in London.

Among the other publications he has written for are the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, Folha de S.Paulo, The New Republic, The New Inquiry, The Awl, The Baffler, and New York magazine. Vincent was born and raised in California and spent the last few years living in Jakarta.

Industry Reviews

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. It's an incredible follow up to The Jakarta Method - which focused on the development of the CIA and the seismic and often horrific global consequences - and sees Bevins applying his near-heroic methods of investigation to more recent events. It's about as good as journalism gets and Bevins is uniquely positioned to get the goods, just due to the sheer amount of time he spends in the places he writes about, fostering relationships and suffering from unquenchable curiosity. I cannot think of a book that so soberly and forensically analysed the very recent past and looked at what went right and what went terribly wrong. The highest praise I can give If We Burn is to say that it would be criminally negligent not to read it if you'd like to change the world. And why wouldn't you?

The best book I read this year.
- Mother Jones

In this remarkably assured and sweeping history of the present, Vincent Bevins asks some of the most urgent questions for contemporary life: How can a multitude of ardent, angry, and hopeful people harness their energies for profound political change? And what happens if they fail? If We Burn travels the world in search of an answer and, along the way, 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.

This book is outstanding.

Vincent Bevins' compelling new book, If We Burn, 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.

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