| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Arab Spring, which has been raging in the Middle East for two years, has swept away seemingly irremovable regimes in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen. In Syria, where the Ba'athist leadership has preserved its bond with the armed forces and law enforcement agencies, the civil war is escalating with unclear prospects for President Bashar al-Assad's regime. In terms of the democratic transformation of the region, during the past two years of the Arab Spring more has been done than in the entire history of the independent existence of Middle Eastern countries. However, the process is not yet complete: democratic change has affected the core of the Arab world and stopped in its periphery - at the borders of the traditionalist monarchies of the Persian Gulf, which are attempting to bribe their way out of long overdue transformations. Iraq, Lebanon, and Algeria are immune to "twitter revolutions," as they had earlier undergone (albeit with varying degree of success) the cycle of modernization, including foreign interventions and civil wars. The monarchies of Morocco and Jordan are adapting, with sufficient flexibility, to the imperatives of the day, and are continuing to make concessions to the opposition. Yet on the whole, the impression of the region is not that of a decisive pivot towards democracy, nor that of integration into global modernization processes.
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