The Arab Winter

The Arab Winter
Author: Noah Feldman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691227934

The Arab Spring promised to end dictatorship and bring self-government to people across the Middle East. Yet everywhere except Tunisia it led to either renewed dictatorship, civil war, extremist terror, or all three. In The Arab Winter, Noah Feldman argues that the Arab Spring was nevertheless not an unmitigated failure, much less an inevitable one. Rather, it was a noble, tragic series of events in which, for the first time in recent Middle Eastern history, Arabic-speaking peoples took free, collective political action as they sought to achieve self-determination.

The Arab Winter

The Arab Winter
Author: Stephen J. King
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2020-02-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108477410

Compares experiences of the Arab Spring for a comprehensive account of how nations handled the challenge of democratic consolidation.

Spring Fever

Spring Fever
Author: Andrew C McCarthy
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2012-09-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1594036446

The first fundamental truth about the "Arab Spring" is that there never was one. The salient fact of the Middle East, the only one, is Islam. The Islam that shapes the Middle East inculcates in Muslims the self-perception that they are members of a civilization implacably hostile to the West. The United States is a competitor to be overcome, not the herald of a culture to be embraced. Is this self-perception based on objective truth? Does it reflect an accurate construction of Islam? It is over these questions that American officials and Western intellectuals obsess. Yet the questions are irrelevant. This is not a matter of right or wrong, of some posture or policy whose subtle tweaking or outright reversal would change the facts on the ground. This is simply, starkly, the way it is. Every human heart does not yearn for freedom. In the Islam of the Middle East, "freedom" means something very nearly the opposite of what the concept connotes to Westerners – it is the freedom that lies in total submission to Allah and His law. That law, sharia, is diametrically opposed to core components of freedom as understood in the West – beginning with the very idea that man is free to make law for himself, irrespective of what Allah has ordained. It is thus delusional to believe, as the West's Arab Spring fable insists, that the region teems with Jamal al-Madisons holding aloft the lamp of liberty. Do such revolutionary reformers exist? Of course they do . . . but in numbers barely enough to weave a fictional cover story. When push came to shove – and worse – the reformers were overwhelmed, swept away by a tide of Islamic supremacism, the dynamic, consequential mass movement that beckons endless winter. That is the real story of the Arab Spring – that, and the Pandora's Box that opens when an American administration aligns with that movement, whose stated goal is to destroy America.

Revisiting the Arab Uprisings

Revisiting the Arab Uprisings
Author: Stéphane Lacroix
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2018-12-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190057939

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.

Islam and Democracy After the Arab Spring

Islam and Democracy After the Arab Spring
Author: John L. Esposito
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0195147987

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.

Dispatches from the Arab Spring

Dispatches from the Arab Spring
Author: Paul Amar
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2013-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1452940614

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.

Islamism, Arab Spring, and the Future of Democracy

Islamism, Arab Spring, and the Future of Democracy
Author: Leonid Grinin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2018-10-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9783319910765

This book provides an in-depth analysis of public opinion patterns among Muslims, particularly in the Arab world. On the basis of data from the World Values Survey, the Arab Barometer Project and the Arab Opinion Index, it compares the dynamics of Muslim opinion structures with global publics and arrives at social scientific predictions of value changes in the region. Using country factor scores from a variety of surveys, it also develops composite indices of support for democracy and a liberal society on a global level and in the Muslim world, and analyzes a multivariate model of opinion structures in the Arab world, based on over 40 variables from 12 countries in the Arab League and covering 67% of the total population of the Arab countries. While being optimistic about the general, long-term trend towards democracy and the resilience of Arab and Muslim civil society to Islamism, the book also highlights anti-Semitic trends in the region and discusses them in the larger context of xenophobia in traditional societies. In light of the current global confrontation with radical Islamism, this book provides vital material for policy planners, academics and think tanks alike.

The Battle for the Arab Spring

The Battle for the Arab Spring
Author: Lin Noueihed
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2012-03-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300184905

This “lucidly written” account of the 2011 wave of revolutions “includes a wealth of astute analysis on the politics of the region, from Morocco to Oman” (Paul Hockenos, The National). Sparked by the protest of a single vegetable seller in Tunisia, the flame of revolutionary passion swept across the Arab world in what has come to be called the Arab Spring of 2011. Millions took to the streets in revolt. The governments of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya fell, other regimes remain embattled, and no corner of the region has escaped unchanged. Here, Middle East experts Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren explain the economic and political roots of the Arab Spring and assess the road ahead. Through research, interviews, and a wealth of firsthand experience, the authors explain the unique obstacles each country faces in maintaining stability. They analyze the challenges many Arab nations face in building democratic institutions, finding consensus on political Islam, overcoming tribal divides, and satisfying an insatiable demand for jobs. In an era of change and uncertainty, this insightful guide provides the first clear glimpse of the post-revolutionary future the Arab Spring set in motion.

Fractured Lands

Fractured Lands
Author: Scott Anderson
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0525434445

From the bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a piercing account of how the contemporary Arab world came to be riven by catastrophe since the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq. In 2011, a series of anti-government uprisings shook the Middle East and North Africa in what would become known as the Arab Spring. Few could predict that these convulsions, initially hailed in the West as a triumph of democracy, would give way to brutal civil war, the terrors of the Islamic State, and a global refugee crisis. But, as New York Times bestselling author Scott Anderson shows, the seeds of catastrophe had been sown long before. In this gripping account, Anderson examines the myriad complex causes of the region’s profound unraveling, tracing the ideological conflicts of the present to their origins in the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 and beyond. From this investigation emerges a rare view into a land in upheaval through the eyes of six individuals—the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family; a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties; a Kurdish physician from a prominent warrior clan; a Syrian university student caught in civil war; an Iraqi activist for women’s rights; and an Iraqi day laborer-turned-ISIS fighter. A probing and insightful work of reportage, Fractured Lands offers a penetrating portrait of the contemporary Arab world and brings the stunning realities of an unprecedented geopolitical tragedy into crystalline focus.

From Arab Spring to Islamic Winter

From Arab Spring to Islamic Winter
Author: Raphael Israeli
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351518917

The world is watching with uncertainity as the "Arab Spring" unfolds. Optimistically named by international media sources, the term "Arab Spring" associates the unrest with ideas of renewal, revival, and democratic thought and deed. Many hoped the overthrow of authoritarian leaders signaled a promising new beginning for the Arab world. Raphael Israeli argues that instead of paving a path toward liberal democracy, the Arab Spring in fact launched a power struggle. Judging from the experiences of countries where the dust is settling-including Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and perhaps also Syria and Libya-it appears that Islamic governments will fill the vacuum in leadership. The hopes that swept the Islamic world with the Arab Spring have given way to a winter of lost hopes and aspirations, as it becomes increasingly clear that democratic outcomes are not on the horizon. What is worse is that the West seems to have abandoned its hopes for democracy and freedom in the region, instead making peace with the idea that Islamic governments must be accepted as the lesser of evil options. Presenting a clear-eyed picture of the situation, Israeli examines thematic problems that cut across all the Muslim states experiencing unrest. He groups the countries into various blocs according to their shared characteristics, then discusses these groups one by one. For each country, he considers whether the liberal-democratic option is viable and examines what kind of regime could be considered legitimate and stable. This volume offers valuable insights for political scientists, Middle Eastern specialists, and the general informed public eager to comprehend the import of these momentous events.