A holistic and cross-disciplinary approach to understanding why a regional democratic transition did not occur after the Arab Spring protests, this accessible study highlights the salience of regime type, civil society, women's mobilizations, and external intervention across seven countries for undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars.
From the author of the book that uniquely predicted the Egyptian revolution, a new message about the Middle East: everything we're told about the Arab Spring is wrong. When popular revolutions erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, the West assumed that democracy and pluralism would triumph. Greatly praised author and foreign correspondent John R. Bradley draws on his extensive firsthand knowledge of the region's cultures and societies to show how Islamists will fill the power vacuum in the wake of the revolutions. This vivid and timely book gives an original analysis of the new Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain by highlighting the dramatic spread of Saudi-funded Wahhabi ideology, inter-tribal rivalries, and Sunni-Shia divisions. Bradley gives a boots on the ground look at how the revolutions were first ignited and the major players behind them, and shows how the local population participated in and responded to the uprisings. In Tunisia he witnesses secularists under violent attack and in Egypt observes radical Islamists taking control of the streets. He illuminates the ancient sectarian strife shaking Bahrain, fierce civil war pitching tribe against tribe in Libya and Yemen, and ethnic divisions threatening to tear apart Syria and Iran. Taking it one step further, Bradley offers a comprehensive look at how across countries, liberal, progressive voices that first rallied the Arab masses were drowned out by the slogans of the better-organized and more popular radical Islamists. With the in-depth knowledge of a local and the keen perspective of a seasoned reporter, After the Arab Spring offers a piercing analysis of what the empowerment of Islamism bodes for the future of the Middle East and the impact on the West.
"The "Arab Spring" all started when a young Tunisian fruit-seller set himself on fire in protest of a government official confiscating his apples without cause and slapping his face. The aftermath of that one personal protest grew to become the Middle East movement known as the Arab Spring -- a wave of disparate events that included revolutions, protests, government overthrows, hopeful reform movements, and bloody civil wars. This book will be the first to bring the post Arab Spring world to light in a holistic context. It is a narrative of the author Shelly Culbertson's journey through six countries of the Middle East, describing countries, historical perspective, and interviews with revolution and government figures. Culbertson, RAND Middle East analyst and former U.S. State Department officer who has been involved with the Middle East for two decades, is uniquely equipped to analyze the current social, political, economic, and cultural effects of the movement. With honesty, empathy, and expert historical accuracy, Culbertson strives to answer the questions "what led to the Arab Spring, " "what is it like there now, " and "what trends after the Arab Spring are shaping the future of the Middle East?" The Fires of Spring tells the story by weaving together a sense of place, history, insight about key issues of our time, and personal stories and adventures. It navigates street life and peers into ministries, mosques, and women's worlds. It delves into what Arab Spring optimism was about, and at the same time sheds light on the pain and dysfunction that continues to plague some parts of the region."--
No attempt to define the Mediterranean as a region can overlook the multiplicity of political, religious and social forces at work along its shores. Responding to changes in the global and regional environment these forces have interacted in complex ways, as evidenced by their impact on the social, cultural, and political life of the states comprised between the covers of this collaborative volume. The peculiarity of the Mediterranean, as has been noted time and again, lies in its geographical position as a “sea in the middle of the land”, where different religions and cultures vie for recognition and self-expression. In the wake of the popular uprisings that have inflamed the region, beginning in Tunisia in December 2010, a drastic reorganisation of their respective state systems is coming into focus in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Though their paths do not run along parallel lines, they share a common denominator: the determination of their people to become the masters of their destinies, and to do so by grappling with new forms of democracy. Almost five years later, after their rulers became the target of violent mass protests, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are going through an exceptionally difficult transition, trying to accommodate their nascent constitutional forms to the new forces inspired by the Arab Spring.
This book analyzes the nature of the relationship between religion and politics by using democracy in the Muslim world and the phenomenon of the Arab Spring as a case study. Esposito, Sonn, and Voll provide valuable insight into the issues of equality, economic justice, and democratic participation that each opposition movement has raised and continues to grapple with, both in the throes of revolution and in its aftermath.
Surveying the causes of the Arab Spring, and revealing the governing trends arising from it, this book examines various international relation theories through the lens of the experiences of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. It takes the events of the Arab Spring as an outcome of globalization’s double movement whose integrative cultural, political and security frameworks devastated nationally controlled economies, undermining the nation-state system and propagating a decentralized and communitarian-based governance structure. The consequences for many plural, diverse societies were two-fold: autocratic nationalism was discarded while decentralized regimes representing communitarian-based politics came to the fore. The author reveals how the formulation of a new communitocratic order rests on the accommodation of this newly emerging communitarianism and explores the major drivers of political transformation, describing the emerging communities, forecasting their governing options and the possible repercussions for the post-Arab Spring states.
Several years after the Arab Spring began, democracy remains elusive in the Middle East. While Tunisia has made progress towards democracy, other countries that overthrew their rulers - Egypt, Yemen, and Libya - remain in authoritarianism and instability. This volume provides a foundational exploration of the Arab Spring's successes and failures.
In 2011 the Arab revolts changed the Middle East forever. The toppling of a generation of dictators left the region in turmoil. Has the promise of the Arab Spring been lost? What does the rise of religious extremism on Europe's doorstep mean for the West and its allies? Is America giving up on the region and, if so, who will lead the new Middle East? Drawing on compelling first-hand reporting, a deep knowledge of the region's history and access to many of the key players, BBC Bureau Chief Paul Danahar lays bare the forces that are shaping the region. Now completely revised and updated to include everything that has happened in the region since the book was first published.
The Arab Spring unleashed forces of liberation and social justice that swept across North Africa and the Middle East with unprecedented speed, ferocity, and excitement. Although the future of the democratic uprisings against oppressive authoritarian regimes remains uncertain in many places, the revolutionary wave that started in Tunisia in December 2010 has transformed how the world sees Arab peoples and politics. Bringing together the knowledge of activists, scholars, journalists, and policy experts uniquely attuned to the pulse of the region, Dispatches from the Arab Spring offers an urgent and engaged analysis of a remarkable ongoing world-historical event that is widely misinterpreted in the West. Tracing the flows of protest, resistance, and counterrevolution in every one of the countries affected by this epochal change—from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Sudan—the contributors provide ground-level reports and new ways of teaching about and understanding the Middle East in general, and contextualizing the social upheavals and political transitions that defined the Arab Spring in particular. Rejecting outdated and invalid (yet highly influential) paradigms to analyze the region—from depictions of the “Arab street” as a mindless, reactive mob to the belief that Arab culture was “unfit” for democratic politics—this book offers fresh insights into the region’s dynamics, drawing from social history, political geography, cultural creativity, and global power politics. Dispatches from the Arab Spring is an unparalleled introduction to the changing Middle East and offers the most comprehensive and accurate account to date of the uprisings that profoundly reshaped North Africa and the Middle East. Contributors: Sheila Carapico, U of Richmond; Nouri Gana, UCLA; Toufic Haddad; Adam Hanieh, SOAS/U of London; Toby C. Jones, Rutgers U; Anjali Kamat; Khalid Medani, McGill U; Merouan Mekouar; Maya Mikdashi, NYU; Paulo Gabriel Hilu Pinto, U Federal Fluminense, Brazil; Jillian Schwedler, Hunter College, CUNY; Ahmad Shokr; Susan Slyomovics, UCLA; Haifa Zangana.
Since 2013, the Middle East has experienced a double trend of chaos and civil war, on the one hand, and the return of authoritarianism, on the other. That convergence has eclipsed the political transitions that occurred in the countries whose regimes were toppled in 2011, as if they were merely footnotes to a narrative that naturally led from an "Arab Spring" to an "Arab Winter". This volume aims at rehabilitating those transitions, by considering them as expressions of a "revolutionary moment" whose outcome was never pre-determined, but depended on the choices of a large range of actors. It brings together leading scholars of Arab politics to adopt a comparative approach to a few crucial aspects of those transitions: constitutional debates, the question of transitional justice, the evolution of civil-military relations, and the role of specific actors, both domestic and international.
