The Arab Spring promised to end dictatorship and bring self-government to people across the
Middle East. Yet everywhere except Tunisia it led to either renewed dictatorship civil war
extremist terror or all three. In The Arab Winter Noah Feldman argues that the Arab Spring
was nevertheless not an unmitigated failure much less an inevitable one. Rather it was a
noble tragic series of events in which for the first time in recent Middle Eastern history
Arabic-speaking peoples took free collective political action as they sought to achieve
self-determination. Focusing on the Egyptian revolution and counterrevolution the Syrian civil
war the rise and fall of ISIS in Syria and Iraq and the Tunisian struggle toward Islamic
constitutionalism Feldman provides an original account of the political consequences of the
Arab Spring including the reaffirmation of pan-Arab identity the devastation of Arab
nationalisms and the death of political Islam with the collapse of ISIS. He also challenges
commentators who say that the Arab Spring was never truly transformative that Arab popular
self-determination was a mirage and even that Arabs or Muslims are less capable of democracy
than other peoples. Above all The Arab Winter shows that we must not let the tragic outcome of
the Arab Spring disguise its inherent human worth.
