In the early 2010s, squares, parks, streets, and boulevards across the world appeared on television and social media, packed with students, workers, burning tires, tear gas and rubber bullets. Every couple of months, a new capital city erupted into peaceful, and then often violent, protest. In 2012, the center-left British journalist Paul Mason, who had extensively covered anti-austerity protests in Europe, would proudly, and hopefully, explain to audiences: “Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere.”
Yet ten years later, we can look back at the Arab Spring, anti-austerity movements in Europe, Occupy Wall Street in America, and anti-authoritarian protests in Brazil, Hong Kong, Turkey, Ukraine and elsewhere as failures. To borrow Mason’s metaphor, the 2010s were not so much a “kick-off” as a missed penalty shoot-out.
The Arab Spring ended in conflagration and further dictatorship, SYRIZA, Greece’s totemic anti-austerity party, is now run by an ex-Goldman Sachs analyst, U.S. finance is more dominant than ever, Turkey and Hong Kong remain under deeply authoritarian governments, Brazil has only just escaped the four-year tenure of Jair Bolsonaro and Ukraine is in the midst of a decade-old war of attrition.
Some might ask: has there been political change? Is something missing? Have the promises of the early 2010s come to nothing? What went wrong?
One attempt at an answer can be found in the new book from seasoned foreign correspondent Vincent Bevins: If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (2023).
Bevins, who made his name uncovering American anti-communist foreign policy in the Third World in The Jakarta Method (2020), has now turned his gaze towards the protests of the 2010s. Drawing on his time as a reporter for major newspapers, If We Burn combines reportage, memoir, political and media theory into an exploration of protest in the age of social media.
From the Arab world, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Ukraine, and Hong Kong to South Korea, Bevins covers how mass protests played out across the 2010s, overturning governments, but faltering in the days, months, and years after.
If We Burn is ultimately a call for protest and contention to stop reinscribing the neoliberal disorganization and atomization of contemporary society through a reliance on horizontalism and spontaneity. Instead, Bevins calls for a renewed focus on association, unionization, party building, and programmatic certainty.
[Ed. note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.]
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Samuel McIlhagga: My first question is: what prompted you to write about protests in the 2010s, as opposed to any other era, in If We Burn?
Vincent Bevins: This was what I had lived through and what had affected not only my professional, but my personal life. So this book, unlike my first book, The Jakarta Method (2020), is built on firsthand reporting in my capacity as a journalist, starting in 2013 in São Paulo. The narrative continues through everything that followed in Brazil from 2013 until the end of the decade. That’s when I started putting together the ideas for this book. I decided to build a global history around the reporting that I had already been doing, starting 10 years ago. I found that the use of that decade, the second decade of the 21st century, made quite a lot of sense—more than the use of decades often does.
SM: There are two bookends to the decade, right? We have Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring at the start, and then Black Lives Matter at the end of 2020.
VB: I drew the temporal border slightly differently because I wanted to include the uprising in Tunisia that started in late 2010. But, arguably, you can talk about the “long 2010s.” So you can say that the political cycle of global contention starts with the response to the 2008 financial crisis. But that is a particular reading that you don’t have to agree with.
This book ends up being about a particular repertoire of contention, a particular package of tactics, that came together in the 2010s. As we discovered, throughout the decade, these methods of contention can be used by anyone. There were a lot of people who would reject the idea that the protest moment was a response to neoliberalism or financialized capitalism. I decided to do two things.
These themes have been a concern of mine for longer than the topics that went into the Jakarta Method. I tried to tell the story of what happened in Brazil in the global context, because I think it only makes sense when it is submerged in world-historical time—as it actually was, as it happened. But also to tell the whole story of a particular type of mass protest explosion, globally, with the Brazilian story as the main narrative.
SM: The Jakarta Method is a retrospective piece of journalism, almost like a traditional political history book. Whereas If We Burn feels more of a moment.
VB: The method is “history book written by a journalist.” This is also a history book written by a journalist, but it builds upon journalism that I carried out in the 2010s.
SM: If We Burn is like a retrospective, but in a much more immediate and visceral sense, like remembering a period of one’s life that’s just passed.
VB: It’s easier to tie a bow on the end of The Jakarta Method, because it ends with a slam dunk.
We know how a lot of things turned out in Jakarta. So it’s easy to end the story clearly. Whereas, when you write the history of the last decade, you’re never going to be able to end the story absolutely. There’s always going to be questions as to what happens next, how humanity moves forward or should move forward. And then there’s the question of the emergence of currently secret information. Which will shape the way that this history is rewritten in the future.
SM: I described your book to someone yesterday as one quarter reportage, one quarter political theory, one quarter media theory and one quarter memoir. Which is an interesting combination…
VB: If I were to take those divisions, I would say that it’s probably more reportage than anything else. But there is political theory and even the intellectual history of certain approaches to contention and responses to injustice. The autobiographical element is something that I would have been very happy not to include. However, I included memoir because it allowed me to do the media critique. In reflecting on my own subjective experiences as a foreign correspondent, I think made it easier and, hopefully, more legible.
SM: There is a dialogue between the street, when engaged in mass protest, and the media. You’re in the belly of the media beast on one side during the 2010s—at the LA Times, the Financial Times and the Washington Post.
It’s intriguing, from my perspective, somewhere between the Gen Z and millennial generations—old enough to remember Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring but too young to be politically conscious. I remember the Occupy Wall Street protests in London, I didn’t go on those, but I did go on the London tuition fee protests—aged around 13 or 14—without much understanding. I followed the Arab Spring avidly, but quite uncritically and earnestly, as a teenager. I would have probably been reading reports about the protests written by people like you, or other people like you, in the Western media who were very optimistic.
Yet, my hope diminished over the decade as I came into political consciousness and gained some political agency. Those failures in the earlier period, in the 2010s, produced a lot of cynicism in me, and others, I guess.
It’s interesting to try to develop a heuristic explaining why these protests failed, not just that they failed. This leads to my next question. Can we understand the Arab Spring, the Euromaidan in Ukraine, and the protests in São Paulo, Chile, Hong Kong, and Turkey as some kind of globally mediated whole? Did millennial protest, or contestation, as an epochal phenomenon fail? Did it fail? Is there an objective benchmark for why it failed? Is that possible to establish?
VB: What I tried to do, in each case, was to understand what each mass protest explosion was asking for and why. That’s not always easy; there are fights over what people are asking for. To the extent that it’s possible, I try, in each case, to take what the streets seem to be saying, as the standard against which I will judge the outcome. I will ask the people involved.
I asked people this very specific set of questions: 1. “What caused the mass protest explosion?” 2. “What did it want to achieve?” 3. “Did it achieve that?” 4. “Why not?”
In each case, what happens in the end is compared to what is asked for in the beginning. Historically, even the most wildly successful uprisings, revolutions, and protest movements, don’t go exactly the way people want. But if you can write a global history around a particular type of mass protest explosion, which was my decision, if you can write a global history around one very specific phenomenon, which is the mass protest, which becomes so big that it either destabilizes or overthrows existing governments, then you can look at that as a global phenomenon.
What I found to be common, across many countries, was a particular set, a particular recipe, for responding to injustice, a particular type of contentious politics. Which is the “apparently” spontaneous, leaderless, horizontally structured movement.
Horizontality is slightly different from horizontalist. Horizontalism is a self-conscious belief that horizontality is the best way to carry out social movements. In reality, very few people in the world knew what that was, or understood it explicitly or theoretically. You also get “concrete horizontality,” which often comes as a result of the concrete decimation of organizations, political parties, civil society organizations, and unions. So digitally and horizontally coordinated mass protests and public squares were a result of this earlier development. In previous epochs, it was not surprising to see a huge protest take place and then be ignored. That’s a familiar story, going back to the second half of the 20th century.
I protested the Iraq War in 2003. The people who were making those decisions decided that they had heard us, and they were going to do what they wanted to do. What was strange about this decade, was the apparent success, the initial success, the feeling, or the appearance that since we had got so many people onto the streets, we were winning.
“We’ve put our enemies on the back foot, we’re in a position to take power away from them!”
When that particular opportunity arises, what my book ends up being about, is what happens afterwards. How do these particular movements take advantage, or not take advantage, of that unexpected opportunity? The book is not a statistical analysis. But quite a lot of these movements ended up not taking advantage of opportunities.
If you ask the people who put together the movement themselves, they confirm this. Quite a lot of these movements ended up creating conditions that they believed to be worse than the ones that they were protesting in the first place.
I don’t think you can view protest as an organic whole. But I think you can view it as a global phenomenon, a set of interrelated phenomenons, something which emerges globally.
SM: In that, protests are discrete empirical units, yet at the same time, because of the rise of social and global media, a novel continuum as well?
VB: They are discrete mass protest events in different national contexts, which can be said to be a global phenomenon for two reasons.
SM: Yet they’re less discrete than prior? Less discrete than, say, moments of contention in the 1930s that might circulate immediately around continents, rather than the globe?
VB: They’re discrete because they’re happening in different countries; we still live in a world of nation-states.
But they can be said to be part of a global phenomenon for two reasons. One, because there is an intentional attempt to copy things that had been seen elsewhere. The movements, themselves, are trying to do something that they were inspired by in a different country.
Two—and this becomes fundamental to my participation in this decade—the media interprets these acts and events as if they are the same thing as that other thing seen somewhere else. It becomes very clear, in the Brazilian context, but also in many others, that media representation of these explosions not only affects the way that the world understands what’s happening, that the world exterior to Brazil, Ukraine, or Hong Kong understands what is happening on the streets, but media representation also ends up restructuring the actual thing itself.
Media reconfigures the actual explosion; it reconfigures who is on the streets and what they believe they’re on the streets trying to achieve!
SM: If we look at 1789 and the French Revolution, for instance. My immediate feeling about famous historical European uprisings is that they don’t horizontally look for influence so much—they’re more temporally focused. For instance, 1789 is looking back to the English Civil War or ancient Roman republican influences for inspiration, then 1848 essentially looks back to the French Revolution. Russia in 1917 is looking back at both. There is a temporal verticality rather than a geographical horizontality.
In the 2010s, there was less of this temporal influence and more of an immediacy, looking to one’s side rather than to one’s back. Is this something new or unique to an age mediated by social networks?
VB: Even in 1848, we got a contagion effect—a wave of revolutions. Because people were hearing about what happened over there. This doesn’t seem technological to us. But to them, the idea of a newspaper coming on a horse across the country—was technology and a relatively new one in the long history of humanity.
What we have now is an extreme acceleration of mediatization. The [time it takes news to] travel has become almost zero. But at the same time, though, I think you get the 2010s, looking back on previous iterations of contention.
SM: So the big example of this, for me, was my experience of the tuition fee protests in 2010, right? Which aren’t included in your book.
VB: I went to them. But, it’s not in the book, because they didn’t get big enough. You don’t have David Cameron and Nick Clegg getting on a plane and flying to Malta!
SM: It’s not integral to the narrative, right?
But from my own anecdotal experience, there was this harking back to 1968 in 2010. There was this weird recycling of images and iconography on the street from the student uprisings in Paris. There was a newly politicized generation, maybe 10 years older than me, who were re-enacting their grandparents’ or parents’ political experiences in the late 1960s.
VB: So this is interesting. This is something that I haven’t spoken about before. I found that in the 2010s, in a way which ends up complicating the whole story, you get movements and media narratives looking back on two different dates and at two different traditions, or ideas, of revolution. That is 1968 and 1989.
Even putting those dates next to each other makes one go, “Wait a minute?”
On the one hand, you had a bunch of Marxist-Leninist or Maoist student anti-imperialists in France. On the other hand, you have a liberal revolution of nation-states.
SM: And yet there are some prescient moments in 1968—like the Prague Spring—which has been understood as heralding 1989 by Western media.
VB: There are two different legacies surrounding thinking about contention. There is the anti-authoritarian leftist post-1968 package of ideas and tactics that came together in the alter-globalization movement in the 2000s.
Then you have the sort of Gene Sharp liberal revolution “people power,” “non-violent resistance” narrative.
SM: That we find in 1990s liberal humanitarianism?
VB: This tendency led to the first wave of the 2000s Colour Revolutions in the post-Soviet space.
These tendencies come together interestingly. In Egypt, in Tunisia, a lot of the organizers are on the left—looking to working-class power and contention as ways to challenge what they perceive to be a neoliberal U.S.-backed local regime. Once the protest explodes, once you get inspiring images of, say, Tahrir Square being reproduced by media firms across the world, you get a bunch of narratives that appear quickly out of nowhere.
For instance: “Oh, this is the fall of the Berlin Wall.” They’re doing the type of revolution, the type of thing that I understand, “me as Anderson Cooper, me as a foreign correspondent,” that I understand to have occurred in 1989.
What I find intriguing about this particular form of contention—the spontaneous, leaderless, horizontally structured, digitally coordinated mass protest in public space—is that it works for pro-systemic movements. If indeed, as an East German, you simply want West Germany to pour into your country, to crash over you, to join West Germany, then coming into the streets and saying, “Come,” that will work.
But if you are challenging the global system, if you see yourself as wanting to challenge regional or global structures in which your nation finds itself, which was the case of the Egyptian Left in 2011, that will necessarily mean counter-revolution.
SM: From your view, in Egypt, what would you qualify as the counter-revolution in the 2010s? Would it be the military junta? Or would it be the movement towards the Muslim Brotherhood and the short-lived presidency of Mohamed Morsi?
People have different historical views of the Arab Spring in Egypt. Some say that the small liberal middle-class civil society groups and the left-wing cadres were delusional about what Tahrir Square was—they were very small compared to the bigger moderate-to-conservative Islamist democratically focused movement of the Muslim Brotherhood—which essentially overwhelmed the smaller groups’ intentions.
Some see the Morsi Islamist administration as counter-revolutionary, while others see the military and middle-class-backed current Sisi secular administration as counter-revolutionary.
VB: Yes, the Egyptian liberal middle class is deployed to make possible the 2013 Sisi coup.
But there are two dynamics here which are interesting. In the so-called Arab Spring, counter-revolution comes in a few ways. Very obvious ways and less obvious ways.
So in Libya, you get a NATO intervention. You get NATO using legitimate complaints about the Gaddafi government. These are deployed as a pretext for a regime change operation which destroys the country. In Bahrain during the Arab Spring, you get Saudi Arabia marching over the King Fahd Causeway to crush a revolt with the support of the United States.
SM: That’s pretty on the nose—an absolutist monarchy crushing a civil rights movement.
So here’s a question—do looseness and horizontalism allow for a depoliticization or, even, external astroturfing of protest movements?
VB: That’s a pre-1848 kind of repression—to the point where, in the book, I outline how secular leftists and liberals in Bahrain were forced to kiss a portrait of the king in prison.
That’s pre-1789 vibes.
But in Egypt, I think the proper revolution finally came to an end in 2013 with the Sisi coup. This is a development that is helped along by the Gulf States—the UAE is acting behind the scenes to fund what looks like, pretends to be, the same kind of grassroots youth-led revolutionary movement as in 2011. In fact, it was actually a Gulf-funded attempt at directing momentum.
These protest explosions unexpectedly create vacuums, not only power vacuums but vacuums of narrative. When it becomes unclear what the aim is—because initially it was about this one thing, but we’ve blown past that thing.
Now, the question of what this protest is all about needs to be filled with a new narrative. One of the easiest things that you can insert into the protest narrative is anti-political, or broadly depoliticizing causes.
Brazil is a really obvious example because anti-corruption rhetoric is thrown into protests about other things. By definition, anti-corruption is something everybody can agree on. Then the real question is: “Well, what kind of anti-corruption crusade are you going to carry out?” In the case of Brazil, it happened to be far-right actors working in concert with the judiciary.
SM: What is overlooked about 1989 as a historical precedent for an individualistic, spontaneous, liberal revolution, especially compared to the 2010s, is that, for instance, if you look at Poland—what was the result of the Lenin Dockyard strikes? It was run by a very organized set of trade unions, in collaboration with the Catholic Church, that became a political party, that became the ruling political party. Even in that ur-liberal 1989 moment, there is an element of organization.
VB: In the case of the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Warsaw Pact states like Poland, what becomes clear if you study the protests—and often gets forgotten in the moment of the euphoric explosion—is that someone is going to form a state afterwards. These are going to be people and organizations that existed beforehand. They’re not going to fall from the sky. So in most of the Soviet Union, what you got was mid-level nomenclature, just seizing control of the assets that they were not owners of, but that they controlled.
The story we hear about the fall of the Soviet Union is that the people flowed into the streets, asking for freedom. They were asking for a more democratic socialism, for more liberal freedoms, in the sense that was understood in the socialist tradition. But actually, the Soviet Union was already in collapse before that happened. The people who end up becoming the new class that rules—are the people who already existed and could rush into that power vacuum.
This is what happened in the 2010s as well.
Who is there to enter the power vacuum determines who ends up being in charge of the reconstruction of order, or the imposition of order, after the protest explosion. This goes back to the question I didn’t answer yet about Egypt. Who is the counter-revolution, and what is the role of the Muslim Brotherhood? Take the rubric that it’s often organized, and prepared, actors that successfully enter the power vacuum.
What you have in 2011, very narrowly speaking, is people in Tahrir Square unable to take advantage of the power vacuum that they produced and essentially asking the military to carry out a coup—but a coup that can be seen as progressive compared to what existed before, especially if it actually leads to elections. Just as what happened in 1952 is seen as progressive, because a coup moved the country from a monarchy to a republic.
In 2011, you have the military taking power, refusing to obey Mubarak’s orders and promising to put on elections.
Who steps into the vacuum first? The Muslim Brotherhood. They won the election, which arguably could have been won by secular center-left forces. If they ever wanted to govern, they would have had to do so in some kind of dialogue with the military.
No one’s ever ruled in Egypt without the military. Compared to the secular liberals, the Muslim Brotherhood is a bit more organized and has more of a coherent ability to carry out collective action. They became the government in 2012—and then the counter-revolution came in 2013 with the Sisi coup.
SM: It’s interesting that the least organized—the liberal civil society groups, plus the organic street movements, get overtaken or flanked. Who by? One, the Muslim Brotherhood, two, the military—both of which have tight cadre formations.
VB: And you know, the Muslim Brotherhood is older than the Egyptian Republic! But again, they can’t beat the military in an ultimate struggle, the military always wins! Unless you get defections from the security services, or you beat them in a civil war.
There’s a reason that the people who are the least organized are often liberal civil society groups or anti-authoritarian left groups. There’s a reason—disorganization has real material causes. There were intentional attempts to crush left-wing parties. My first book is about this, to some extent. There have been intentional attempts to crush organized labor. There’s also just the incredible difficulty of organizing along the above lines in the neoliberal era. But the Egyptian counter-revolution comes more slowly, and more subtly, than a NATO intervention or an invasion by a neighbor.
SM: My final question is: why does If We Burn focus more on the Global South rather than the Global North? Perhaps you think that’s a bit of an arbitrary binary? Considering that you focus on places like Hong Kong and South Korea.
VB: I think it works. What I say is that all the mass protest explosions that I analyzed in the book take place outside the “traditional” first world. So South Korea is now a very rich country, but in the era of the classic distinction between first and third world, it was not first world.
Hong Kong is part of the PRC, so it can not, categorically, be part of the Global North. It’s a very wealthy, special administrative region or city-state, of course.
The question is one that we have to ask of the decade itself, rather than my methods. Because I stuck strictly to a very difficult task that I set for myself. I decided that I would include cases where a protest got so big that a government was overthrown or so fundamentally destabilized that it was forced to restructure.
So the question is not why didn’t I pick any countries in the traditional first world—but why didn’t destabilization happen in the first world? I come to a few conclusions, which are important and often forgotten by readers in the first world. There are real differences that people in the Global South do understand.
The possibility of an imperial counter-attack is something that the Latin American left is always thinking about. Whereas maybe the Californian anti-authoritarian left doesn’t have to think about that so much. There’s not going to be a larger power immediately crushing an experimental and forward-looking insurrection in the United States, beyond policing.
There are a few things that happen in the first world that don’t happen in the Global South, and a few things that do happen in the Global South that don’t happen in the Global North.
Number one: there was never going to be an armed invasion or serious pressure on a first-world country, say Greece, during the protests of the 2010s. This was not the case in the Global South. As I say in the book: Libya ends in a NATO invasion—but NATO is not going to invade itself.♦
