Bevins has spent the last 10 years or so following and interviewing in search of answers. ''The point was not just to notice that the mass protest decade hasn''t really worked out,'' he muses toward the end of the book. ''The idea was to understand why.'' Fortunately, he comes away from his globe-trotting search with critical lessons for activists both here and abroad.

Autorentext

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, and served as Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He previously worked for the Financial Times in London, and now contributes to outlets like The New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books.

Vincent's first book, The Jakarta Method, was published in 2020 to critical acclaim. His works have been translated into fifteen languages.

Klappentext

'If you have ever marched for something and lost, you should read Vincent Bevins's If We Burn' The New Yorker

From 2010 to 2020, more people took part in protests than at any other point in history. But what type of change did they deliver?

From the so-called Arab Spring and Gezi Park in Turkey, to Ukraine's Euromaidan and student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, this decade was propelled by explosive mass demonstrations. If We Burn is a stirring global history guided by a single, puzzling question: how did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

In this groundbreaking study of street movements and their consequences, acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins weaves hundreds of interviews from around the world into a fast-paced, gripping narrative. Analysing both the successes and defeats, it allows us to understand our world in the present - and offers urgent lessons for the future.