Falk - Chaos and counterrevolution: after the Arab Spring

Richard Falk did it again. A masterly survey and critical analysis by an expert with knowledge and wisdom. Chaos and Counterrevolution is a subtle and sophisticated assessment of what is going on in the MENA region After the Arab Spring . It is a major contribution to the field as well as (Critical) International Relations Theory. Highly recommended.

FUAT KEYMAN

Director of Istanbul Policy Center, Professor, Sabanc University

The blogposts collected in this volume showcase both the immediacy of contemporaneous reporting and the reflective, thoughtful analysis that has characterized all of Falks writing over many decades. His deep knowledge of the region (especially Turkey) gives extraordinary depth and texture to his compelling insights; and the power of his narrative and the excitementsand disappointmentshe records impel the narrative forward with intense force.

LALEH KHALILI

Author, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies , Professor, School of Oriental and African Studies, Univ. of London

Richard Falks groundbreaking investigative work on Palestine and Israel is well known. But he has also followed the swift tide of events in the rest of the Middle East with fine attention to the complex questions of international law and morality that they inevitably raise. Chaos and Counterrevolution provides crucial analysis, helping readers worldwide to understand what has been happening in many Arab countries, and in Turkey and Iran.

MARWAN MUASHER

Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Chaos and Counterrevolution: After the Arab Spring offers a tour de force inside the Middle East region. It presents candid and lucid analyses of interconnected complexities ranging from a lurking colonial past and hegemonic policies, to rising expectations and dashed hopes following the Arab spring. Richard Falk depicts the essence of the struggle between hegemony and emancipation in the region. He tells it as it is: painful but very real.

EMAD EL-DIN SHAHIN

Editor in Chief, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics

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Copyright 2015 Richard Falk

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Cover design by CSTUDIO Design.
Typesetting by Diana Ghazzawi for Just World Publishing, LLC.

Publishers Cataloging in Publication
(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

Falk, Richard A.

Chaos and counterrevolution : after the Arab Spring /

Richard Falk.

pages cm

LCCN 2015937661

ISBN 9781935982500 (paperback)

ISBN 9781935982517 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781935982487 (ebook)

1. Arab Spring, 2010- 2. Arab countries--Politics and government--21st century. 3. Protest movements-- Arab countries--History--21st century. I. Title.

For Moulay Hicham El Alaoui and Malika Benabdelali,
in friendship, with admiration and affection

Cartography by Diana Ghazzawi and 2015 Just World Publishing, LLC.

Writing in the blogosphere these last several years has been instructive in several ways, but none more so than in the region known in the West as the Middle East but in most of Asia as West Asia. Here, more than in any other part of the world, twenty-first-century geopolitics are being played out, disclosing strong tensions within the region as well as the complex interplay between the region and a global system that exhibits ever-changing blends of hard and soft power. The Middle East also has been an arena of multiple conflicts around the rise of nonstate actors as significant political players, challenging the notion embedded in the UNs structure and international law that sovereign states and only states are participants in the world order. The state system fights back by categorizing these upstart political actors as agents of terrorism, criminalized until the pendulum of diplomacy swings in their direction and enables relevant political actors to negotiate agreements.

For the past twenty years my academic interests in the Middle East have been centered on the IsraelPalestine conflict. With this focus, I have particularly devoted attention to the uphill struggle to achieve a just and sustainable peace for the peoples of Palestine and Israel. This led me to make sharp criticisms of the partisan pro-Israeli policies that dominate the Western approach, including rejecting the American political fiction that peace between the two peoples can only be achieved via direct negotiations presided over by the United States and consisting of a bargaining process that excludes the relevance of international law. I continue to believe that for many years this futile diplomatic framework has allowed Israel to engage in unilateral behavior that undermines the supposed goal of these negotiations: establishing an independent and sovereign Palestine. The Palestinian ordeal remains an open wound that has negative regional ramifications, seriously inhibiting parallel efforts to create peace and stability throughout the Middle East as a whole.