News Letter III

New editions; explosive mobilizations; errors and updates

1. Dear friends, I write to you from Serbia, where students have been protesting the government of Aleksandar Vučić for an entire year. Like every one of these cases, it has features which make it unique within a new wave of dramatic protests taking place around the world. I almost wrote “youth-led protests,” so you would know what I was talking about, but that is tautological. For at least a hundred years now, street mobilizations as a matter of course have featured a lot of young people, for obvious reasons. You might as well write “protesty protests.”

   

   We have recently seen uprisings in Indonesia, Nepal, Madagascar, Morocco, Bangladesh, Kenya…. Some have overthrown governments, others have not. I hope you all caught Hanna Azarya’s reported feature from Jakarta, our first attempt to understand at least one of these cases. Here in Serbia, it is “the students” leading the movement, which is a slightly more coherent category than “Gen Z,” but I will come back to all of that elsewhere. It is not only for the reasons listed above that I have once more begun to pay attention to chaotic mega-demonstrations:

2. On December 2, we will release the paperback of If We Burn, with a new Afterword. I wanted it to come out earlier, but whatever. There will be two English-language editions, one published in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. Both covers are slightly different than the original, and different than each other; there are small differences between the Afterwords in the two paperbacks, reflecting both the national contexts and the fact that I wrote the UK text more recently. We have already published a number of translations, some of which have a prologue or epilogue directed at readers in different languages. God willing, more will come.
   
   You can pre-order the paperback now, if you were waiting for this edition, and it should arrive about as fast as it would if it were already “on sale.” Or, you could take advantage of this weird moment in which the hardcover is technically cheaper than the paperback in some places.
   
   Both versions of the English-language Afterword were written before the most spectacular cases of 2025 — Nepal, Madagascar, and the ones that keep coming. I did not and would not, however, try to give an immediate evaluation of still-unfolding or very recent events. The text of the Afterword does other things. I am pretty sure I will get in trouble if I put the whole thing right here before it goes on sale, but I will share two things I wrote in May that may be relevant to everything above. First, I have seen attempts to move on from some of the ideological assumptions of the 2010s — but material conditions are very similar. The apparently spontaneous, horizontally structured mass protest is still the easiest thing to assemble. Organizing remains very hard. And second, I wrote that we have not yet seen the creation of entirely new forms of resistance since the end of the 2010s. On both counts, I feel the same way in November.
   

3. In the Netherlands, Omniboek has published The Jakarta Method in Dutch. Here is the cover:

   

   In Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto has declared murderous dictator Suharto (his former father-in-law) a “national hero.”
   

4. I spent quite a lot of time working on corrections and revisions to the paperback of If We Burn, only to make a very small number of incisive (I hope) edits. We found and fixed some embarrassing errors of the typo variety; we added some more reading material, references and commentary to the endnotes; finally, I changed a few sentences. Those changes weren’t to fix errors, exactly, but I wanted to make it clearer why we told the stories we did. In any case, I will take this opportunity to apologize for everything in this book that was imperfect, and that which remains imperfect. As I did with The Jakarta Method, I will publish a list of everything that changed on the book’s home page.
   
   But, in addition to being cheaper (and softer) than the hardcover, hopefully this new edition is more solid.

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   North South Notes has entered an “experimental phase.” A little information on that is here, and more will come soon. But for now - all subscriptions and pledges are welcome. It is likely I will use the subscriber chat to give away some free books later this year.