When Mohamed Bouazizi Set Himself On Fire In Sidi Bouzid In December 2010, He Was Not Merely Announcing The Beginning Of A Protest, But He Was Opening The Door To An Entire Decade Of Modern History That Would Later Appear As One Long Collective Dream. From Tunisia To Tahrir Square, From Pearl Roundabout In Bahrain To Taksim Square In Istanbul, From Seoul To Madrid To Wall Street To Sao Paulo, Tens Of Millions Of People Took To The Streets And Squares, With A Call That Seemed Identical Despite The Different Languages: Enough. Enough Corruption, Enough Repression, Enough Exclusion, Enough Neoliberalism. It Was The Moment When An Entire Generation Believed That History Had Returned To Work After A Long Slumber, And That The Street Was Finally Capable Of Writing Its Own Happy Ending. But After A Decade, Nothing Remained Of That Dream Except One Question That Haunts Everyone: Why Did All These Explosions Fail To Bring About The Revolution They Promised?
This Is The Central Question From Which American Journalist Vincent Bevins Proceeds In His Book Published In 2023 By PublicAffairs Under The Title “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade And The Missing Revolution”, Which Can Be Translated As “If We Burn: The Decade Of Mass Protests And The Absent Revolution”. Bevins Is Not A Distant Observer, But One Of Those Who Lived This Decade From The Heart Of The Event. A Former Correspondent For The Los Angeles Times And The Washington Post, He Lived In Sao Paulo For Years And Covered The Huge Brazilian Protests In 2013, Then Moved Between Jakarta And London, And He Is The Author Of The Important Reference Book “The Jakarta Method” About America’s Secret Wars Against Communism In The Third World. This Background Gives Him A Dual Perspective: He Understands The Mechanisms Of Imperial Power And The World Order That Was Formed After The Cold War, And At The Same Time He Possesses The Sense Of The Field Journalist Who Sits With Activists In Narrow Apartments And Hears Their Disappointments After Years Of Noise.
The Thesis Of The Book Is Simple In Appearance But Devastating In Depth, And It Is That The Decade Extending From 2010 To 2020 Was The Largest Wave Of Mass Protests In The History Of Humanity In Terms Of The Number Of Participants And The Number Of Countries And Geographical Diversity, But It Ended In Most Cases Not Only Without Achieving Its Goals, But With Completely Opposite Results. The Regimes That Were Shaken Returned More Cruel, And The Far Right Is The One That Picked The Fruits Of Street Anger In Brazil And The United States And India And The Philippines, And The Left That Sparked The Spark Found Itself Scattered And Frustrated. Bevins Does Not See In That Mere Bad Luck Or External Conspiracy, But He Sees A Structural Defect In The Way We Understand Protest Itself In The Twenty-First Century.
The Author Relies On What He Calls “The Tahrir Square Model” Or “The 2011 Model”. That Model That Spread Like A Virus: A Huge Gathering, Horizontal Without Leaders, Rejecting Hierarchical Organization And Traditional Parties And Trade Unions, Demanding The Fall Of The Regime Or The Departure Of A Specific Person, Documenting Itself Via Facebook And Twitter, And Receiving Sympathetic Global Media Coverage That Portrays It As A Spontaneous And Pure Democratic Carnival. This Model Was Born In Tunisia And Egypt, But It Was Quickly Imported To Spain With The 15-M Movement Or “The Indignados”, And To New York With “Occupy Wall Street”, And To Turkey And Brazil And Ukraine And Hong Kong. Everyone Wanted To Have Their Own Tahrir Square.
But Bevins, Through Hundreds Of Interviews He Conducted Over Ten Years With Activists From Ten Countries, Reveals That This Model Carried The Seeds Of Its Failure Within It. The Idea Of “Leaderlessness” That Everyone Celebrated As Evidence Of Democratic Purity, Was In Reality A Fatal Weak Point. When A Movement Refuses To Create A Clear Structure For Decision-Making, And When It Refuses To Present A Coherent Alternative Program, And When It Considers That The Mere Existence In The Square Is A Revolutionary Act In Itself, Then It Leaves A Huge Vacuum. This Vacuum Does Not Remain Empty For Long, But It Is Filled By Those Who Possess Organization And Money And Power: The Army, Or The Deep State, Or The Organized Right, Or External Forces.
The Book Does Not Write The History Of Protests As A Series Of Moral Victories, But As A Cold Anatomy Of A Collective Disappointment. And It Does Not Blame The Protesters, But Tries To Understand How Their Political Consciousness Was Engineered. Bevins Returns To After 1989 And The Fall Of The Soviet Union, And To The Victory Of Neoliberalism As The Only Ideology, And To The Shattering Of Mass Parties And Strong Labor Unions That Were Previously Organizing Anger And Turning It Into A Project. In The Absence Of Those Structures, The Internet Came To Offer An Illusory Alternative: We Believed That The Network Could Replace The Party, And That The Hashtag Could Replace The Program, And That “Consciousness” Alone Is Enough. And Here Lies The Essence Of The Tragedy That The Book Narrates: An Entire Generation Learned How To Protest, But It Did Not Learn How To Govern, And How To Build, And How To Win.
It Is Impossible To Understand The Decade Of Protests Without Returning To The Moment When Everything Collapsed Silently In The Offices Of Wall Street In 2008. The Global Financial Crisis Was Not Just Numbers In The Stock Exchanges Of New York And London, But It Was A Declaration Of Moral And Political Bankruptcy Of An Entire Model That Had Ruled The World Since The Collapse Of The Berlin Wall. The Model That We Were Told Was The End Of History, Where The Market Corrects Itself And The State Withdraws And Liberal Democracy Will Spread Like Water. When The Same States That Preached The Free Market Intervened To Save Banks With Taxpayers’ Money, While Leaving Millions To Lose Their Homes And Jobs, The Last Social Contract Broke. In Tunisia And Egypt Unemployment Among University Graduates Was The Fuel, And In Spain And Greece The Austerity Imposed By The European Union Was The Hammer, And In The United States The Occupy Wall Street Movement Raised The Slogan We Are The Ninety-Nine Percent Against The One Percent Who Had Seized Everything. This Is The First Common Denominator That He Monitors: All These Protests Were Reactions To The Failure Of Neoliberalism To Fulfill Its Promises, But They Came At A Historical Moment When No Ready Alternative Existed.
The Generation That Took To The Street Is The Generation That Grew Up In The Shadow Of An Unprecedented Organizational Vacuum. Here Bevins Presents One Of The Most Important Theoretical Contributions In The Book. He Takes Us Back To What Happened To The Global Left After 1989. Communist Parties Collapsed Or Turned Into Parties Of Capitalist Management, Labor Unions Eroded Due To Globalization And The Relocation Of Factories, National Liberation Movements In The South Turned Into Corrupt Quota Systems. Only Two Large Organizations Remained In The World That Possess A Real Capacity To Mobilize: The Market, And The Repressive State. In The Middle, A Vacuum. In This Vacuum A New Culture Of Protest Emerged Called Horizontalism. The Idea That We Do Not Need Leaders Because Leaders Betray, We Do Not Need A Program Because Programs Restrict Us, We Do Not Need A Party Because Parties Are Corrupt. We Only Need To Gather, To Be Together, To Practice Direct Democracy In The Square, And This In Itself Is The Revolution.
Bevins Traces The Origins Of This Idea Not Only To Contemporary Anarchism, But To The Zapatista Experience In Mexico In 1994, And To The Global Justice Forums In The Early Millennium, And To The Writings Of Thinkers Like David Graeber Who Was One Of The Theorists Of The Occupy Wall Street Movement. The Idea Seemed Noble And Liberating: No One Represents Us, We Represent Ourselves. But In Practical Practice It Left The Question Of Power Unanswered. Who Negotiates On Behalf Of The Square? Who Decides When We Leave? Who Puts A Plan For The Economy After The Fall Of The Dictator? The Typical Answer Was No One, Or Everyone, Which Means In Practice No One.
Here What The Book Calls The Tahrir Square Model Emerges As A Global Template. The Scene Is Preserved In All Of Our Memory: Thousands Of Tents, Handwritten Banners, A Collective Kitchen, A Cleaning Committee, Speakers Alternating On The Microphone, A Promise That We Will Remain Until The Regime Falls. The International Press, Especially The Western One, Fell In Love With This Scene. It Saw In It The Birth Of A Pure Democracy, Unpolluted By Politics. But Bevins Conveys Amazing Testimonies From Inside Those Squares That Reveal Their Fragility. In Cairo, There Was No Real Agreement On What Comes After Mubarak. There Was The Organized Muslim Brotherhood And There Were Dreamy Liberal Youth And There Was The Military Watching. In Madrid, Puerta Del Sol Square Turned Into A Beautiful Social Laboratory But It Failed To Translate Itself Into Electoral Power Except After Years And After Bitter Divisions. In New York, The Occupy Movement Refused Even To Vote On Specific Demands For Fear That That Would Create A Hierarchy.
The Second Element That Nourished This Model Is The Illusion Of Technology. Bevins Devotes An Entire Chapter To Deconstructing The Myth Of Twitter And Facebook As Liberation Tools. It Is True That Platforms Allowed Rapid Coordination And Breaking The Monopoly Of Official Media, But They Also Imposed Their Own Logic On Protest. Algorithms Favor The Shocking Image, The Short Slogan, The Dramatic Moment, They Do Not Favor Lengthy Discussion About Taxes Or Agrarian Reform. Protest Became Designed To Be Shareable More Than To Be Winnable. Moreover, These Platforms, Which Are Giant Capitalist Companies Based In California, Were Never Neutral. In Egypt And Tunisia They Allowed Revolutionaries To Organize Because That Served Its Image As A Freedom Platform, But At The Same Time It Was Collecting Data And Selling It And Cooperating With Regimes When That Becomes Profitable. And Most Importantly, It Reinforced The Idea That Real Organization Is Unnecessary, Because You Can Just Create An Event Page And Invite Everyone.
From Here Bevins Moves To A Central Point: The Previous Color Revolutions, From Serbia To Georgia And Ukraine, Were Supported By Western Funding And Training On Nonviolent Resistance From Organizations Like Otpor And Canvas, And They Had A Clear Goal Which Is To Topple A Man And Hold Elections. As For The Protests Of The Second Decade, They Were Larger And More Spontaneous, But They Were Also More Ambiguous. They Do Not Want Only Elections, But Want To Change The Entire Economic System, But They Reject The Tools That Allow That. And This Contradiction Is What Explains Why It Was So Easy To Hijack Them Or Contain Them.
At This Historical Moment, We Are Facing A Generation That Possesses All The Elements Of Anger And Possesses None Of The Elements Of Construction. It Has Amazing Courage To Go Down Under Bullets, But It Does Not Possess A Theory Of The State, Nor Does It Possess A Party, Nor Does It Possess An Alternative Economy. And This Is Exactly What Makes The Following Decade Appear As A Series Of Successive Explosions That All End With The Same Ash.
If You Put A Map Of The World Between 2010 And 2013 And Put A Red Pin On Every City That Witnessed An Occupation Of A Central Square, You Will Find The Whole Map Red. This Is Not A Literary Exaggeration, But It Is The Statistical Truth From Which Vincent Bevins Starts In The Middle Section Of His Book. He Does Not Remain In Theory, But Takes Us By The Hand To The Streets In Which He Lived.
He Begins From Tunisia, Where Everything Began. Bevins Returns To Sidi Bouzid And Meets The Family Of Bouazizi And His Friends, To Discover That The Story That Was Told To The World Was Distorted In A Flagrant Way. Bouazizi Was Not A Political Activist, But Was A Young Man Crushed By Corrupt Bureaucracy And Police That Demand A Daily Bribe. His Revolution Was A Revolution Of Bread And Dignity In Its Direct Material Meaning. But When The Spark Moved To The Capital, It Was Quickly Hijacked By Urban Elites And Facebook Networks That Turned It Into An Abstract Liberal Democratic Revolution. Tunisia Survived Relatively Because It Was Small And Had A Strong Labor Union Which Is The Tunisian General Labor Union, That Old Structure Which Revolutionary Youth Despised At First, But It Is The One That Sat At The National Dialogue Table And Saved The Country From Complete Collapse. This Observation Will Become A Key In Every Other Place: Where Old Organization Exists, There Was A Chance To Survive.
Then Egypt, Which Is The Broken Heart Of The Book. Bevins Devotes Many Pages To Egypt Because He Considers It The Purest And Most Tragic Model. He Conveys Testimonies Of Youth From The April 6 Movement And Revolutionary Socialist Activists Who Dreamed Of A Different Egypt. He Describes The First Nights Of Liberation As A True Liberating Carnival, But He Also Reveals How The Decision Was Made. No One Represents The Square, But Everyone Speaks In Its Name. The Military Council Was Meeting And Planning While The Square Was Chanting Down Down With Military Rule Without Possessing A Tool To Topple It. When Elections Came, The Horizontal Youth Discovered That Whoever Owns Organization Is Who Will Win: The Muslim Brotherhood On One Hand, And The Remnants Of The Old Regime And The Army On The Other Hand. The Defining Moment That Bevins Monitors Is June 2013. Millions Went Down Again Against Morsi, Demanding His Departure, With The Same Logic Of 2011: Leave. Morsi Left, But Who Came? Al-Sisi Came, And With Him Came A Counter-Revolution More Violent Than The Previous Regime. The Demonstrators Who Believed They Were Correcting The Course Of The Revolution Found Themselves Signing A Blank Check For The Army To Return And Kill In Rabaa More Than Mubarak Killed In Thirty Years. Bevins Does Not Condemn Them, But Shows How The Absence Of Organization Made Them A Tool In The Hands Of A More Organized Force.
From Cairo He Moves To Manama, Which Is The Forgotten Story In This Decade. In Bahrain Shiites And Sunnis Went Down Together At First To Pearl Roundabout Demanding A Constitutional Monarchy. It Was A Cross-Sectarian Movement, Horizontal Too. But It Was Crushed Not Only By The Bahraini Regime, But By Tanks Of The Saudi Peninsula Shield And With Silent American Support. Bahrain Proves That The Horizontal Model Cannot Withstand The Violence Of A State Supported Externally If It Does Not Have Protection Or Armed Organization Or International Support. The Silence With Which Bahrain Was Met Compared To The Celebration Of Egypt And Tunisia Exposes The Selectivity Of Western Media Coverage Which Was Part Of The Problem.
And From The Middle East The Book Jumps To Europe And America. In Spain, The May 15 Movement Or Los Indignados Rejected All Parties And Said You Do Not Represent Us. It Remained In The Squares For Months Discussing Everything And Deciding Nothing. It Ended With The Exhaustion Of Activists, But From Its Ashes The Podemos Party Was Born Which Finally Accepted To Turn Into A Hierarchical Party And Enter Parliament. In Greece, Syntagma Square Was Similar, And Ended With The Rise Of Syriza Which Promised To End Austerity Then Surrendered To It. In New York, Occupy Wall Street Was The Purest In Its Rejection Of Leadership, To The Extent That They Were Using Hand Signals Instead Of Voting. Bevins Conveys From One Of Its Organizers Saying After Ten Years: We Thought We Were Changing The World Because We Changed The Way Of Talking, But We Did Not Change Any Law.
As For Brazil, It Is The Laboratory That The Author Himself Lived, And It Is The One That Gives The Book Its Title. In June 2013, Small Protests Organized By Leftists Against The Raising Of Bus Prices In Sao Paulo Began. A Young Movement Called The Movement For Free Transportation. Suddenly, And Thanks To Police Violence And Facebook Coverage, The Protests Exploded To Become Million-Strong In All Cities. But Who Joined? The Right Joined, The Middle Class Angry At Corruption Joined, Everyone Joined. The Specific Leftist Demand Dissolved Into A Vague General Demand Against Corruption And Against Everything. Bevins Documents How Anonymous Right-Wing Pages On Facebook Began To Lead The Crowd, And How Slogans Of Toppling The Leftist Regime Turned Into Slogans Demanding The Toppling Of The Ruling Workers’ Party. The Result After Five Years: The Election Of Jair Bolsonaro, A Retired Fascist Military Man Who Was Defending The Military Dictatorship. The Left That Lit The Fire Is The One That Burned With It. This Is The Phrase Of A Brazilian Demonstrator From Which The Book Took Its Title: If We Burn, We Will Take Everyone With Us. But What Happened Was The Opposite, The Fire Ate Those Who Lit It.
This Section Ends With A Quick Tour In Chile 2019 And Ukraine And Hong Kong, To Confirm The Same Pattern: Protests Begin With Specific Social Demands, Turn Into A Horizontal Mass Movement Without Leadership, Are Celebrated Globally As Pure Democracy, Then Leave A Vacuum Filled By The Right Or The Army Or An External Force. The Red Map Turns After A Decade Into A Gray Map Of Frustration And Retreat.
After Vincent Bevins Takes Us On A Tour Around The World Through Burning Squares, He Stops In The Middle Of The Book To Ask The Question That Many Romantic Writers Of Revolutions Avoid: What If The Problem Is Not In The Strength Of The Enemy, But In Our Idea About Ourselves?
The First Target Of Bevins’ Criticism Is The Doctrine Of Leaderlessness. He Does Not Attack It Morally, But Deconstructs It Historically. He Returns To A Famous Saying By Jo Freeman The American Feminist In The Seventies Entitled The Tyranny Of Structurelessness. Freeman Wrote That Any Group That Claims To Be Without Structure, Is In Reality Hiding An Invisible And Undemocratic Structure. For When There Are No Clear Elections, And When There Is No Accountability Mechanism, Then Power Goes Automatically To The Most Eloquent, Or The Most Available, Or The Most Followed On Twitter, Or The Most Connected To The Foreign Press. In Tahrir Square, There Were Youth Who Spoke Fluent English And Knew How To Write A Press Release, So They Became The Face Of The Revolution On CNN, While The Workers Of Mahalla Al-Kubra Who Actually Went On Strike Against Mubarak No One Knew Them. Leaderlessness Did Not Abolish Leadership, But Made It Unaccountable.
Bevins Uses Here What He Calls The Forgotten Lenin Lesson. Not Lenin As A Communist Icon, But Lenin As A Theorist Of Organization. Lenin Used To Say That Spontaneity Alone, However Heroic, Will Always End With The Victory Of The Organized Class. The Bourgeoisie Is Organized Through Its State And Its Army And Its Companies, So If Workers And The Poor Want To Win, They Must Be More Organized Than It, Not Less. The Protests Of The Second Decade Did Exactly The Opposite: They Faced A Highly Organized Enemy With No Organization At All. The Result Was Expected. Bevins Mentions How Gramsci Distinguished Between War Of Maneuver And War Of Position. War Of Maneuver Is The Direct Attack On The Presidential Palace, Which Is What All These Movements Did And Sometimes Succeeded In Toppling The President. But War Of Position Is The Long Battle To Control The Institutions Of Civil Society And The State And The Economy And The Media. This War Cannot Be Fought With A Tent In A Square. It Needs A Party, A Union, A Newspaper, A Cadre School. And When Movements Abandoned War Of Position On The Pretext That It Is Reformist And Boring, They Lost The Whole War.
The Second Point That The Book Details Is The Role Of Media And Social Media Not As A Neutral Tool, But As An Ideological Structure. Bevins Relies On Testimonies From Inside Large Newsrooms Such As The New York Times And The Guardian. He Reveals How The Western Liberal Press Was Looking For A Specific Story: Nice Youth Who Resemble Us, Using An iPhone, Wanting A Democracy Like Our Democracy, Without Islamists And Without Extreme Socialists. This Story Sold Well, But It Distorted Reality. When Islamists Or Radical Left Were An Authentic Part Of The Scene, They Were Ignored Or Portrayed As Intruders. Also The Logic Of Social Media Imposed A Kind Of Spectacular Protest. The Successful Protest Is The One That Produces An Iconic Image Spreadable: A Girl Standing In Front Of A Soldier, A Man Raising A Flag Over A Tank. As For The Boring Work Represented In Writing A Constitution Or Building An Electoral Coalition, It Does Not Produce Images, And Therefore Does Not Spread.
And Here Comes The Most Dangerous Transformation That The Book Monitors: How The Vacuum Is Hijacked. When A Movement Refuses To Name Itself And To Determine Who Is Its Enemy And Who Is Its Friend, Then Anyone Can Wear Its Mask. In Brazil, A Leftist Movement Demanding Free Transportation Began And Ended With Crowds Wearing The National Team Shirt And Demanding Military Intervention Against Corruption. In Ukraine, The Euromaidan Protests Began As A Liberal Movement Pro-European Union And Ended With An Alliance Including Neo-Nazis. In The United States, The Energy Of Occupy Wall Street Against Banks, After It Dissipated, Turned Into Part Of The Popular Base That Fed Trump Because He Also Was Attacking The Elite. Bevins Calls This Right-Wing Reorientation. The Right Does Not Need To Organize Its Protests From Scratch, It Is Enough To Wait Until The Horizontal Left Protests Collapse, Then It Comes To Collect The Scattered Anger And Direct It Towards Its Goals: Against Immigrants, Against Women, Against Communism.
The Book Cites Important Research By Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci Who Was Among The First Who Celebrated The Power Of Leaderless Networks, Then Returned After Years To Admit That The Power Of Networks In Rapid Mobilization Is Met By A Fatal Weakness In Strategic Decision-Making. The Network Can Gather A Million People In One Day, But It Cannot Decide What The Million Will Do The Next Day. The Old Party Was Slow In Mobilization, But It Was Capable Of Continuity. The Second Decade Replaced Strategy With Tactic, Replaced Organization With The Moment, Replaced Politics With Ethics. Everyone Wanted To Be Pure, But Purity In Politics Often Means Impotence.
Bevins Reaches A Bitter Conclusion: The Problem Was Not That The Demonstrators Did Not Try Hard Enough, But That They Tried In The Way That The System Allowed Them To Try. The Neoliberal System Does Not Mind That You Demonstrate, But Encourages You To Demonstrate As Long As You Do It In A Horizontal And Temporary And Spectacular Way. Because It Knows That You Will Get Exhausted, And That You Will Return To Your Home, And That The Police Will Clean The Square, And That Life Will Return As It Was, But With An Additional Memory Of Defeat. The Real Revolution, As One Of The Old Brazilian Strugglers Whom Bevins Meets At The End Of The Book Says, Is Not A Carnival, But Is Boring And Long And Organized Work, And This Is Exactly What An Entire Generation Learned To Despise.
In The Last Chapter Of His Book, Vincent Bevins Takes Us To Santiago In Chile In October 2019, To What Seemed Like The Exception That Breaks The Rule. Again Students Evading Paying The Metro Ticket, Again Police Violence, Again A Million In Plaza De La Dignidad. But This Time, And For The First Time In A Decade, There Was A Small But Decisive Difference: Activists Who Learned From The Defeats Of 2011 Decided Not To Stay In The Square Only. They Pushed Towards A Constitutional Referendum, Towards Electing A Constituent Assembly, Towards Turning Anger Into A Legal Text. For A Moment It Seemed That The Vicious Circle Had Been Broken. Then Came The Pandemic, Then Came Divisions, Then The Proposed Constitution Failed In The Referendum In 2022 Because It Seemed Too Ambitious, Then Chile Returned To The Right Again With The Election Of A Conservative Right-Wing President. Even The Exception Ended With Disappointment, But It Left A Lesson: Without Transition From The Street To The Institution, Nothing Remains.
Does This Mean A Return To The Old Leninist Party? Bevins Does Not Say That Directly, And He Is A Liberal American Journalist And Not A Revolutionary Theorist. But He Clearly Hints That The Only Alternative To Vacuum Is Construction. And He Cites New Experiences That Began To Appear After 2020: In Brazil, The Landless Workers’ Movement MST That Did Not Participate In The 2013 Carnival Because It Was Busy Building Agricultural Cooperatives, Is The One That Remained Steadfast After The Rise Of Bolsonaro And It Is The One That Helped In The Return Of Lula. In Egypt Itself, Despite Repression, The Small Independent Unions That Were Founded After 2011, Despite Their Weakness, Are The Only Ones That Still Are Capable Of Negotiating A Worker’s Wage. In The United States, The Discussion Within The New Left About The Importance Of Labor Unions Such As The Amazon And Starbucks Workers Union, Is An Attempt To Get Out Of The Cloak Of Occupy.
The Book Ends With An Affecting Scene Of A Writer Meeting An Old Brazilian Activist Who Had Chanted If We Burn We Will Burn Everything, To Find Him Today Working As An Uber Driver And Telling Him We Did Not Know What To Do After The Fire. This Scene Is The Summary Of An Entire Decade. The Fire Ignited, But There Was No One Who Knew How To Direct It To Warm Homes Instead Of Burning Them.
If We Want To Be Fair. Bevins Sometimes Falls Into The Trap Of Organizational Determinism, That Is He Assumes That The Existence Of Organization Would Have Guaranteed Success, While In Reality Many Organized Movements Were Also Crushed By Sheer Violence, As Happened In Bahrain And Syria, As Well As His Focus On The Idea Of Horizontalism As A Main Reason For Failure May Underestimate The Role Of Major Geopolitical Factors: The Intervention Of Saudi Arabia And The Emirates, And The Support Of America And Russia For Counter-Revolutions, And The Role Of The International Monetary Fund In Imposing Austerity After Protests.
- The Published Opinions Do Not Necessarily Represent The Opinion Of Nile Post Necessarily
