You say you want a revolution

Beginning with the Arab Spring, the 2010s ushered in a new dawn of protest. This lucid account of recent political and social history explains why the uprisings failed.

- ANNA RANKIN

From 2010 to 2020, it's estimated that more people took part in mass global uprisings than any similar period in history. At the centre of these protests was the so-called Arab Spring, a series of protests across the Arab world that brought great hopes of change, yet the movement ultimately failed. Why? History offers a partial explanation.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 came a crisis of history - that is, its interpretation. In US social scientist Francis Fukuyama's bold view, history had ended. The triumphant advance of liberal democracy over Marxism was complete.

With it came a newly affirmed set of ideological principles, central to which was the notion of a continuum of progress, that things will simply improve. For many specifically, political leaders in the West throughout the 1990s and into the present - this appealing philosophy remained foundational in the formation of belief, ideology and policy. What came next was a new century of not only mass inequality, both domestically and across the Global North-South divide, but mass unrest.

That economic conditions may not be the principle catalyst for dissent is one thematic concern of US journalist Vincent Bevins' If We Burn, a singularly comprehensive and discursive study into what its author terms the mass protest decade. If We Burn - the full phrase, borrowed from The Hunger Games and adopted by protesters, is "If we burn, you burn with us" - is the result of scores of interviews conducted over four years by Bevins, who has worked for several major newspapers, including as a foreign correspondent in Brazil and Jakarta. He examines the fate of nine countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain,