If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
An award-winning journalist interviews hundreds of participants from a dozen countries to answer why the 2010s mass protest decade — the Arab Spring, Gezi Park, Euromaidan, Hong Kong, Chile — produced the opposite of what protesters demanded. A forensic post-mortem on movement logistics and political outcomes.
Key Takeaways
- Forensic analysis of why the 2010s mass protest decade failed
- Covers Arab Spring, Gezi Park, Euromaidan, Hong Kong, Chile
- Hundreds of first-person interviews from a dozen countries
- Why mass protests produced the opposite of what demonstrators demanded
- Critical examination of horizontal organizing and leaderless movements
The 2010s saw more mass protests than any decade in human history — and most of them failed. Bevins documents exactly how and why, interviewing the people who were there. If you're planning any kind of mass mobilization, this is the required failure analysis.
Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist who served as a foreign correspondent in São Paulo and Jakarta during the mass protest decade. His firsthand coverage of uprisings in Brazil, Indonesia, and across the Global South gives him unique perspective on why movements succeed or fail.
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