The recent events in Algeria and Sudan are more or less similar to what happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. How do we account for the dynamics of transition... that lie somewhere in between, where powerful revolutionary mobilisation forced dictators to abdicate [or removed] but fail[ed] to capture the governmental [state] power, thus leaving the interests and institutions of the old order largely unaltered? How should we read the logic of transition in such political upheavals that were both revolutionary and nonrevolutionary, reflecting both transition to democracy and revolutionary desires for economic distribution, social inclusion and cultural recognition? —Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring , 2017, p. 209 I do not believe, as so many disillusioned or broken by actual revolution have come to believe, that the suffering can be laid to the charge of the revolution alone, and that we must avoid revolution if we are to avoid sufferin
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51