Dear Readers,
We proudly present our newest edition of R/evolutions for 2016: “The Legacy of the Arab Spring: New Forces and Fault Lines” Its timing coincides with the remembrance of the start of the Arab Spring set ablaze by the young, desperate Tunisian street vendor, Mohammed Buozizi on 17 December 2010. In this journal’s ‘Regional Issue’ a splendid set of authors highlights various dimensions of the Arab uprisings and what we know after more than five years about the popular protests, regime contention, and counter-revolutions in the Middle East and Northern Africa.
The topic editors would first of all like to thank the authors and anonymous reviewers for their enthusiastic participation in this project. The results of their original contributions have coalesced into this multi-faceted edition with various approaches, which together shed some interesting new light on this important topic.
Kind regards from the topic editors
Lasha Markozashvili
Jeroen Van den Bosch
MANSOURI, ARMILLEI: The Democratic ‘Transition’ in Post-revolution Tunisia: Conditions for successful ‘Consolidation’ and Future Prospects
Tunisia is arguably the most successful case of all the Arab uprisings. How is it possible that Tunisian protests succeeded where all others failed…
HINNEBUSCH: The Sectarian Revolution in the Middle East
Since 2001, identity politics in the Middle East have shared similarities with Syrian cluster bombs – larger settings have fractured into little bits and…
AL-RASHEED: King or Chaos: Saudi Arabia and the Arab Spring
How come Saudi Arabia has so far survived the waves of revolutions virtually unscathed? How has the regime been able to redirect its people’s…
COOKE: Creativity and Resilience in the Syrian Revolution
Professor m. cooke presents another – forgotten – dimension of the Syrian civil war. The original and continued protests of its artists and activists…
BAMYEH: Will the Spring Come Again?
Every revolution triggers a counterrevolution. Professor M. A. Bamyeh deconstructs what revolutions are, and how we can look at them from another point of…
GHAZAL: Untangling the Leviathans of the Arab Spring
This interview with Professor A. Ghazal ‘untangles’ the different roles the drivers of the revolutions (the people in the streets), elites, political regimes and…
ABISAAB: The So-called Arab Spring, Islamism and the Dilemma of the Arab Left: 1970-2012
What happened to the Arab Left? The famous sub-stream of global Marxist intellectuals withered away in the aftermath of the Cold War and before…
AL-WESHAH: Arab Spring” – Five Years After: The Negative Impact of the Anti-Regime Protests
In this text Dr. A. Al-Weshah shortly outlines and streamlines the timeline and most influential events of the Arab Spring uprisings and why they…
VAN DEN BOSCH: Introduction: The Colors and Seasons of the Revolutions
In this short essay, the editor makes a short comparison between the revolutions of 1848, 1989, the so-called ‘color revolutions’ and the ‘Arab Spring.’…
