Roots of the Arab Spring: Contested Authority and Political Change in the Middle East

In December 2010, the self—immolation of a Tunisian vegetable vendor set off a wave of protests that have been termed the "Arab Spring." These protests upended the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen while unsettling numerous other regimes throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Dafna Hochman Rand was a senior policy planner in the U.S. State Department as the uprisings unfolded. In Roots of the Arab Spring, she gives one of the first accounts of the systemic underlying for...