SPRING: The last decade saw the most protests in human history. But how is it that so many uprisings led to the opposite of what they asked for?

By Vincent Bevins

To form the core narrative of my second book, I rely primarily on hundreds of interviews, carried out in twelve countries, with militants, revolutionaries, politicians, and regular people who lived through explosive uprisings that sought to transform the global system. But to get a sense of what happened from 2010 to 2020, the decade with the most numerous protests in human history, I also read as much as I could over four years, seeking out the work of scholars and participants who had reflected on what went wrong.

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution is a work of history built around a vexing question: how is it that so many uprisings apparently led to the opposite of what they asked for? As I read widely guided by this same concern, I was struck to find that brilliant thinkers in disparate parts of the world had often arrived at similar places, though they took very different (national, political, economical, philosophical) routes to get there.

For my understanding of the revolts in the Arab world, I am deeply indebted to Lineages of Revolt, by Adam Hanieh, and Revolution without Revolutionaries, by Aasef Bayat. Contra the shallow readings offered by the anglophone press during the so-called “Arab Spring,”

Hanieh maps out the political economy of North Africa before the uprisings, making clear that neoliberal policy once more required repression, rather than leading inexorably to democracy, as North Atlantic commentators loved to tell ourselves. Bayat was present both in Iran 1979 and Egypt 2011, and he explores the nature of neoliberal subjectivity to explain just how much had changed in revolutionary practice in the intervening decades. See this great review of his new book.

In Brazil, where I have lived primarily since 2010, I relied on two essential books by philosopher Rodrigo Nunes, and one now-classic ground-breaking study written by political scientist Camila Rocha.

In Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal, Nunes reflects on the organisational forms that became hegemonic in the long 2010s by de-and-re-constructing the very concept of organisation itself. In Menos Marx, Mais Mises, Rocha traces how well-funded right-wing organisations with roots in the US got themselves organised enough to be in a position to take advantage of the unexpected chaos in the country erupting in June 2013.

And then in Do Transe à Vertigem, Nunes pieces together what Bolsonarismo actually is, pointing to both social media influencers and the “entrepreneurship of the self” as essential to the formation of a violently anti-democratic movement.

I think that Turkish sociologist Cihan Tuğal and Rodrigo Nunes would be struck by just how much they end up agreeing upon, after living through two protest explosions (in the same month) in two very different, imperfect democracies.

The Fall of the Turkish Model was fundamental to my understanding of both Gezi Park and the so-called “Arab Spring” itself. Things turned out very differently in Chile, where I frequently returned to Social Movements in Chile: Organization, Trajectories and Political Consequences, edited by Sofia Donoso and Marisa von Bulow, and this issue of Radical Americas, featuring the work of Tanya Harmer among many others.

And then there is Ukraine, the country whose endlessly complex mass protest explosion still haunts the globe. Arguably, Euromaidan is not over—certainly, the war that began shortly afterwards tragically continues to claim lives every single day, and certainly, few people have been capable (if they even tried) of understanding the 2013-2014 uprising in its full complexity.

It would be amazing to see Volodymyr Ishchenko put his work on Euromaidan into a book someday (which would be in very productive dialogue with the works of Hanieh, Bayat, Nunes, Rocha and Tuğal), but for now I have been deeply struck by the thoughtfulness and rigour of his articles on the subject.

“Insufficiently Diverse: The Problem of Nonviolent Leverage and Radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan Uprising, 2013– 2014,” provides an elegant answer to the much-propagandised question of far-right involvement in Euromaidan (and coincidentally, the same one that dozens of interviews in Kyiv in 2021 pointed me toward), while “How Maidan Revolutions Reproduce and Intensify the Post- Soviet Crisis of Political Representation” (written with Oleg Zhuravlev) tackles the question of why these types of uprising, in general, cannot deliver what they ask for. His recent work on the Ukrainian Communist Party is also hugely valuable.

On the origins of the war itself, Ishchenko pointed me toward Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022 by Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll. For a longer, more nationalist history of the country, I turned to The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy.

Finally, the “mass protest decade” ends in the People’s Republic of China, more specifically Hong Kong, as a virus begins to engulf the planet and stop countless street movements in their tracks. For background reading on 2019 in Hong Kong I relied on three very different books: Vigil, by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Hong Kong in Revolt, by Au-Loong Yu, and After Autonomy, by Daniel Vukovich.

• The article was sourced from Africa is a country, a site of opinion, analysis, and new writing on and from the African Left.  If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (2023) by Vincent Bevins is available from Public Affairs.

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TSHWANE COUNCIL AND UNION MUST FIND SOLUTION TO END STRIKE

The City of Tshwane is experiencing severe service delivery problems with some areas now a health hazard and fast becoming unfit  for human occupation due to the two-month-old strike by municipal workers affiliated to the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU).

Almost all municipal offices are not functioning. Residents with complaints and those wishing to pay rent are turned away by security guards because municipal employees were on strike over unpaid wage increases. The strike has  adversely affected service delivery. The collapse in the delivery of services has, amongst other things, resulted in heaps of rubbish piled up in almost every  street corner and open spaces. The smell of  rotten garbage waft through the air into  the houses forcing residents to stay with their doors and windows closed at all times. In some areas, residents are experiencing the problem of  blocked manholes which result in sewage  flooding their streets. Residents are subjected to these unpleasant conditions while the players –  the Tshwane City Council and SAMWU leaders – are at loggerheads and with no solution on sight.

At the centre of the dispute is the Council’s decision to renege on the agreement to pay the workers salary increases of 5,4 percent. The matter was referred to the High Court in Pretoria  about two months ago which ruled in favour of the employees. The Council argued that they could not afford the increases because they have serious financial constraints that could cost the Council R600 million. The  matter was then referred to the South African Local Government Bargaining Council ( SALGBC) which dismissed the application by the Council which sought an order to  be exempted from paying the salary increases. The SALGBC ordered the council to pay the  5,4 percent increase that was agreed upon in 2021.

The  strike, which has been declared illegal by the Council, has resulted in more than 120 employees fired so far. This led to several municipal vehicles being attacked and damaged and a number of non-striking workers assaulted. The trade union has denied responsibility for these attacks. The situation has led to the deterioration of relations  between the two parties.

The collapse of service delivery has since caused tension between the DA and ActionSA , both members of the coalition government in Tshwane after the ActionSA  urged the mayor to negotiate with the striking workers. While we do not condone acts of violence, we believe however that dialogue was the only best way to resolve this impasse. Cool heads are needed in times of such conflicts taking into account that it is the  rate payers who are bearing the brunt. Residents cannot continue living under such unhygienic  conditions and  without proper service delivery ad infinitum. We urge both parties to cool their tempers and urgently meet around the negotiation table and find an amicable solution. To borrow from one of the quotes by United States of America  naturalist, John Burrough : ‘’ Nothing relieves and ventilates the mind like a resolution.’’