Arab Spring Is About Dignity, Says Georgetown Professor
BY ZEHRA ALTAYLI (IR/V)
Since Muhammed Bouazizi set himself and Tunisia on fire 14 months ago, protests have spread across the Arab world and toppled one dictator after another. These protests are often portrayed or perceived as a single movement, commonly designated by the term "Arab Spring." This is misleading, says Adel Iskandar, professor of media studies at Georgetown University. The protests in the Arab world are quite diverse and should not be misunderstood as a unified march toward democracy. What the protest movements do have in common, though, is the wish to regain dignity: a dignity that authoritarian regimes in the region failed to provide their citizens.
Speaking to students of Zeynep Arkan's Foreign Policy Analysis course at Bilkent on Wednesday, February 15, Prof. Iskandar also contemplated the future of the Middle East. According to him, the revolutions in the Arab world are fueled by the view that there is something fundamentally wrong with these countries' bureaucracies and their institutions in general. What may come out of the Arab Spring, then, is a revival of anarchism as a system of self-governance.