If We Burn
| Company type | Book |
|---|---|
| Industry | Publishing |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Founder | Vincent Bevins |
| Products | Political history and journalism book |
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution is a political history and journalism work authored by Vincent Bevins, published in 2023. This book examines the surge of large-scale protests throughout the 2010s, investigating the reasons behind their frequent inability to fulfill their objectives, resulting in what Bevins describes as a "record of failures, setbacks, and cataclysms." The title alludes to acts of self-immolation, beginning with Mohamed Bouazizi's 2010 protest and extending to the rallying cry "If we burn, you burn with us" during Hong Kong's 2019–2020 demonstrations.
The narrative follows the trajectory of leftist activism, starting from the October Revolution through the New Left era, culminating in modern protest movements. It emphasizes the shift from traditional vanguard-led approaches to more horizontal organizational models. Bevins contends that the lack of centralized leadership caused mainstream media to misinterpret these movements' aims, thereby diminishing their effectiveness. Additionally, this decentralized framework enabled right-wing factions to infiltrate and appropriate protests, contributing to setbacks observed in countries like Brazil.
Drawing on four years of extensive research and numerous interviews with principal organizers, Bevins presents his analysis with empathy despite ideological divergences among groups. He critiques how conventional media outlets have distorted the portrayal of protest actions, informed by his personal professional background. Naomi Klein commends the book for its candid self-examination.
Among the movements discussed are:
- Movimento Passe Livre, Brazil
- Arab Spring, with particular focus on Tunisia and Egypt
- Occupy Wall Street, United States
- 2014 Hong Kong protests
- Euromaidan, Ukraine
- 2019–2022 Chilean protests
- 2016–2017 South Korean protests
Reception
The publication has garnered acclaim from writers and scholars including Greg Grandin, Laleh Khalili, and Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, alongside favorable critiques in The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and The New York Times Magazine.
In a review for The New Republic, Osita Nwanevu highlighted the importance of Bevins' findings for upcoming protest efforts, offering a critique of the horizontalism characterizing these movements:
Setting aside Lenin, these insights are largely straightforward—or at least they should have been apparent to the studied movements. Effective change requires a defined tactical or ideological framework; without appointed leaders or a "vanguard," predicting a movement’s eventual path or determining which ideas and participants will dominate after dismantling existing political structures is impossible.