The Arab winter : democratic consolidation, civil war, and radical Islamists
(Book - Regular Print)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"This book is written from the point of view of the dashed hopes of ordinary Arab citizens who mobilized across the region during the Arab Spring to reinvent the autocratic Arab world into one characterized by democracy, dignity, socioeconomic justice, and inviolable human rights. However, instead of achieving their goals, the Arab revolts, outside of Tunisia, led to civil wars, authoritarian retrenchment, and the Islamic State-a totalitarian, bloodthirsty, and theatrically barbaric "caliphate" that revels in killing ordinary Muslims who they deem apostates. I explain these disappointing and even harrowing results based on how well transitional elites handled major democratic consolidation challenges. Those include extricating the military from politics, political parties forging a democratic bargain, reaching national consensus on a new socioeconomic pact to legitimize democracy, establishing transitional justice, national reconciliation, human rights, and the rule of law, and forging national unity and modern state attributes-if necessary. Elites who had to nation-build and state-build at the same time as they implemented political democracy-in Libya, Yemen, and Iraq-failed, understandably, to do so and their countries collapsed into civil wars. Political parties in Tunisia reached a democratic bargain. Transitional elites could not extricate Egypt's military from politics"--,Provided by publisher.