Description:
The fascinating history of a decade aflame--and what we can learn from its embers.
"Disturbing and exhilarating." --New Yorker
From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. Acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins carried out hundreds of interviews around the world, guided by a single, puzzling question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?
The result is a stirring work of history that connects events in a dozen countries and reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change is gravely misguided. From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine's Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, Bevins provides a blow-by-blow account of street movements and their consequences, recounted in gripping detail.
In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future.
Brief description:
Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist. He reported for the Financial Times in London, then served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times before covering Southeast Asia for the Washington Post.
His first book, The Jakarta Method, was named one of the best books of 2020 by NPR, GQ, the Financial Times, and CounterPunch, and has been translated into fifteen languages. Vincent lives in São Paulo.
Review Quotes: In this remarkably assured and sweeping history of the present, Vincent introduces us to the activists, hackers, punks, martyrs, and the millions of ordinary people whose acts of bravery spurred the mass protests of the last decade. Bevins's clear-eyed, sympathetic account of the unfulfilled promise of these protests leaves his reader with a bold vision of the future--one in which his book's lessons are used to transform an uprising into a true revolution.-- "Merve Emre, critic, New Yorker"