Author: Micheline R. Ishay

Book review by: Lana Shehadeh

Published by: New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Year of publication: 2019

Number of pages: 352

ISBN: 978-0300215694

 

In The Levant Express: The Arab Uprising, Human Rights, and the Future of the Middle East, Micheline R. Ishay uses the metaphor that compares the Arab Spring to a high-speed train making its way through the region with demands of human rights and democratization. However, as the Arab Spring chilled and transformed into a cold Arab Winter, the high-speed train is derailed and repressive and authoritarian governments are replaced with even more repressive and authoritarian regimes. She uses the metaphor to whet her reader’s curiosity by asking: What will put the high-speed train—demanding human rights—back on its tracks and carry on its journey through the region? Interestingly, however, Ishay’s metaphor is not only used to describe the growing demand for human rights during early 2011; rather, she uses it to describe the possibility of actually creating a railroad throughout the region connecting its countries via an economic route that would drive markets and reinvigorate financial and governmental interests between countries. However, the train had to make a stop at the counter-revolutionary intersection that damaged its engine room because of the emergence of fascist and semi-fascist leaders within the Middle East as well as beyond it, in addition to the significant retraction of Arab revolutionary fervor and demand for change.

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The Levant Express: The Arab Uprising, Human Rights, and the Future of the Middle East