Status Updates From If We Burn: The Mass Protes...

"One Egyptian revolutionary put it to me this way: 'In New York or Paris, if you do a horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprising, and it doesn't work out, you just get a media or academic career afterward. Out here in the real world, if a revolution fails, all your friends go to jail or end up dead.'"

"History does not possess a supernatural, metaphysical quality that pushes it forward relentlessly. ... If you chop down a tree, you do not immediately get a bigger tree. Sometimes you are just left with a stump. As industrial society becomes ever more complex, the range of possible unintended consequences grows larger."

"Only a small minority of Hong Kongers supported independence from the PRC—a much larger number wanted democracy within China—and only a tiny minority of protesters did things like wave American flags or hold up pictures of the US president. But those images went far and wide ...Western media darling Joshua Wong, who went to Washington to offer testimony to Rubio, did not represent anyone—except in the media."

The protests for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff were "very different than 2013. Back then, people had risen to action after seeing protesters face down police violence. This time, police were supporting the demonstration. The impeachment protests also had the backing of major media, which had built up to this date for weeks. This didn't feel like an uprising; it was more like a coordinated nationalist ritual."

"Corruption in Brazil manifests itself concretely through corporate influence over the state and public life; not—as often depicted—some político filling a giant bag with cash and running. Regular people are far more affected by the special rights granted to big construction companies and banks and the concerns ravaging the Amazon than by the amounts of money actually kept by politicians themselves."

"The 2012 EU–Ukraine agreement proposal required liberalization (keeping wages down and cutting pensions) and was not an invitation to join the EU. The EU was asking Kyiv to step over Moscow's red lines, without offering a very good reason to do so. Russia, on the other hand, offered $15 billion and a deal on gas. Yanukovich may have been a crook, but it might have been rational for any leader to take Putin's deal."

"Erdoğan had both ideological and geopolitical incentives to pull for Islamist movements in North Africa. The Turkish president supported Ennahda in Tunesia and was close to the Muslim Brotherhood after Morsi' victory. These were the movements that might recreate the 'Turkish Model'—the pro-Western, neoliberalized, moderately Islamist mode of governmentality he had developed. But this isolated him in the region."