If We Burn by Vincent Bevins examines why mass protests mobilized millions but delivered worse outcomes, exposing the limits of leaderless uprisings.

Between 2010 and 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in recorded human history. They filled Tahrir Square in Cairo. They shut down São Paulo. They occupied the streets of Tunis, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Santiago, Seoul. They built tent cities and horizontal assemblies and Twitter networks that crossed borders in hours. They were young, educated, frequently precarious, and furious at governments that had absorbed the costs of the 2008 financial crisis onto the people least responsible for it.

And in seven out of ten countries Vincent Bevins studied, the result was not reform. Not revolution. Not a draw. The result was something worse than the situation protesters were fighting against.

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution — published by PublicAffairs in October 2023 — is an attempt to understand why. Bevins, an American journalist who spent years reporting from Brazil, Southeast Asia, and across the Global South, draws on four years of research and more than 200 interviews with organizers, participants, and bystanders across ten countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Chile. The result is one of the most important books written about left politics in recent years — not because it offers easy answers, but because it asks the hardest question with the most rigour: how did so many people, wanting so much, end up with so little?

The Decade That Changed Nothing, and the Decade That Changed Everything

The mass protest decade of the 2010s was not politically neutral. It had material causes. The 2008 financial crash had made the logic of neoliberal austerity viscerally legible to a generation that inherited its costs without inheriting any of its promises. Youth unemployment across the Arab world, precarious employment in Brazil, transit fare hikes in São Paulo — each of these was a local trigger with a common root: an economic order that had concentrated wealth upward while managing the consequences downward, and governments that served that order regardless of their nominal ideology.

So people moved. In Tunisia, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after police confiscated his produce stand, and a regional uprising became a revolution. In Egypt, 2 million people filled Tahrir Square and forced Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled for thirty years, to step down. In Brazil, what began as a protest against bus fare increases in São Paulo in June 2013 expanded within weeks into a nationwide uprising of millions, one of the largest in the country’s history.

Bevins chronicles all of this with the granularity of a journalist who was present for much of it and spent years interviewing those who were present for the rest. The book does not read as a retrospective indictment. It reads, as Naomi Klein noted in her endorsement, as an act of autocritique — an attempt from within the tradition of people who wanted these movements to succeed to understand why they did not.

The Logic That Failed

The dominant organizational philosophy of the mass protest decade was what Bevins calls horizontalism: decentralized, leaderless, structureless. It was deliberate. Movements of the 2010s had been shaped by decades of post-Soviet left theory that treated hierarchical organization as inherently corrupt and authoritarian, and by a generation of anti-globalization activism that valued process over outcome. Social media amplified this tendency, making it possible to mobilize enormous numbers of people without building the organizational infrastructure that coordination and representation require.

The approach had an implicit theory of change that Bevins renders in a five-step list:

1. Protests and crackdowns lead to favorable media (social and traditional) coverage
2. Media coverage leads more people to protest
3. Repeat, until almost everyone is protesting
4. ????
5. A better society.

Step four — the gap between mass mobilization and actual political transformation — is where nearly every movement in the book collapsed. Filling that gap required organizations that could negotiate, make decisions, hold positions, and fill the power vacuums that successful protests created. The horizontalist movements of the 2010s, almost by design, could not do any of these things.

The structural reason that gap exists — how capital retains a veto over democratic outcomes regardless of who fills the streets — is examined in the analysis of how Cuba exposes the limits of liberal democracy, which documents why formal democratic processes consistently fail to threaten the conditions that generate grievance.

The consequences were not abstract. In Egypt, the military filled the vacuum that Mubarak’s removal created, and the coup of July 2013 produced a regime more repressive than the one the protests had toppled. In Brazil, the June 2013 mobilizations — which had begun with left demands against fare hikes — expanded so rapidly that reactionary forces moved in, captured the energy, and used it. Three years later, the leftist Workers’ Party president Dilma Rousseff was impeached in what many in the movement described as a soft coup, and in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro — one of the most far-right leaders in the country’s history — was elected president. The activists who had filled the streets in 2013 watched in horror as their movement was used to produce the opposite of what they had wanted.

Bevins quotes Mayara Vivian, a leader of the Movimento Passe Livre (the Free Fare Movement that had initiated the Brazilian protests), and Fernando Haddad, a minister in the Workers’ Party government the protests had helped destabilize. Despite their profound political differences, both said the same thing when Bevins interviewed them years later: “There is no such thing as a political vacuum.”

That phrase is the spine of the book. Movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for. When mass protests weaken or remove a government without having built the organizational capacity to define what comes next, something will fill that space. The historical record of the 2010s shows what tends to fill it: the military, traditional political elites, the far right.

Who Gets Represented, and How

One of the book’s sharpest arguments concerns representation — specifically, who gets to define what a movement means when the movement refuses to define itself.

Horizontalist protest movements of the 2010s were deliberately unrepresented. No leaders, no spokespeople, no negotiating positions. The theory was that this made them impossible to co-opt and gave them a radical democratic legitimacy. What it actually did, Bevins argues, was make them fundamentally illegible: “The horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass protest is fundamentally illegible.” And when a movement is illegible, others provide the translation.

Media organizations — staffed predominantly by people from upper-middle-class backgrounds at elite institutions, reporting to audiences largely in the Global North — interpreted the protests through the frameworks available to them: liberation narratives, Western democratic values, and a deep structural tendency to identify the “reasonable” protesters with demands that fit within acceptable political parameters. Bevins is unusually self-critical on this point, acknowledging his own role as an international journalist in the misrepresentation of movements he was covering while they were happening. His class and institutional position shaped what he saw, who he interviewed, and how he filed.

The result was that the same protest could be reported simultaneously as a pro-democracy uprising (affirming) and as a security threat (delegitimizing), depending on which elements got amplified. Without a movement capable of controlling its own narrative — because controlling a narrative requires the organizational infrastructure to designate speakers and hold positions — the narrative was controlled by whoever had the platforms.

The mechanics of that narrative control — how states and media manage perception after moments of rupture to restore institutional legitimacy — are examined in the analysis of perception management and how states control the narrative after violence.

What Worked, and Why

The book’s two clearest successes — Chile and South Korea — are instructive. In both cases, mass street protest was combined with organizational structures that could translate pressure into political outcomes.

In South Korea, a sustained protest movement in 2016-2017 drawing millions into the streets successfully impeached President Park Geun-hye through constitutional means, with organized political parties and civil society organizations capable of channeling the energy into an institutional outcome.

In Chile, the 2019 uprising produced Gabriel Boric, who had been a leader of the 2011 student protests, entered institutional politics in 2013, and was elected president in 2021 — famously declaring at his inauguration: “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” The outcome was not revolution, but it was transformation, and it required a decade of organizational work connecting street power to political capacity.

Tunisia, where the protest decade began, is treated with particular care. The Tunisian revolution did produce a democratic transition — for a time — before sliding toward authoritarianism again. What made Tunisia initially succeed where Egypt failed included the presence of organized labor: the UGTT trade union federation played a critical coordination role, giving the uprising a structure capable of negotiating political outcomes rather than simply generating pressure. When that structure wasn’t enough to hold the gains, the gains eroded.

The Question the Book Raises

Bevins’ conclusion is that future movements need to build democratic organizations before explosions happen — structures capable of making decisions, sustaining positions over time, and filling political vacuums when they open. He describes sympathy for what he calls “Leninism” as an organizational philosophy: not as a blueprint for vanguard party dictatorship, but as the argument that structured, disciplined, hierarchically accountable organizations are necessary to translate protest energy into durable power.

This is where the book generates its most productive friction. Writing in Tempest, socialist organizer David Camfield praises the diagnosis of horizontalism’s failures while pushing back on the prescription. The missing analysis, Camfield argues, is of the specific class content of the movements and the governments they faced. What kind of organizations are needed depends on understanding the balance of forces, the role of the state, and which class interests will fill any vacuum. Organization alone isn’t the answer; the organizational question cannot be separated from the strategic one.

That pushback is fair. What If We Burn contributes is not a complete strategic theory but something arguably more valuable at this moment: a rigorous global comparative record of what happens when the structural question is avoided. The activists Bevins interviews who reflect most clearly on their movements’ failures don’t wish they had been more spontaneous or less hierarchical. They wish they had built more, earlier, with greater capacity to act when the moment arrived.

The parallel trap on the international left — waiting for structural conditions to align before acting, mistaking analysis for strategy — is examined in the analysis of the trap of waiting for multipolarity to act.

Why This Book Now

If We Burn was published in October 2023. Since its publication, the conditions that generated the mass protest decade have intensified. Austerity continues. Housing is increasingly unaffordable. The political center has hollowed out further. The far right is in government across more countries than it was in 2010. And movements continue to form, mobilize, and face the same structural questions about organization, representation, and power.

The book does not offer a formula. It offers something more honest: a record of what happened to people who tried, an accounting of what went wrong, and the words of organizers who lived through failure and emerged with clearer thinking about what different choices might have produced.

Bevins’ closing proposition is difficult to argue with after 350 pages of evidence: “There is no such thing as a political vacuum. Movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for.”

The question for the left is not whether to build organizational capacity. The record has settled that question. The question is how — and whether it can be done quickly enough to matter.

If We Burn is essential reading for anyone asking it.

Sources

1. Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, PublicAffairs, October 3, 2023. Author’s website and corrections log: https://vincentbevins.com/book2/
2. Counterfire, “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution — book review” (ten-country overview, Vivian/Haddad “no political vacuum” quotes, Egypt/Brazil outcomes, Chile/South Korea comparison, UGTT role in Tunisia): https://www.counterfire.org/article/if-we-burn-the-mass-protest-decade-and-the-missing-revolution-book-review/
3. Tempest Magazine, “Organize, yes, but how? Review of If We Burn” by David Camfield, December 29, 2023 (five-step horizontalist theory of change, Bevins’ Leninism framing, critique of missing class and material analysis): https://tempestmag.org/2023/12/organize-yes-but-how/
4. Kirkus Reviews, If We Burn review, 2023 (Boric inauguration quote, “fundamentally illegible” quote, Chile success assessment): https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/vincent-bevins/if-we-burn/
5. ZNetwork, “Review of If We Burn,” November 2023 (media class analysis, Brazil 2013 depth, seven-out-of-ten failure summary): https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/review-of-if-we-burn-the-mass-protest-decade-and-the-missing-revolution/
6. Los Angeles Review of Books, “The Struggle Continues: On Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn” (scope and methodology, Tilly’s repertoire of contention, autocritique framing, book’s ambition): https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-struggle-continues-on-vincent-bevinss-if-we-burn/
7. Wikipedia, If We Burn entry (publication details, reception, Klein autocritique endorsement, full country list): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn