The Impossible Revolution: Why Did the Arab Spring Fail to Materialize in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine?

Abstract

The year 2011 was the year of the masses in the Middle East and the circum-Mediterranean. Collective euphoria and popular mobilization forged unlikely coalitions between historical rivals driven by a revolutionary imagination embodied by a new political subject (Challand 2013). This transnational space of possibilities diffused mimetically from its original core in Egypt and Tunisia throughout the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. For the first time in history, the Arab world became a mobilizing source of inspiration for dissident movements worldwide. These in turn adapted its principles to local disputes and national grievances from New York to Madrid. While in retrospect the Arab uprisings are largely acknowledged as a genie out of the bottle they remain a rare historical experiment, which attests to the tremendous power and fragility of democracy in postcolonial settings under neoliberal conditions (Achar 2013, p. 162; Lynch 2012, pp. 136–37).