From 2010 to 2020, more people crowded onto the streets around the world to protest than at any other time in known history. Starting with what is often called the Arab Spring and ending with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the demonstrations—dense, synchronized, and persistent—dwarfed older, briefer moments of global protest. More people participated in demonstrations than in 2003 (against the invasion of Iraq) or 1999 (against globalization) or 1968 (against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, and so on). There were, of course, more people protesting than in 1848, the first modern wave of uprisings, known as the Springtime of the Peoples.

During what the journalist Vincent Bevins calls “the protest decade,” what was at issue varied considerably but converged on several widely held grievances: income inequality, which made even food and public transit too expensive for many people; the corruption and self-dealing of oligarchs; the overreach and violence of the police. Relatively small protests often ballooned to enormous size after televised or streamed police attacks brought out people who didn’t normally join marches. Images and videos of protests and repression, followed by even larger protests, ping-ponged around the globe through mass media.

Focusing on 2010–2020 means that Bevins leaves out plenty of mass protests from the past six years. He does not write about the George Floyd protests, or the more recent “No Kings” marches. If We Burn was originally published in 2023 (it was rereleased last year with a new afterword), so the multitudes around the world protesting genocide in Gaza are not included. But he takes the reader to places that appear less frequently in the international news. While Bevins writes briefly on protest movements in Greece and Spain, as well as Occupy Wall Street, the book is really about the Global South.

Bevins reported on some of these mass protests in real time, most notably in Brazil, and he came away with an excellent question: Why have these often huge protests achieved so little, or at times even the opposite of what protesters sought? After the protests against the authoritarian governments of Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who was elected in 2018, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, who led a coup d’état in 2013 and was elected in 2014, what have been their lasting achievements? And given the more recent protests against corruption or against genocide in Gaza, which have mostly seemed futile, it’s worth asking: Under authoritarian governments, is mass protest—even when protesters take enormous personal risks to demonstrate—an effective way to transform a society? If not, what might work better?

To find the answer, Bevins takes the straightforward but rare approach of asking the people who organized or were involved in protests in ten places—Brazil, Chile, Ukraine, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Turkey, Hong Kong, South Korea—what they think, years later. He avoids the armchair pundit question—What went wrong?—and instead asks different follow-up questions about what strategy might lead to different results. The more than two hundred interviews he conducted over four years reveal how activists discuss, disagree, organize, and plan (or don’t plan) left-leaning protests. Some sections of the book are thinner (Hong Kong, Yemen), and others more detailed and robust (Brazil, Chile, Turkey), but that is perhaps to be expected in such a globe-spanning book.

Bevins worked as a reporter for the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times in São Paulo and for The Washington Post in Jakarta. (The number of languages he speaks is more common to European than North American correspondents: Portuguese, Spanish, Indonesian, and “pretty decent” German.) He had studied political economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and after graduating in 2007 drifted to Venezuela and lucked into a career in journalism. Over the next few years, he lived in several places where activists were seeking out “the missing revolution,” places—especially Indonesia—where the cold war had been very hot. In addition to reported pieces, he began to write about the history of US-backed violence and abuses of power around the world.

His first book, The Jakarta Method (2020), was recognized by historians as a major contribution to the study of the cold war. From 1965 to 1966 the Indonesian government killed around 500,000 communists (some estimate up to one million) with US encouragement and military aid, annihilating the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union and China. The Indonesian capital became shorthand for the forced disappearance, torture, and mass killing of leftists, methods that Bevins shows were later copied during terror campaigns across Latin America. “JAKARTA IS COMING” warned a spray-painted sign in Santiago, Chile, before that country, too, was plunged into violence during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

It’s not hard to imagine why, after assembling such dark material on the techniques of torture and mass killing that spread around the Global South, Bevins might want to write a book on the strategies of mass protest that moved through the same regions in more recent years. If repression can be copied, why not resistance?

The central story of thwarted protest in this book takes place in Brazil. All Bevins’s other reporting trips around the world were attempts to better understand what had happened in São Paulo. In 2013 the Brazilian government raised the price of public transit by 20 cents, at first prompting some fairly standard, limited opposition. As in many countries with a tradition of protest, a small core of people would come out for just about anything: some students, some anarchists, some punks. This time they organized themselves into a more radical group called the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), or Free Fare Movement. Bevins knew a few of them socially and was watching with vague interest as they mobilized to fight the fare hike when something unexpected happened. The protests started to swell and swell.

On June 13 he still didn’t think the movement qualified as international news, but he went out just to see. That same day the police cracked down, hard. Suddenly they were advancing on him and a group of protesters and, with no provocation, let loose: “Without warning, they began shooting directly at the crowd—tear gas, shock bombs, maybe rubber bullets—it was hard to know in the moment.” Everyone scattered “like scared little cockroaches.”

Bevins all but writes: What the fuck? Places with a strong culture of protest generally have an agreed-on choreography. The early hours of a demonstration are for kids and families, who then head home before the black bloc—anarchists who usually dress in all black and cover their faces—arrives, since later things might get physical. If police break the rules and repress too hard or at the wrong time, protests often escalate the next day. Bevins writes, “There are several opportunities to leave if you don’t want to stick around for the rough stuff, and you can often even understand why the police take the action they do.” This time, in 2013 in Brazil, the police stoked the conflict far too soon, and without being provoked.

Repression elsewhere in the city was even more severe. In addition to his work as a foreign correspondent, Bevins ran an English-language blog at Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s leading newspaper. One of his colleagues there, Giuliana Vallone, was walking home after photographing a protest when the police went berserk and started attacking the crowd. A policeman raised a gun and fired a rubber bullet straight into her face. Vallone fell to the ground with a grotesque eye wound. Someone took a photo, and it started to ricochet around the Internet.

The spectacular police response prompted an outpouring of sympathy for those who had been attacked. A sensationalist conservative television presenter, José Luiz Datena, weighed in on his live show by saying “I am against riots, guys,” then invited viewers to vote on the question, “Are you in favor of this kind of protest?” More than one thousand people voted yes. “I would vote no,” Datena said. “OK, is it possible that we formulated the question incorrectly?” He changed it to “Are you in favor of protests with rioting?” Thousands of people once again responded yes. Bevins notes that Datena “quickly changed his tune. Now the protest was a ‘show of democracy.’”

The 2013 protests spread across Brazil, and soon two million people were on the streets. The protesters were also active online, sharing techniques and encouragement with others around the globe. Shortly after the original attack, Bevins tweeted that as the crowd was tear-gassed in São Paulo people chanted “Love is over! Turkey is here,” in reference to widespread protests in Turkey. Those demonstrations were sparked by the violent eviction from Gezi Park of protesters objecting to a military barracks in that public space. Someone in Istanbul saw the message and took a photo of eight young people holding green and yellow paper, the colors of the Brazilian flag, with a big message in Portuguese and only slightly wonky spelling: “THE WHOLE WORLD IS SÃO PAULO—RESISTANCE EVERYWHERE—BRAZIL, RESIST!—TURKEY IS BY YOUR SIDE.”

As they expanded, the protests in Brazil became less focused. Members of MPL doubled down on their ultimate aim, which was not just to oppose fare hikes but to make public transportation free for everyone. One popular sign read “NÃO É PELOS 20 CENTAVOS” (It’s not ABOUT the 20 cents). But some people were out to protest police brutality, and others corruption. Some demanded obscure legal reforms, others more public funding for hospitals and schools. (A certain amount of this was contradictory: the Workers’ Party, known as PT, had expanded public funding while in power.) A group of muscular men in Brazilian soccer jerseys did not take kindly to a couple of young punks telling them that nationalistic slogans were not welcome. Many MPL members were booed out of their own protests for wearing red, a color associated with the PT. “Sem Partido!” the protesters shouted—“No Parties!”

The demonstrations in Brazil and elsewhere shared many features: networked, horizontal, “prefigurative.” For those not steeped in leftist protest politics, Bevins spells out what that means: the movements had no leaders, decisions were made by consensus in sometimes agonizingly long meetings, and the protests themselves were an attempt to enact the characteristics of the society they wished to create. Spokesperson positions rotated among members to avoid any individual appropriating the power of the group. This made it difficult to say exactly who the protesters were and what they really wanted, and much of the book is preoccupied with how the media often projects reductive stories onto such chaotic events.

The mayor of São Paulo eventually caved to the demand to bring the bus fare back down, but by then the original protesters had realized that they were outwitted by their opponents. A right-wing group announced a new movement with a confusingly similar name, MBL, for Movimento Brasil Livre—the Free Brazil Movement—calling for the ouster of the leftist president, Dilma Rousseff. Right-wingers capitalized on the public outrage created by Lava Jato, a sprawling anticorruption investigation, and some of them pursued a witch hunt of PT members; it was eventually used as a pretext for the impeachment of Rousseff and her replacement by a right-wing deputy, Michel Temer. Temer then moved to limit public spending—the opposite of what many of the original protesters had wanted.

In 2018 came the election of Jair Bolsonaro, which felt to many—but especially to those who had been out on the streets—like not just a reversal but a betrayal. Bolsonaro managed to position himself as an antiestablishment outsider despite his long tenure in Congress. (As is unfortunately so often true of anticorruption candidates in Latin America, this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black: in 2024 Bolsonaro was indicted for money laundering and attempting to import an undeclared gift of diamonds that he allegedly received from Saudi officials while president.) Former protesters lamented that the leaderless movement they had called into being could be so easily co-opted by reactionary forces.

Because the book focuses on left-wing protesters, it has little to say about those who outflanked them. But I found myself repeatedly wondering: When protests are defeated, is it because of a lack of leadership and strategy on the left or cohesive strategy and dark money on the right? There are a few tantalizing hints about the involvement of right-wing think tanks, themselves also internationally networked—though via funding sources instead of social media. Bevins mentions the Atlas Network, a right-wing international organization based in Washington, D.C., that provides training and grants to libertarian and conservative groups abroad—in a structure one scholar calls the “neoliberal Comintern.” The Atlas Network has in turn been funded by such unsavory allies as ExxonMobil and the Koch foundations. Organizations backed by the Atlas Network helped to dampen and then co-opt the Brazilian protest movement of 2013. Did the same thing happen to other protest movements around the world?

As a case study, Brazil presents some unusual features: a left-wing government was in power during the protests, whereas other protests were waged against authoritarian governments like those in Turkey or Bahrain. It’s an unconventional choice to consider the Arab Spring together with other, quite different movements, given their highly varied outcomes: leaders in Egypt and Tunisia were forcefully overthrown rather than impeached, or, as in the case of Gezi Park, they remained in place.

But Bevins shows that distant protesters were copying one another’s tactics, and that there were more similarities in trajectory than one might expect. When, at the height of the Gezi Park protests, the Turkish government finally invited a delegation to negotiate on behalf of the park, Bevins writes, “it wasn’t clear who was actually supposed to go.” Sometimes this had advantages: Asef Bayat, a sociologist who has written extensively about the Arab Spring, notes that because there were not always clearly defined goals for the various protests, it was easier for those far away to applaud them: protesters could not be immediately tarred as socialist, or Islamist, or any other “-ist” that might be unappealing to countrymen who might consider joining or to those cheering from other countries through the scrim of cultural and linguistic differences. Then the fallout could be disappointing. Bevins shows that failures were not necessarily down to a lack of popular support for the protests, but rather a case—like in Egypt—of the military and security apparatus reasserting control. The Arab Spring, according to Bevins, was well organized for rapid mobilization but less so for negotiating transitions or building institutions that could compete with entrenched elites.

Some scholars, including the anthropologist David Graeber, who was very active in the Occupy Wall Street movement, argue that there is value in protest regardless of its outcome. Graeber, in a widely read essay, defines prefigurative politics in this way:

Direct action is a form of resistance which, in its structure, is meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

The appeal, even the joy, of this is obvious. But does it work? This shadow hangs heavily over the book. Are there ways to protest that are more effective? Can the left resist becoming authoritarian, while also avoiding endless horizontalist discussions of its own processes? Bevins mentions an Occupy Wall Street gathering in Atlanta; when John Lewis, the civil rights hero and US congressman whom Bevins describes as having “helped forge the modern repertoire of contention with his own body,” appeared at the protest, a vote was taken on whether he should speak. A graduate student, who happened to be white, argued no, since “no particular human being is inherently more valuable than any other.” Because decisions were reached through consensus, this veto stood, and Lewis did not speak.

Hours-long discussions of process are tedious, to be sure (I organized with a graduate student union, ask me how I know), but they have their merit. One reason people get involved in mass movements is the conviction that the oppressive structures could really be thrown off if enough people gave them a heave simultaneously. Many protesters around the world emphasized to Bevins the beauty of protesting in the 2010s, the sense of togetherness, even sublimity. Bevins writes that for many of the protesters at Tahrir Square, “Life there felt ‘legendary,’ it felt ‘mythical,’ and it felt as if it belonged to a different universe, one that was unforgettable yet hard to truly believe. One that was profoundly, unimaginably beautiful.”

The strength of the book is its question: What to do differently? The weakness of the book is its answer. Those who participated in defeated protest movements share regrets but few practical ideas. Many discuss the often untaken road of transitioning to formal politics, and if Bevins has a recommendation for protesters it would be to follow this path. “Movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for,” he writes.

Chile is his one example of what greater organization might look like. In 2019 there was a mass protest and a series of riots led by students called the estallido social (social explosion), prompted by an increase in Santiago subway fares. Mainstream journalists in both Brazil and Chile were surprised by the outrage regarding what seemed relatively small changes in cost—which protesters took as emblematic of how out of touch those media figures were. The protest’s demands quickly expanded to include a rewriting of the Chilean Constitution, which dated to Pinochet’s dictatorship and enshrined neoliberal economic and social policies.

Though inspired by the Arab Spring, Chile’s student movement had deeper roots in student-led protests that had begun back in 2011. These were highly organized and hierarchical, a far cry from the horizontalist movements elsewhere. And—a major difference—after organizing the mass protests, many of the student leaders joined institutional politics and ran for election in 2013, gaining seats in Congress as independents or Communists. The students, now graduates, said they would have “one foot on the street and another in Congress.” Bevins writes: “Setting aside the possibility of a fully fledged revolution that defends itself against the inevitable counterattack, you cannot do much better than win power, and get to work.” Gabriel Boric, a student leader who was elected to Congress as an independent, aggressively pursued constitutional reform, a central demand of the protesters.

But since then Chile has taken another turn. Boric, who left office this past spring, managed to increase the minimum wage and shorten the work week from forty-five to forty hours, yet the Pinochet-era constitution still stands, and he and his allies did not manage to fulfill the campaign promise, also a common slogan in street protests, that “if Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” On March 11 Chile inaugurated José Antonio Kast, a far-right ideologue who is unapologetically nostalgic for the dictatorship. During an unsuccessful presidential bid in 2017, Kast said, “If [Pinochet] were alive, he would vote for me.” The boomerang effect can come from events at the ballot box as well as on the street. Brazil, meanwhile, swung back to the left after Luiz Inácio da Silva, known to all as Lula, was reelected in 2022, and Bolsonaro is currently under house arrest.

In the new afterword to the book, Bevins points out that little has changed since the 2010s. The major difference, he thinks, is that protesters no longer necessarily value horizontality and spontaneity in street protests for their own sake. Rather, protests—which Bevins now calls “explosive mobilizations,” noting that in the original book he had “declined to attempt to coin a phrase denoting this recipe of tactics”—still take this form but for “material” reasons, i.e., with the hollowing out of trade unions it is hard to mount mass movements any other way. This means that while the style of the movements may be quite similar, their politics range all over the political spectrum and the outcomes are unpredictable. Bevins approvingly quotes Towards the Abyss, Volodymyr Ishchenko’s 2024 book on the Maidan protests in Ukraine: “The aspirations of the rank and file are a bad predictor of the consequences.”

Bevins has turned down offers to appear on CNN, he says, during protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, because he feared reducing the reason for “why protests don’t work” into a short news clip. Most recently, he has reported on the ground for the London Review of Books on the student protests in Serbia. When he arrived in Belgrade, some of the students he planned to interview were aware of his latest book. “If you are here, that is already a bad sign,” one joked to him.

Bevins writes that he cannot offer explicit lessons for the future: “From 2019 to 2023, I spent 95 percent of my time making sure I had gotten the facts of the story right, and 0 percent of it trying to devise a program for instant revolution in the First World.” Still, his book seems proof that mass protest, even when well-coordinated and relatively clear in its aims, is simply not effective in the face of governments warped by oligarchies. With the rise of global plutocracies even in purported democracies, this mechanism of accountability may simply be broken.

In Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (2016), the poet and political theorist Joshua Clover called the riot the only recourse for those at the bottom: “The irruption of a desperate situation, immiseration at its limit, the crisis of a given community or city, of a few hours or days.” Bevins dismisses any notion of rioting as integral to effecting social change, based on what he has seen in the countries from which he reports. Riots

would probably not work very well in the actually existing Global South, which is surrounded by so many foreign actors that might be sucked very quickly into an apparent power vacuum by the possibility of easy profit and plunder.

Yet he also gives little consideration to another, more effective technique that is more common in the Global South than in rich countries, often in concert with mass protests: the general strike. The latter may not effect wide-scale social change on its own, but as a way of interrupting the networked forms of capitalism that link all these countries to one another, it might certainly appeal to citizens who feel that even nationwide protests aren’t working.

Historically the risks involved in asking what protesters might do differently are greater in the regions Bevins writes about than in the US, but that may be changing. One Egyptian revolutionary told him:

In New York or Paris, if you do a horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprising, and it doesn’t work out, you just get a media or academic career afterward. Out here in the real world, if a revolution fails, all your friends go to jail or end up dead.

That distinction seems to be eroding, as the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti made terribly clear. But even after the murders, Lutheran ladies in Minnesota, undeterred, drove their SUVs behind ICE vehicles to protect neighbors and document abuses until the gradual and only partial drawdown of ICE from the state. Recently when I was visiting Duluth, an older gentleman showed me his pointed red knit hat. Modeled on caps that were worn by Norwegians resisting the German occupation and eventually outlawed by the Nazis, the hats are now a protest symbol in Minnesota. (The state has a loud and proud Norwegian American population.) Still, the staunch protesters there have not managed to bring about any changes at the federal level. ICE continues to stalk the land.