The spectacular explosion of revolutionary energy across the greater Middle East in the first weeks of 2011 reconfigured many international endeavors, including the Israeli-Palestinian pseudo-peace process and NATO’s wishful quasi-consolidation. The revolutionary drive may have slackened in the second half of the anno arabicus miraculum, but it is definitely not a spent force and there are heavy impacts to brace for. It is far too early to say whether these revolutions will promote democracy across the region, of which there has been too little, but it is certainly a good time to speculate about probable repercussions. Popular uprisings in post-Soviet states (still defined as such twenty years after independence) have features and dynamics significantly dissimilar from those in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, but it may be useful to look for interplays between the so-called color revolutions and the Arab Spring. A particularly complex interplay appears in the North Caucasus, where new drivers are reshaping the banditry-insurgency-terrorism threat and providing it with new momentum. […]
Memo #:
177
Series:
2
PDF:
PDF URL:
http://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/ponars/pepm_177.pdf
