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Maybe someday
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I Index Overall Rating
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3/100Scholars
90/100Author:
Noah Feldman
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Date:
May 12, 2020
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. 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.
What The Reviewers Say
...argues that the uprisings are in danger of being dismissed as a meaningless experience, not just because of the chaos and terror that followed them, but because of the widespread sense that they have left no real political residue apart from Tunisia’s fragile success at building a democracy.
One of the difficulties in writing about the Arab Spring is that the term really refers to a series of mutually inspired but quite different national conflicts. Yet in his new book, Noah Feldman...has tried to outline a unified theory.
The Arab Winter is not a history. Rather, it is an argument, in the best sense of that word, couched in political philosophy. To get the most out of the argument (for who doesn’t want to argue back?) the reader should be somewhat familiar with the Middle East.
Devoting separate chapters to Egypt, Syria, the Islamic State and Tunisia, Mr. Feldman argues persuasively that the Arab Spring ushered in a new era, characterized by politics from below.
