Hijacked Hope: Why a Decade of Mass Protest Backfired

Deconstructed

The Intercept

News

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2023

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The 2010s bore witness to a decade of massive global protests, from the seismic events of the Arab Spring to the birth of Occupy Wall Street and the fervor of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. But what tangible accomplishments emerged from these impassioned movements?

This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Vincent Bevins, a veteran foreign correspondent and author of “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” Bevins and Grim discuss the Arab Spring and the mass anti-austerity demonstrations in Brazil, and scrutinize the unsettling reality that, in numerous instances across various nations, conditions either stagnated or took a more repressive turn. Bevins details how more organized and, oftentimes, more authoritarian forces — ranging from organized groups to governments — were adept at harnessing the unrest, co-opting it, and ruthlessly quashing these burgeoning movements.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Deconstructed, I'm Ryan Grimm.
0:06.2	Now the decade from 2010 to 2020 saw more people surge into the streets to engage in mass
0:11.5	protests than any decade in human history.
0:14.4	I suspect that stat remains true even if you adjust it for the growing size of the population.
0:19.8	There were so many, it's hard to remember them all, from the Arab Spring in 2011 to
0:23.8	mass protests in Brazil and Chile to the Maidan in Ukraine, Occupy Wall Street, the Umbrella
0:29.0	Movement in Hong Kong, the candlelight movement in Korea, Geese Park in Turkey, the George
0:33.7	Floyd protests in the United States, and if we want to keep going, the recent mass protests
0:38.6	in Israel against the takeover of the judiciary.
0:42.0	But if we look back on them with a clear eye, something terrifying starts to come into focus.
0:47.0	In many of those cases, at best, things remained basically the same afterwards.
0:52.1	In others, the result was the precise opposite of what protesters originally wanted.
0:57.4	Vincent Bevins, a veteran foreign correspondent, has written a new book called If We Burn,
1:02.7	the Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.
1:05.9	I thought his last book, the Jakarta Method, published in 2020, was a true masterpiece, and
1:10.4	so there was no chance I was going to miss whatever he wrote next.
1:13.2	In my opinion, if we burn is just as good, if not even better, but it's a much different
1:17.8	book, and in many ways, it's a difficult one because it asks uncomfortable questions
1:22.0	about the movements that have been the real heroes of our era.
1:25.4	And it asks those questions sympathetically to those who were most involved in all of
1:29.4	those mass protest movements.
1:31.6	The book is also uncomfortable in the way it forces us to look closely at the made-down
	...

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