Aftandilian in The Arab Weekly on Failures of the Arab Spring
Gregory Aftandilian, Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published an Op-Ed on how the Washington D.C. think tank community views the failures of the Arab Spring.
Aftandilian’s article, entitled “In Washington, Consensus on ‘Arab Apring’ Failures, Few Solutions,” was published in The Arab Weekly on February 24, 2019.
From the text of the article:
Eight years after the “Arab spring,” think-tank writers and others in the Washington policy community continue to grapple with the uprisings’ failures — with Tunisia being the exception.
One consensus that has developed is that hoped-for democratisation did not come about because authoritarian states were weak or had weak institutions. In other words, despite the perception that those states were strong because they were ruled by strong men, they were, in fact, very brittle because, with the exception of the military establishment in some cases, institutions such as legislatures, the judiciary and civil society were often appendages of the ruling regimes and not independent actors.
Another point of consensus is that “revolutionaries” — often university-educated, middle-class young people — were good at mobilisation through social media but did not understand how power works and how to create political forces that could rule the state.
The case of Egypt is often cited. Young people who rallied people to go to Tahrir Square and often out-foxed police had a disdain for parliamentary politics. They apparently believed that, by being an outside pressure group, they could keep the replacement government on a democratic path. They forgot the lesson from other revolutions that bringing down a regime requires a group to take over all levels of power.
Aftandilian spent over 21 years in government service, most recently on Capitol Hill where he was foreign policy adviser to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (2007-2008), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-2004), and foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Edward Kennedy (1999).