How Protest Movements Fall Apart. Ash Sarkar Meets Vincent Bevins

The 2010s saw a new era of mass protest, from Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, to Occupy Wall Street, EuroMaidan and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. Many of these movements shared a “horizontalist” or leaderless approach and most of them ended in failure.

Vincent Bevins experienced some of these movements up close. In his latest book If We Burn he tries to explain why the movements of the “New Left” didn’t succeed and what lessons we can learn from them.