The Dissident Blog #14: After the Arab Spring e-bok

These days, “the Arab Spring” is an expression that has almost an emetic effect on many of those who were most heavily involved in the democracy movement that suddenly and, for many, unexpectedly swept through north Africa, into the Middle East and down towards the Arabian Peninsular. Their exasperation comes from the way it became such a media cliché and the way change in many societies either was thwarted or simply stopped. The situation in Syria and central Iraq has become a war of terror. But as many of the contributors to this issue point out, a “spring” is something that comes and goes—but none of what we witnessed would have happened in the first place without the years of hard, courageous and dangerous work that different groups of activists put into societal change. In this issue, we’ve tried to bring together voices from as many of the nations affected by the democratic uprisings as we can. We asked them: What happened to the Arab Spring?”