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Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP via Getty Images
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Covid-19’s ‘Politics of Humiliation’: A Chance for the US to Lead—or to Lose Control

June 1, 2020

Mohamed Bouazizi did not seize the world’s imagination because he was handsome or rich or powerful. Instead, the Tunisian fruit vendor, whose self-immolation kicked off the “Arab Spring” in 2010, inspired tens of millions of Arabs because they empathized with his despair and sense of humiliation. 

We often think of politics in binary terms: right versus left, rural versus urban, north versus south. However people come to identify themselves, their political identities are products of circumstance and belief, with some sort of calculation at their core. 


Read the full article on The Hill


 

Written By
Jon B. Alterman
Senior Vice President, Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy, and Director, Middle East Program
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Related
Babel: Translating the Middle East, Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy, COVID-19, Commentaries, Critical Questions, and Newsletters, Egypt and the Levant, Geopolitics and International Security, Great Powers and Geostrategy, Levant and Egypt, Middle East, Middle East Program

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