• How could protests be more effective?

    A protest against the killing of Renee Good last Wednesday, only hours after it happened. The 2010s saw more people take part in political protests than any decade before. The 2020s are shaping up to be bigger still — on the day I write this, the US is facing another big wave of protests over…

  • A warning from Europe’s history: To Hell and Back by Ian Kershaw, review and analysis

    In the summer of 1914 most of Europe plunged into a war so catastrophic that it unhinged the continent’s politics and beliefs in a way that took generations to recover from. The disaster terrified its survivors, shocked that a civilization that had blandly assumed itself to be a model for the rest of the world…

  • Why do protest movements fail? If We Burn by Vincent Bevins, review and analysis

    Something odd happened in the 2010s. As the journalist Vincent Bevins puts it: From 2010 to 2020, more people took part in protests than at any other point in human history. I was one of them. I marched in November 2010 against the British government’s plans to treble the tuition fees for universities. It didn’t…