Vincent Bevins

Vincent Bevins is an American journalist and author whose reporting career has taken him through Latin America and Southeast Asia. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and the London School of Economics, then worked for the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. His years as a foreign correspondent underpin his books’ international scope.

Bevins writes political history shaped by reporting: archival research is joined to interviews with people who experienced coups, massacres and uprisings. He moves across borders to trace connections that national histories can obscure, while keeping survivors and participants central to the account.

His first book, The Jakarta Method, appeared in 2020. Beginning with Indonesia’s anticommunist mass killings of 1965–66, it examines how political violence and United States support for anticommunist forces influenced the Cold War across Asia and Latin America. If We Burn, published in 2023, turns to the mass-protest movements of the 2010s, asking why demonstrations that mobilized millions so often failed to achieve their intended political transformations.

Start with The Jakarta Method. It is the clearest introduction to Bevins’s method: reporting from several continents, historical reconstruction and individual testimony brought together to challenge a familiar account of the Cold War. Readers interested in more recent movements can follow it with If We Burn.