“The authoritarian opponents of Islamic democracy now have a script that they can follow to mobilize and motivate the suppression of Islamic democratic movements,” Feldman said in an interview. A first wave of protests leading to a democratically elected government in Egypt was followed by a second wave of protests that encouraged the military to overthrow that government, which could end the experiment of Islamic democracy for the foreseeable future.
The Islamic State-whose existence, says Feldman, was predicated on the capture of Syrian territory after the civil war-killed and raped thousands of civilians.
What began with the promise of change as masses of ordinary people took to the streets shouting, “The people want the overthrow of the regime,” turned into tragedy: Protests against the Assad regime in Syria sparked a longstanding civil war, which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and has led millions to flee the country. That this did not lead to constitutional democracy or even to a more decent life for most of those affected is not a reason to believe that the effort was meaningless.”įeaturing analysis of political events with elements of philosophy (Feldman draws on Hannah Arendt and Aristotle), the book explores the Arab Spring protests and their aftermath in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria, and the rise of the Islamic State. He writes in his new book, “The Arab Winter: A Tragedy”: “People whose political lives had been determined and shaped from the outside tried politics for themselves, and for a time succeeded. Focusing on only outcomes, however, diminishes the historic nature of the Arab people’s efforts to achieve self-determination for the first time, Feldman argues. That omission reinforces the contention of Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman that the multinational protest movement against repressive governments in the Arab world that took place primarily during 2011 has today been relegated to “implicit nonexistence” because of its failure to meet most of its goals. The article cited about 40 events, including international ones like the failed effort to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from office, a terrorist attack at a university in Kenya, and a Thai soccer team’s rescue from a cave. As the 2010s came to a close, CNN presented a roundup of some of the news stories that defined the decade.
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