Unrest in the Arab World: Four Questions (Commentaries) (Arab Spring) (Essay‪)‬

The "Arab spring" seems to challenge a number of scholarly truisms prevalent in the Middle East studies community. The rather quick fall of Tunisia's Ben Ali and the subsequent resignation and arrest of Husni Mubarak in Egypt took many by surprise. Some of my students, for instance, asked with a smile whether it still makes sense to read the literature in their curricula, alluding to the strong focus on Middle Eastern authoritarianism when discussing domestic politics of the region. A number of critical media commentaries put the scholarly expertise of area experts in doubt who apparently have not been able to predict the recent course of events. A wind of change has not only moved across the Middle East but also seized public debates and university lecture rooms, raising crucial questions for the scholarly establishment. Personally, I have repeatedly been confronted with four questions to which I would like to give preliminary and far from comprehensive answers in this essay. Rather, these answers are spontaneous responses to questions that will continue to preoccupy occupy us in the near future. I will start with the "failure" of Middle Eastern scholarship to predict the recent events. Then I will address the validity of scholarly work that so strongly has focused on the resilience of authoritarianism in the region. The third question turns to the ways in which to support processes of democratization in the region. And I conclude with a tentative answer to the question whether we are witnessing a "new Middle East" in the making. 1. Why did Scholars not Predict the Recent Developments?