Academic commentary on Arab uprisings and social change

2D The part of social change that is the hardest to understand in a positivistic way is the moral dimension—that is, the ideas that people carry around in their heads regarding legitimacy, justice, dignity and community. The current Arab uprising was triggered by the self- immolation of an overeducated 26-year-old Tunisian vegetable seller whose cart was repeatedly confiscated by the authorities. After Mohamed Bouazizi was slapped by a policewoman when he tried to complain, he reached the end of his tether. Bouazizi’s public suicide turned into a social movement because contemporary communications technologies facilitated the growth of a new social space where middle-class people could recognize and organize around their common interests. We will probably never understand, even in retrospect, why the dry tinder of outraged dignity suddenly ignited in this fashion in December 2010 as opposed to 2009, or ten years before that, and why the conflagration spread to some Arab countries but not to others. But we can certainly do a better job in putting together the few pieces we do understand, in a way that would be useful to policymakers coping with the reality of social change. 1 Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies: With a New Forward by Francis Fukuyama (Yale University Press, 2006). 2Davies, “Towards a Theory of Revolution”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 27 (1962). 3Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: IIliberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (W. W. Norton, 2003); see also Zakaria, “A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew”, Foreign Affairs (March/April 1994). 4For a description of the Wolfenson presidency, see Sebastian Mallaby, The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Penguin Press, 2004). 5See Harold James’s retroview, entitled “Growing Pains”, of a classic December 1963 essay by Mancur Olson (“Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force”) in The American Interest (September/October 2006). HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023482