Speaker introductions and presentation by Osama Abi-Mershed.
Part of CCAS' Spring 2011 series, Revolution in the Arab World: The Long View
February 7, 2011
Speakers
Osama Abi-Mershed, Department of History, Georgetown University
Elliott Colla, Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies Georgetown University
James Collins, Department of History, Georgetown University
Bassam Haddad, Middle East Studies Program and Department of Public and International Affairs, George Mason University
In January 2011, Tunisia’s authoritarian government was toppled in a populist uprising, and the country has since entered a political transition whose outcome remains uncertain and open-ended. While the full dimensions of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution remain unknown, the dismantling of the autocratic regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali holds dramatic implications for the Arab regimes and the western governments that support them. Indeed, the specter of anti-authoritarian revolt now looms across the political landscape of the Arab world, from Mauritania to Yemen, as the reverberations of the Jasmine Revolution promise to impact fundamentally the relations between local governing elites and their respective populations. The recent and unfolding developments in Egypt merely confirm that the Jasmine Revolution has transcended the boundaries of Tunisia proper, to lay claim to a broader regional mobilization of democratic aspirations and demands for radical sociopolitical reforms.
The lecture series on 'Revolution in the Arab World: The Long View' proposed a variety of interdisciplinary and long-term perspectives on the local and regional repercussions of the Jasmine Revolution for the Arab world and beyond. By addressing the question of “authoritarianism” both as a thematic and regional issue, the series interrogated two unfolding aspects of this momentous and complex event. The first had to do with the fluid situation in Tunisia itself as state elites, the military, and emergent non-state actors struggled to define a new balance of power in the country. The second pertained to the wider implications of the Tunisian event, specifically in its challenges to the patterns and operations of Arab authoritarian regimes. Among the thematic questions the series aimed to examine and address were: the prospects for Tunisian and Egyptian reformers to institutionalize the achievements of their revolutions; the potential for the Tunisian and Egyptian examples to be repeated in other Arab countries; the comparative vulnerability of Arab authoritarian states to similar popular uprisings, and the various counter-strategies they may employ to resist, contain, or co-opt the momentum of the Tunisian and Egyptian protests?
