Let's cut the fluff. If you're social media consumers, odds are you've heard of the Arab Spring, maybe even seen clips of it floating around online: burning flags, packed protests, tweets going viral. But how much do we really know? And more importantly, what did we learn?
Ahmad Sahide's "The Arab Spring: Tantangan dan Harapan Demokratisasi" isn't here to romanticize revolutions. It's here to drag us out of surface-level hot takes and into the messy, uncomfortable truth: that democracy is hard, hope is fragile, and not every revolution leads to freedom.
The book walks us through the rise and aftermath of the Arab Spring with surgical precision. From Tunisia to Egypt to Syria, it explores how rage boiled over into protest, and how that protest sometimes led to change, but often spiraled into chaos. Sahide doesn't just narrate events. He dares to ask: why did democracy fail in some places? Who sabotaged the hope? And what does it say about the global system we live in?
Spoiler: a lot.
Let's Talk Roots: Why the People Snapped
We love to call things "revolutions," like it's some aesthetic shift in power with cool chants and sudden freedom. But revolutions are messy, often born out of desperation, not idealism. Sahide reminds us that the Arab Spring wasn't a random glitch in the system, it was the system finally collapsing under its own weight.Â
For decades, regimes across the Arab world thrived on control: media censorship, police brutality, rigged elections, and economies goes downfall caused by corruption and they just worked for the elite. Youth unemployment was sky-high. Corruption wasn't a scandal, it was the default setting. So, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire in protest, he didn't just light up a market square. He lit up a continent's frustration.
Sahide zooms in on this: the revolution wasn't sudden. It was structural. It was about people who had nothing left to lose. But the brutal irony is that the fall of a dictator didn't mean the rise of democracy. Instead, in many cases, it led to military coups, civil wars, and deeper instability.
Toppling a Regime Building a System
The book's strongest critique? That we often confuse regime change with progress. Just because a dictator's statue gets torn down doesn't mean society becomes free overnight.
Take Egypt. Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011. There was this euphoric high, people on the streets, chants of "freedom," elections on the way. But just two years later, the country was back under military rule. What happened?
