Adeed Dawisha
WW Norton and Co
2013
288 pp
The Second Arab Awakening is an overview of the Arab Spring, providing a state-by-state analysis of the popular pro-democracy uprisings that took place in numerous middle-east and North African nations beginning in early 2011.
The first 'awakening' referred to by this book's title were the mid-twentieth century anti-colonial revolts in a number of these countries, revolts that led to the emergence of the dictatorships the 2011 uprisings rose against. Dawisha discussed that history in relation to the recent uprisings.
Many of the Arab Spring books that have been published in English were rushed to publication before January 2012, containing hopeful visions of the near future. Dawisha's book was published in 2013 when the Arab Spring had resulted in a variety of results across the Arab world. By then the most successful-seeming uprisings of 2011 looked, in 2013, as a youth-facilitated transfer of power from secular military dictatorships to Islam-centric political parties. The author discusses countries like Jordan, that introduced democratic reforms without popular uprisings, but by 2013 the less successful Springs were brutally repressed while Syria entered a nation-destroying civil war.
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