Revolution, Freedom, and the Arab 20th Century by Dr Andrew Arsan

Starts on Tue, 2 Mar 2021 17:00 Greenwich Mean Time (UTC±0)

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Ten years ago, the citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Syria rose up against their rulers, demanding dignity and freedom. A decade on, we have become used to hearing the Arab Spring described as a failure. Rather than heralding a new age of democracy and equality, we are told, it brought on instead a bleak winter of autocracy, civil war, and humanitarian disaster. In this telling, the uprisings of 2011 were a one-off occurrence, a brief interlude in a long history of oppression, instability, and inequality. But the Arab revolutions were not quite as exceptional as this account suggests. On the contrary, they were the culmination of a century of struggle for individual rights and collective freedoms. This is the story I will plot out in this talk.