Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

I am joined today by Vincent Bevins.

He is a journalist who has reported for the Financial Times.

The LA Times, Washington Post.

He's the author of the widely acclaimed book, The Jakarta Method.

And most recently, a book that received

a rave review in Current Affairs magazine, if we burned the mass protest decade and the missing

revolution available from public affairs press, the New Republic says it contains critical

lessons for activists, both here and abroad.

Vincent Bevins, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs today.

Thank you for having me.

So I think that especially in the United States, where many of our listeners and readers are based,

there is a collective five-second memory of the world. And so I think we have to

start with the decade that you cover. What happened? Remind us what happened in this decade that you

are talking about? In the 2010s, and I make a choice to go from January 1st, 2010 to 2020, there were a lot of mass protests.

Quite a lot of other things happened too, but for the purposes of this book, I tried to write a

global history as if the most important thing to have happened in that decade were these mass

protests that often exploded in such a way that they became something other than protests. So the events that I

choose to include are events that become so large that they either overthrow or fundamentally destabilize

governments in given national conditions. Now, you can link, I think, the two biggest geopolitical

things in the world right now to different mass protest events that sort of went

differently than people expected, both the ongoing war in Ukraine that, you know, started really

...