Middle Eastern Minorities ― The Impact of the Arab Spring

This is a comprehensive survey of minorities in the Middle East with a special focus on the post Arab Spring era and a rich trove of information and insights generated from the detailed case studies. Instead of ushering in democracy and inclusive politics, the Arab Spring has brought chaos and fear and reinforced the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism by injecting new blood into what seemed like the ossified veins of a decaying ideology. One of the gravest deficiencies of the Arab Spring is its failure to address the enduring question of minorities - the Shi’a, Alawites, Druze, Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, Zaidis and others. This book has two main objectives: firstly to describe and investigate the current status of minorities in the region in the wake of the Arab spring and to explain their attitudes towards the revolutionary upheavals and the various strategies they used to avail themselves of the opportunities presented and to confront the risks posed and secondly to situate the question of ethnic, sectarian and religious minorities in the larger history of the region and its politics in order explain the underlying institutional and ideological factors that caused their predicament and problematized their relationship with the majority. Although this book is about the fate of Middle Eastern minorities in the wake of the Arab Spring, it is situated in a broader research agenda about how Revolutions in general affect the status of minorities. For comparative purposes, it further explores general questions of how minorities fared in revolutionary times and in their aftermaths and under what conditions revolutions could lead to more minority-tolerant regimes.

Ibrahim Zabad is an assistant professor of Political Science and the co-director of the International Studies Program at St. Bonaventure University in Western New York.