States of Disrepair

By Catherine Borthwick

The 2010s ushered in an unprecedented era of internet communication and global mass protest movements, dual phenomena that Vincent Bevins views as inextricably connected. I meet Bevins in the entrance of the British Library in London, where a mass of students and scholars are working on a chilly weekday afternoon. Bevins seems right at home against the backdrop of buzzing academics, his backpack slung over his shoulder as he leads me through the library lobby to one of its cafés.

Bevins is mostly known for his Cold War history book The Jakarta Method (2020), which investigates U.S. support behind the Indonesian mass killings of approximately one million people between 1965 and 1966. More recently, he published If We Burn (2023), an analysis of what he refers to as the ‘mass protest decade’ of the 2010s. Before he was authoring books, however, Bevins was a foreign correspondent in Brazil and Southeast Asia, and he has contributed to a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Guardian.

I observe almost immediately that Bevins’ demeanour is strikingly similar to his writing style: keenly focused, with a nearly disarming attention to clarity. As we’re sitting down, he offhandedly mentions the imminent extinction of journalism, and I press him on this claim. ‘I hope I’m wrong,’ he remarks dryly. But Bevins foresees a possibility in which “real journalism” — or the 20th century model in which people consume a range of news from advertiser-funded publications — is replaced by ‘advertising with corporate communications and ideologically-driven output financed by oligarchs.’ In a time where Elon Musk owns ‘X’ and Jeff Bezos has bought out The Washington Post, this future is not so hard to imagine.

Bevins likens the threat of journalism’s extinction to the diminished cultural relevance of Greek tragedy, an analogy that he says he owes to a friend in Brazil. ‘People still perform Greek tragedy,’ he reflects, ‘but it has none of the social role that it used to perform in Ancient Greece. If we can find a way to somehow keep journalism alive, I don’t think it can be done by innovative business model engineering. It requires a democratic decision to keep it alive.’ But do enough of the public accept this prophecy, and do enough of us care?

I wonder if Bevins sees any future in publicly funded journalism, with reader-funded platforms such as Substack coming to the fore. ‘Well, who is the public, right?’ Bevins immediately responds. ‘Public funding can come from the state. Public funding can come through subscription — a product people want to receive. Or it can be paid through something like Patreon or Substack, which I think is more like a disaggregated medieval patron model where people are really paying to be a part of a project. So I think that has to be part of the ecosystem going forward. But you can’t do what the LA Times Foreign Desk did in the 90s with Substack. It just requires too many people doing too many things that don’t show up as content often enough to be valued.’

I agree that reader-funded publications are not an encompassing solution by any means. A slew of issues, such as a publication’s objectivity and verity, arise when we imagine them dominating the journalistic future. At present, there are few accountability measures for journalists writing independently rather than for a collaborative publication such as a newspaper. Fact-checking measures and public image liability frameworks are often absent. But perhaps more independent publishing is a step in the right direction, especially given the immutable digitisation of the journalistic media industry.

We pivot to Bevins’s own investigative work, his long-form journalistic projects in particular. I ask him about the extended period he spent researching the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66 for his first book, The Jakarta Method. ‘It took a very long time to even sit down with the victims of the 1965 mass murder,’ Bevins reflects, recounting a long process of meeting people in Indonesia, explaining his project to them, and earning enough of their trust that they would introduce him to others who might shape the narrative of the book. Even after securing an interview, Bevins told me that people were often reluctant to speak about their experiences.

‘I would allow all those people to tell me everything they wanted to tell me, and that would go into the way that I understood the larger events,’ Bevins said. ‘And then over dozens of interviews, I started to realise which people not only really wanted to tell the story, but also fit into a greater narrative that could speak to events larger than themselves.’

We naturally progress from our discussion of The Jakarta Method to Bevins’ second book, If We Burn, a narrative journalistic analysis of ten major protest movements that spanned the 2010s. ‘The reason I put so many of these events around the world across the 2010s next to one another,’ Bevins explains, ‘is not only because I have a bird’s eye view as a journalist, but also because there was the intentional reproduction of tactics and discourses from one site to another.’ For example, Occupy Wall Street, the left-wing populist protest in Manhattan’s financial district, was Adbusters Magazine trying to bring a Tahrir Square model to New York.

Similarly, the Umbrella Movement, which emerged through protest action in Hong Kong, was inspired by Occupy Wall Street. I remark that Bevins himself is a living participant in his own book, since he writes about his intense experience in the streets during the protests in Brazil in 2013. ‘More than I’d like to be,’ Bevins replies, laughing modestly. But he explains that he includes his own narrative in the book out of necessity. ‘I was so close to what happened in June of 2013,’ Bevins says. ‘Instinctively I prefer explanations of history which are more grounded in the long term structural shifts in society, rather than focusing on ideas and representation of media. But I just came to the conclusion that you couldn’t tell the story of that decade without explaining how and why the media failed in the way that they did.’

Bevins’ writing has been lauded for its commitment to dispassionate objectivity in the face of emotionally provocative histories. Yet it speaks to his capabilities that he is able to transcend the journalist-subject opposition to include his own narrative. Bevins was on the street when military police attacked the crowds in Sao Pãolo, spraying tear-gas and firing rubber bullets on civilians. ‘The moment of the attack is seared into my brain,’ Bevins writes in If We Burn. ‘They let loose, with volleys of smoke and fire and noise and canisters and streams of light flickering into the heavens. It was strangely beautiful, in the way the apocalypse might be.’

The protest that Bevins is describing was initiated by the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement) which aimed to lower the bus fare, and through which millions of progressive protestors took to the streets across Brazil. Five years later, Bevins returned to the country to cover the election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. He continues: ‘Bolsonaro launched his campaign after Trump changed the rules of play in the US — after Trump said that Mexicans are rapists, which is something that the Liberal media in 2015 were convinced spelled the end of his candidacy.’ After Trump was elected in 2016, Bolsonaro intentionally reproduced many of his discourses and tactics to be seen as the ‘Trump of the Tropics.’

A greater geopolitical movement that Bevins calls attention to in our conversation is the decline in public confidence in traditional political parties across much of the developed world and the Global South. The notion that the establishment is corrupt, he argues, explains a multitude of election results, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and most recently, Donald Trump’s return to office. In Brazil, Bolsonaro ran on an anti-party platform, with the campaign slogan ‘Brazil above everything, God above everyone,’ a searing rejection of traditional party politics. The idea, Bevins says, is that the elites and the traditional establishment are so corrupt that people are willing to elect the person who is the most anti-establishment. It’s a global crisis of hegemony and political legitimacy.

I ask Bevins about his thoughts regarding the pro-Palestine student encampments in the year following the release of his book. He sees the police suppression at Columbia University as a major turning point in the pro-Palestine movement. ‘Before the crackdown at Columbia, you would not have called the pro-Palestine movement “student protests.”’ he says. ‘They had young people, old people, students, leftists, Muslims, and so on. But like so many cases in If We Burn, it was a crackdown on an especially visible and privileged part of the population which generated a lot of media attention. In the majority of cases that I look at in the 2010s, it is a police crackdown on the part of a population whose repression shocks the middle class public that causes the rapid scaling up of the size of the demonstration.’

I note that many mainstream journalists were critical of the encampments that swept Western universities last spring, dismissing the protestors as privileged students with limited worldviews. ‘It’s a very 2010s move to say, like: “being on the left is for white college students.” If your frame is really narrow, that’s fine.’ Bevins responds. ‘But the largest and most significant left-wing movements in history are working class organisations in the Global South that are often decimated diplomatically, economically, or violently by privileged people in the United States.’

As we wrap up our conversation, I am struck by the Vincent Bevins paradox. In front of me sits a writer who is indisputably critical about the state of contemporary journalism. Yet he is not somber, but distinctly stoic in his focus on the future. The same can be said about Bevins’ candid writing style, marked by its brilliant accuracy. Perhaps Bevins lays the groundwork for the rest of us in his calm approach to geopolitical analyses — listening carefully, finding connections, and diligently excavating the truth. The story, it seems, follows in time.

CATHERINE BORTHWICK was raised in New York City and attended Vassar College. She is getting her Master’s degree in Philosophy at Oxford. In her free time, she enjoys vegan cooking, walking her neighbour’s dog, and going to the cinema.

Art by Angelika Woodruff