Foreign Affairs : Kitap tanıtımı Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World: Regimes, Oppositions, and External Actors After the Spring

 Foreign  Affairs : Kitap  tanıtımı 

Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World: Regimes, Oppositions, and External Actors After the Spring

By Lisa Blaydes, Amr Hamzawy, and Hesham Sallam

University of Michigan Press, 2022, 488 pp.

Reviewed by Lisa Anderson

March/April 2023

Published on February 28, 2023

An unusually strong collection, this volume showcases writing by some of the best scholars working on politics in the Arab world today, all of them at the top of their game. These essays together offer a thorough and sophisticated examination of the political change and contestation that has shaped the decade after the uprisings in 2011, from Algeria to Sudan. The authors focus on three themes: the persistence of political mobilization among populations that are young, dissatisfied, technologically adept, and unreconciled to autocracy; the adaptations of regimes that are also increasingly tech-savvy and equally determined not to surrender their power and privileges; and the ever more visible importance of international and local actors in the dynamics of domestic conflict across the region. The authors puzzle over the unwillingness of many of the protest movements to develop more coherent institutional forms, skeptical as they are of conventional organizations such as political parties, ideological commitments such as Islamist or nationalist dogmas, and, it sometimes seems, authority of any kind. Still, the book’s contributors make a convincing case that the Arab world will see continued activism and growing regime ruthlessness in the face of discontent