The Battle for the Arab Spring is a warning, not a celebration. Forget the early euphoria, the hype about Facebook revolutions. What’s happened across the Arab world since early 2011 is messy, brutal, and without a predictable ending, happy or otherwise. The cork was popped from the authoritarian bottle when seemingly indestructible leaders, Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, were overthrown by their people. Gaddafi was dispatched, with a lot of force from NATO. In Syria, the ophthalmologist turned dictator finds his régime in a fight to the death. Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy, sitting atop a Shia majority, has endured many anxious moments.

Noueihed and Warren note that the events of 2011 have been described variously as uprisings, revolts, revolutions, protest movements, insurrections, rebellions, insurgencies, and awakenings. ‘Arab Spring’ gained traction as an umbrella term in both English and Arabic because the seeds of change had been growing underground long before shooting to the surface. The woes of the region’s people were myriad: sclerotic, repressive régimes feeding off their own people, poor living standards, a sense of hopelessness especially among the educated young. Statistics are only a rough guide but across the region unemployment ranged from ten to twenty per cent, with those under thirty making up half of the jobless. The régimes looked invincible. For a long time they had been, with a good deal of help and blindness from those beyond the Arab world. But, while the state appeared strong, it was, in fact, ‘only fierce’. Once the Arab Spring broke out, ‘social media, combined with satellite television, would play a crucial role in creating a sense of communal fearlessness’. That said, social media was part of the mechanics of revolution, not the cause. It reflected a shifting environment that repressive régimes found increasingly difficult to control, no matter how adept they were at ‘upgrading their authoritarianism’.

Change is happening across the Arab world, but régimes with oil wealth can fight it. In that sense Gaddafi, reviled for so long within the region and beyond, has so far been the exception. Energy-rich Arab states in the Gulf may be ‘riddled with corruption, inequality and waste’ and face uncertain futures, but they have the wherewithal to buy political quiescence. It doesn’t come cheaply. Noueihed and Warren comment that the Arab Spring was more expensive for Saudi Arabia than for any other state: a $130 billion package that included salary rises, tens of thousands of new jobs, and bigger housing loans – ‘by far the largest financial concessions of any Arab government in 2011’.

Who are the winners so far? They hardly seem to be the young, democratically inclined Facebook generation that inspired such high hopes. The picture is inchoate and contested, Egypt being the prime example, but the trend favours the Islamists. This is where Noueihed and Warren offer a welcome, nuanced counter to the shock/horror mentality that infects too much commentary. The Arab Spring, they write, was not an Islamic Spring. The initial surge in early 2011 ‘was not about religion but was an expression of anger over élitist corruption, economic inequalities, widespread injustice and geriatric leaders out of touch with reality’.

Still, by the end of the year Islamist parties had triumphed in elections in Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco. Noueihed and Warren rightly argue that a win for Islamist political parties does not necessarily equal a loss for democracy:

The ultimate fallout from rising Islamist influence is far from predetermined and will differ from country to country ... The need to form alliances, to consult, to make unpalatable deals with groups and parties with different views, to respond to popular demand but to balance this with economic realities and realistic foreign policies, will likely push Islamist parties towards increasing pragmatism and moderation.

They also make a point that is all too often overlooked: Islam is no more monolithic than any broad grouping, including Christianity. Many mainstream Islamist parties, although not the arch-conservative Salafists, are leaning ‘more towards a Turkish-style system than an Afghan one ... Like Christian fundamentalist organizations in the United States, Islamists emphasize family values and social conservatism.’  The battle is within Islam as much as beyond it.

One regional country for which the emerging picture holds serious implications is Israel. Noueihed and Warren argue that the Jewish state’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan are unlikely to be threatened, though they may eventually be renegotiated. A range of factors is at work here, some beyond Israel’s influence. Egypt’s armed forces have a vested interest in maintaining peace with the Jewish state; two to three billion dollars a year in mainly military assistance from the United States depends on it. But Israel’s own behaviour will shape that of others, including Islamist politicians. It can hardly complain when its ongoing settlement of occupied Palestinian territory and opposition to Palestinian statehood are seen to cast doubt on its good neighbourliness.

A little less high-minded hypocrisy from those beyond the region is badly needed. Barack Obama finally got it right on Egypt, but the initial reaction of his administration was instructive. Vice-President Joe Biden observed in late January 2011 that Mubarak had been a very responsible ally: ‘I would not refer to him as a dictator.’ Noueihed and Warren comment that the Arab Spring once again illustrated the stark contradictions between what the Western world preached and what it practised – the support for democratic transitions in Tunisia and Egypt versus the comparatively blind eye to the crackdown, aided and abetted by Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain. The other glaring contradiction remains that while Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad is (at least at the time of writing) bombarded only with words, Gaddafi was bombarded with NATO bombs and rockets.

We can only read Alison Pargeter’s Libya with a mounting sense of disbelief. Where did Gaddafi come from? How did he manage to stay in power for so long? How did the West seriously consider him to be ‘reformed’? Gaddafi lived in his own universe, separate from most of his own people, separate from his fellow dictators in the Arab world. To stay on top he used energy wealth and brutal repression. He came in from the cold internationally because Libya offered high-quality oil and potentially lucrative business opportunities.

Libya reads like a political thriller of a high order: eccentricity to the point of madness; intrigue; revenge; terror; destruction on both a grand and personal level; lots of money and, courtesy of ‘Brother Leader’ Gaddafi’s children, a bit of booze and sexual hanky-panky. All the ingredients are there. Here was a man who destroyed his state or, more accurately, substituted his own wacky self for it, and whose calamitous ‘foreign policy’ was as arbitrary, contradictory and whimsical as the man himself. Pargeter comments that Gaddafi left Libya’s new leaders with the appalling task of building a state almost from scratch; of creating a functioning political system, government, ministries, civil service, police force, even a postal service.

Libya’s future path is an extreme form of the challenges facing the wider Arab world: a battle for individual and national decency and identity; a battle for satisfying jobs, decent housing, and the right of young people to grow up and build families and futures of their own; a battle for dignity and justice after years of repression. The new era, they write, ‘will not be pretty or peaceful. There will be winners and losers, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, bloodshed and truces, hope and despair. There may be war and another round of revolts and many in the region will privately wish that 2011 had never happened at all. [But] anything now seems possible. For the people of the region, forced so long to live out a pretence at stability, hopelessness that they could change their world or shape its future, that is the biggest prize of all.’