| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Ongoing turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East has disappointed many in the West who had expected the 2011 revolutions to usher in a new era of social justice and democratic transformation across the region. There is now no lack of dour meteorological puns on "Arab Spring" to indicate the unfortunate change of season since the uprisings. But the people who rushed to use this term in the first place set themselves up for disappointment. It was rash and ahistorical to presume automatically that after December 2010, the Arab world would go through democratic transitions akin to those which East European countries went through after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite certain vague and beguiling similarities, transition processes in the Arab countries have really had little in common with those in post-Communist Europe.
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