A fall snapshot of Arab Spring
Two years ago, a wave of protests started in the Middle East, and eventually toppled longtime regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Less dramatic results came from popular demonstrations in Bahrain and Yemen. The present violence in Syria is the latest flowering of the movement that came to be known as the Arab Spring. What has the Arab Spring meant? What is it now? And what comes next? A panel of experts gathered Thursday evening to gamely take up the subject in a Sever Hall classroom. An audience of 70 had groped its way across a darkened Harvard Yard to the event, sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center, after a power outage had blackened much of Cambridge. They were “people who have braved the dark to be enlightened,” said Homi Bhabha, director of the center. Just as the power snapped back on, he introduced the panelists, three of them from Harvard: Shahab...