‘If we burn, they burn with us’ — 10 protest movements that shook the world in the 2010s but didn’t change it

3 Jul 2024

‘... failure is an option. In order to win, you have to accept that possibility. As we have seen, there is a huge amount of desire to see change in the structures that comprise our global system. And as we have shown, that desire was not enough, and neither was being right. At least, not yet.’

Peacetime is over.

The world is entering a renewed period of dangerous conflict, crisis and worldwide wars.

Whether it be the Doomsday Clock, now at set at 90 seconds to midnight; or that political historians are drawing parallels with the world on the eve of war in 1938; or that the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are ignored, causing them to panic about projected temperature increases, it’s clear homo sapiens is in troubled waters.

With the way time is concertinaed these days it won’t be long before historians look back on our days of misery and wonder. When they do, one thing that will be clear is that the eventual implosion of the Holy Neoliberal Empire won’t have been for lack of people trying to create societies that were better, fairer and more sustainable.

They will conclude that the citizens of planet Earth ended up in a self-made and preventable catastrophe.

In reaching this conclusion they will enter into the evidence a 2023 book by Vincent Bevins, titled If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, which documents the mass protests of the 2010s and how they came to minus nought.

They will record that Bevins was/is an American journalist who was working in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2013 at the time of one of Brazil’s biggest protest movements to date, the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), catalysed by a protest over a rise in bus fares in that city.

Bevin’s physical proximity to this protest, his witness to its rise and fall, as well as its changing political colours, targets and unintended consequences, led him to embark on a deeper study of the mass protests and the movements behind them that convulsed that decade.

If We Burn analyses and provides a coal-face description of the mass revolts that started in Tunisia in 2010 after the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in protest.

It shows how, through images carried on social media and television, they spread to Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain; and later in the decade wracked diverse countries including Ukraine, Turkey and Hong Kong, Chile and Brazil.

If you want to appreciate the scale and historical significance of the protests of the 2010s consider that If We Burn doesn’t analyse movements like the the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa in 2016, the global climate crisis movement (Fridays for Future), the gilets jaunes in France, the Anti-CAA protests in India (all in 2019) or the #BlackLivesMatter movement that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

The upwelling of protest has continued, as witnessed last week again in Kenya.

Protest too much?

All told, If We Burn is a remarkable feat of joining the dots, and of unearthing the similarities and differences across the protest movements. Its added value is that outside of the countries where they are taking place, protest movements are covered very sporadically, superficially (and often inaccurately) by the mainstream media.

Bevins fills that gap.

He provides a deep dive into how these movements unfolded, as well as introducing us to some of the activists who led them, their strategies, anxieties and thoughts in hindsight.

The book is a contiguous description of 10 different protest movements, including a unique account of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine. By doing so it starts to offer a much more nuanced and politically un-Photoshopped picture of what they were about.

However, Bevins doesn’t stop at describing the revolts. He also wants readers to try to understand the factors that sparked and sustained them (beyond the obvious issues they confronted)… and why nine out of 10 of them failed.

“In this book, we looked closely at 10 mass protest explosions… if we view the outcomes from the perspective of what the mass protests asked for.., then seven of these countries experienced something even worse than failure. They went backward.”

To this end, his analysis provides a sober and evidence-based critique of “horizontalism” and the idea of leaderless movements.

It looks into the anatomy and pathology of the movements to try to understand the swirling and often contradictory currents that shaped them.

Throughout, Bevins is self-conscious of his profession as a journalist. He implicates the media in how these protests were reported and mediated, warning against the bias of the mainstream media, their ability to subvert and even take over the meaning of the protests, anoint leaders (who may not be leaders) and the role of the modern media (television and digital) in catalysing the breakout of protest.

Apart from those of us who seek to make the world fairer, the book is also essential reading for journalists.

It’s a caution against lazy journalism. It lays out why journalists must go deeper than the narrative they pick up from social media, to understand the real causes, hidden players and consequences of protest.

Reading it as an activist, it became a reminder of why book research and book reading is still so important.

Today, many activists garner their news and views of the world by scrolling X or other social media platforms. There’s no doubt that this has value. But it is insufficient; history and longitudinality continue to provide indispensable context to a full understanding of what is going on, and our ability to assess its real meaning. You can’t understand the Tahrir Square, Maidan and Hong Kong protests outside of the history of those countries and the geopolitics of colonialism, postcolonialism and neoliberalism.

In 1919, John (“Jack”) Reed, another American journalist, published Ten Days that Shook the World, a classic first-hand account of the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.

Reed’s first draft of that history remains the go-to for anyone wanting to place themselves on the scene of the revolution. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition with a book about 10 years that shook the world and, yet, in most instances, consolidated a counterrevolution.

Bevins concludes from his study that “failure is an option”. This makes his book essential reading for every activist. It should form part of a broader introspection about why the arc of history is not bending towards justice despite our best efforts and sacrifices. And what we might do to change that. DM

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution is published by Wildfire, 2023. Its title is taken from a social media post by Finn Lau, a Hong Kong activist, “which he had taken from The Hunger Games series”. It kind of sums up the manifold ways in which fiction and life are interwoven in the 21st century, feeding off each other, warping reality and influencing the world in unexpected ways.

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