Arab Spring

A week ago the International Monetary Fund approved a $12 billion loan to Egypt as the country slips into a perilous economic situation created by a declining currency, food shortages, and a strained relationship with a chief benefactor – Saudi Arabia.

“What we’re seeing from one end of the Middle East to the other is no money,” said Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “You look at the spreadsheet for Egypt, and everything is moving in the wrong direction.”

In February 2011, President Obama criticized the U.S. intelligence community for not accurately forecasting the unrest in Tunisia would spread to Egypt and other Middle East countries, sparking a region-wide Arab Spring, an unremitting civil war in Syria, and the rise of ISIS.

The president had harsh words for the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about how quickly the forces in Tunisia turned against the authoritarian regime, The New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti wrote at the time:

With civil wars raging in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, a wave of radicalization of Tunisian youths, and general political and economic instability throughout the Arab World, the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring has been violent and chaotic.

But as journalist Rami Khouri points out, solving centuries of political and social problems is a long and imperfect process.

Joshua Landis and Suzette Grillot discuss what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in Washington this week says about a possible shift in U.S./Middle East alliances. Many traditional U.S. allies are worried Washington might shift toward Iran and away from Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Later, Landis and Rebecca Cruise talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood. He compares this decade’s uprisings in the Arab World to what he calls an “Atlantic Spring” that started in 1776.

Beginning in 2010, a wave of revolutions swept the Middle East, removing rulers and establishing new regimes. Although the Arab Spring took place more than two centuries after the American Revolution, they occurred in similar social and political contexts.

“Before [the Arab Spring] there was an Atlantic Spring that began actually in 1776,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood.

Suzette Grillot talks with Italian citizen and lawyer Katia Girotto about the outcome of European parliamentary elections, and how Italians feel about the elections' impact on the future of EU politics and economics.

Rebecca Cruise and Joshua Landis discuss television and social media in Lebanon with University of Balamand journalism department head Ramez Maluf. He says Beirut's position as a major entertainment production hub is controversial among conservatives and Arab intellectuals.

Media played a significant role in organizing the protests that spread like wildfire across the Middle East in 2011. But as Islamists put a stake in the ground and solidified their claim to Arab society and culture, Lebanon largely remained insulated from the effects of the Arab Spring.

Kelly McEvers spent three years based in Baghdad and Beirut covering the Middle East for NPR. She started her assignment with instructions not to miss a day in Iraq as the 2011 U.S. troop withdrawal deadline approached.

“Then in late 2010, a guy set himself on fire in Tunisia, and everything changed,” McEvers told KGOU’s World Views host Suzette Grillot. “I was swept up with millions of other people in this thing called the Arab Spring.”

NPR assigned correspondent Kelly McEvers to Iraq in 2010 with instructions not to miss a day ahead of the expected troop withdrawal by the end of 2011.

“Then in late 2010, a young man in Tunisia set himself on fire, and literally changed everything,” McEvers says. “At first I was watching it on TV in Baghdad, sitting there thinking, ‘Do we really have to stay in Baghdad? C’mon, you know? Put me in coach!’ asking to be sent out on the stories.”

Over the past 11 months, the Zaatari refugee camp in Northern Jordan has hosted hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing that country’s civil war.

Suzette Grillot and Rebecca Cruise visited the camp in early June, and witnessed some of the newest arrivals.

Real-time updates on social media are revolutionizing traditional journalism. By following Twitter feeds and other forms of social media, journalists like NPR Senior Strategist Andy Carvin now identify breaking news faster and do a better job following international stories.

Real-time updates on social media are revolutionizing traditional journalism. By following Twitter feeds and other forms of social media, journalists like NPR Senior Strategist Andy Carvin now identify breaking news faster and do a better job following international stories.

“Crowdsourcing is basically just a fancy term for asking for help from the public,” Carvin says. “It's something journalists have always done at various points, but now social media has made it easy to engage people all over the world.”

Carvin calls himself an “informational DJ.” He has used crowdsourcing to cover stories ranging from the Newtown, Connecticut shooting to the Arab Spring.