From 2010 to 2020, it’s estimated that more people took part in mass global uprisings than any similar period in history. At the centre of these protests was the so-called Arab Spring, a series of protests across the Arab world that brought great hopes of change, yet the movement ultimately failed. Why? History offers a partial explanation.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 came a crisis of history – that is, its interpretation. In US social scientist Francis Fukuyama’s bold view, history had ended. The triumphant advance of liberal democracy over Marxism was complete. With it came a newly affirmed set of ideological principles, central to which was the notion of a continuum of progress, that things will simply improve. For many – specifically, political leaders in the West throughout the 1990s and into the present – this appealing philosophy remained foundational in the formation of belief, ideology and policy. What came next was a new century of not only mass inequality, both domestically and across the Global North-South divide, but mass unrest.
That economic conditions may not be the principle catalyst for dissent is one thematic concern of US journalist Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn, a singularly comprehensive and discursive study into what its author terms the mass protest decade. If We Burn – the full phrase, borrowed from The Hunger Games and adopted by protesters, is “If we burn, you burn with us” – is the result of scores of interviews conducted over four years by Bevins, who has worked for several major newspapers, including as a foreign correspondent in Brazil and Jakarta. He examines the fate of nine countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Turkey, Brazil, Chile, Ukraine and South Korea, as well as Hong Kong. It was the death in Tunisia in 2010 of 26-year-old street vendor Tarek El-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire in response to repeated harassment by a municipal officer, that catalysed revolution in his homeland and detonated the Arab Spring.
This series of anti-government uprisings and armed revolts produced devastating outcomes across the Middle East by autocratic state regimes, and frequently at the hands of interventionist foreign powers.
Opening with an eyewitness account of a 2013 demonstration demanding cheaper public transportation in São Paulo, Bevins proves a discerning guide for those who may be less familiar with the era of mass uprisings, the intellectual history of leftist thinking and the legacy of revolutionary social movements and contentious politics. He evaluates the social movements of the 1960s in the West and draws a through-line to the various currents of political strategy and accepted truths of the 2010s.
Although If We Burn is technically a work of investigation, it is propelled by the accounts and embedded reportage of those who witnessed scenes many of us watched from afar. There are searching conversations with participants and politicians, bureaucrats and social scientists.
The book also functions as a journalistic memoir of sorts for Bevins. It charts an era in which media outlets were flush with foreign correspondents and social media was in its infancy, if growing. Bevins, who turns 40 this year, writes brilliantly on the present-day repercussions of social media and its corrosive effect on legacy media, and the crisis facing traditional political institutions and democratic representation itself. He assesses the tandem roles of the media in determining the nature and perception of protest movements and the virulent creep of anti-politics, fostering a rise in contempt, alienation and melancholy towards formal democratic politics, institutions and the media.
There are, of course, myriad reasons for this despair and distrust. Bevins looks closely at the rise of neoliberalism and its erosion of bonds between the state and the people, traditionally understood as the foundation of liberal democratic politics, in favour of relations between governments and business. This, among other consequences Bevins identifies, allowed for a weakening of standard practices of revolt like boycotts and strikes in favour of demonstrations more likely to attract media attention – or, later in the decade, movements designed to exist primarily online.
So, why did most of the protests fail, leaving the political realities of those countries in worse condition? (Bevins concludes that only one of the mass movements he describes, South Korea’s Candlelight Demonstrations, prevailed, and calls it even on another, Ukraine’s Maidan Uprising.) Though, for some, this may cast a dispiriting pall across the book, for others the histories offer germane warning and a sense of possibility – if not, more importantly, a clear-sighted and at times confronting assessment of the left.
Sometimes, being right is not enough, Bevins observes wryly. In his verdict, movements are more liable to succeed when hierarchical forms of organisation are deployed. The leaderless, horizontal approach is determined “illegible”, allowing meaning to be imposed from the outside. “You must not only pay attention to who is waiting in the wings to fill a power vacuum. You have to pay attention to who has the power to define the uprising itself.”
Italian sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo, cited by Bevins, shoots straight at the target: “At the end of the day, horizontalism is a reflection of individualism.”
An Egyptian revolutionary tells him that, in the West, “if you do a horizontal, leaderless and post-ideological uprising and it doesn’t work out, you just get a media or academic award afterwards. Out here in the real world, if a revolution fails, all your friends go to jail or end up dead.”
Bevins wonders whether political struggles since the 1960s were developed by a conversant and middle-class “New Left, in the US and Western Europe, that didn’t fundamentally care if they won”, and turns to a number of tightly disciplined Old Left organisations replete with collective action, clear aims and objectives, including the civil rights movement.
All formal organisations also face their own challenges, Bevins notes, and from a wide range of available, and cogent, examples fittingly offers the US government response of counter-intelligence and assassination to the Marxist-Leninist Black Panther Party.
Concluding the book at the dawn of Covid-19 and the 2020 George Floyd protests makes for a compelling, and unresolved, close. There’s the sense of a sequel volume in the works. This new decade, naturally, shares a porous border with its predecessor – history is not so tidy as to be constrained by such constructs. Accordingly, it is natural to read this book through the lens of current war and protest: we are heir to the spirit of the age, after all, and political struggles, sweeping change, transformations of power and toppling of regimes form, essentially, a kind of people’s history. If We Burn is brilliantly articulated; it’s a peerless and lucid account of a remarkable period in time, and an indispensable record of contemporary political and social history.
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Vincent Bevins (Hachette, $39.99) is out now.
