The New Arabs
How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Renowned blogger and Middle East expert Juan Cole takes us “inside the youth movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, showing us how activists used technology and social media to amplify their message and connect with like-minded citizens” (The New York Times) in this “rousing study of the Arab Spring” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
For three decades, Cole has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. In The New Arabs he has written “an elegant, carefully delineated synthesis of the complicated, intertwined facets of the Arab uprisings,” (Kirkus Reviews), illuminating the role of today’s Arab youth—who they are, what they want, and how they will affect world politics.
Not all big groups of teenagers and twenty-somethings necessarily produce historical movements centered on their identity as youth, with a generational set of organizations, symbols, and demands rooted at least partially in the distinctive problems of people their age. The Arab Millennials did. And, in a provocative, big-picture argument about the future of the Arab world, The New Arabs shows just how they did it. “Engaging, powerful, and comprehensive…The book feels as indispensable to scholars as it is insightful for a more casual reader” (Los Angeles Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Young people and their smartphones overthrow dictatorships in this rousing study of the Arab Spring. University of Michigan historian Cole (Engaging the Muslim World) follows the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya from their roots in dissident organizing though the mass protests of 2011, the collapse of repressive regimes, and ensuing political turmoil. He focuses on the leadership of the "millennial" generation of young, urban, secular activists, their horizons broadened by the Internet and satellite TV, their "interactive networks and horizontal organizations" empowered by blogs and YouTube videos that spread ideas and rallied demonstrators. Cole's exhilarating journalistic narrative of their exploits is enlivened by interviews with participants and his own colorful firsthand accounts of upheavals. His emphasis on youth and technology is sometimes overdone; revolution was for young firebrands as much in 1848 as in 2011, and old-fashioned factors allegiances of soldiers, the humble paper pamphlet play as important a role as youthful lan and social media. However, Cole's deep, nuanced exploration of political and social currents underneath the uprisings shines; he shows Westerners who think the Arab world is divided between corrupt despots and Islamist zealots just how strong and pervasive the tendencies towards liberalism and democracy are.
