This is about an hour. [applause] well, thanks so much to everybody for coming out. Let me say a few words about the book and its genesis. I lived in the middle east a lot in the 70s when i was just a kid, and i actually lived for a while off of Tahrir Square, the main drag, the main Center Square of cairo. I saw a round about. And many of the sort of important streets in cairo come down into it, and then you go off to the bridge from it and so forth. Be so its a little bit difficult to avoid that square. Its central to the citys traffic pattern. So having it occupied is rather a hassle for drivers. And the square was instituted, was designed and built way back in the middle of the 19th century by the thenruler in imitation of paris where he had studied and lived, the ruler, and in imitation of baron housemans reconfiguration of paris as a modern city. Were starting to get those french round abouts here in ann arbor now, i noticed. [laughter] were catching up now to baer baer on houseman. But cairo did sometime ago, and i lived off of that square, and i went to school there because the American University in cairo at that time was just off of Tahrir Square, and i had a lot of egyptian student friends. We hung out together, went to films together and talked about the future. So when in january of 2011 thousands and thousands and ultimately, you know, hundreds of thousands of young people a lot of them students came to Tahrir Tahrir square and they actually occupied it, they brought tents and stayed the night, some of them just didnt leave. They started putting up placards,ny mubarak, please resign. We need a shower. When they did that, i recognized them as the sons and daughters of the people i had gone to school with, and i had followed, you know, the arab world for 30 years, and so i felt a Certain Affinity to them, and i was very interested in what they had to say because their slogans were different from the ones that i had known, say, in the early 70s. I remember, you know, it was the time of revolutionary romanticism but of the old 1960s che guevara kind of sort. But these young people talking about personal dignity, they were talking about Transparent Elections. You know, i could be wrong, but i just dont think that Transparent Elections was the main talking point of most people in the arab world in the early 70s. They, a lot of people at that time wanted a great leader. They wanted a man on horseback like the great egyptian nationalist leader. These young people at that time seemed relatively uninterested in leaders. And my own teacher whos from egypt, the great sociologist and dissident ike rahim, when he saw ibrahim, when he saw this thing break out in cairo, flew back. I tell the story that he told me. He said he went to Tahrir Square where the young people were, and being a sociologist, kind of take me to your leader. And he said they looked at mihm funny. At him funny. What do you mean by that . It wasnt that kind of a movement, that it had a leader. And, in fact, to this day people are a little bit confused or they cant quite tell how things got done. Because food showed up and water showed up, and things were arranged for, and it seemed to be networked and not centralized. It wasnt hierarchical. And, of course, before that happened in egypt, in tunisia young people had pioneered by assembling in such large numbers in provincial cities and ultimately the capital, that they, they made they paralyzed the government. And this was what happened throughout 2011 and really until last year. And in egypt it was done again. So many young people came out into the streets in central places that they made it impossible for ordinary life to go on. Shops couldnt function very well, and people werent making any money, and the tourists stopped coming. And base aically, these young basically, these young people blackmailed the countrys elites. And their message was were not going home until that guy is gone. And the rest of the elite had first said, no, you know, we all depend really heavily on that guy, and we like him, and hes the source of our wealth and power. And then days would pass, nobodys making any money and nothings getting done, and fortunes are in danger and politics are roiled x the elites started thinking, well, really how well do we like that guy . [laughter] and, ultimately, they put him on a plane and sent him into exile, ben ali in tunisia was put on a plane. Initially, he was thinking he would go to paris, but then and the thenpresident of france, sarkozy, was initially amenable. But then someone whispered in star cozys ear sarkozys ear that, you know, there are on the order of 800,000 tunisianfrench. And they may not be very happy about this arrangement. So is then ben ali was kind of the flying dutchman in the air there, had no place to go. Calls were made around that welcomed they park him where could they park him . Well, theres one reliable place you can always send the old dictators to, so hes now in saudi arabia. But these young people were the ones that arranged for his, his red sea vacation. And why did they do this . What was everybody so upset about . Well, the arab world after the end of world war ii had largely been colonized by the french and the british. And it wasnt very pleasant to be colonized by either one. I lived in france, i grew up partially in france, and we knew a french woman there who was an old family friend. Years ago i was talking to her, and she was kind of conservative, and i complained to her about the way the algerians were treated, you know, france took algeria in 1830 and was finally persuaded to leave after a lot of trouble in 1962. And she said, no, no, we built them railroads, we built them infrastructure. She said, we built churches for them. [laughter] so i dont think theyre as grateful for those things as she seems to think they should be. And so it was no fun being under the colonial jack boot. And after the war, you know, france and britain were destroyed in many ways. Their economies were very badly off and convincing the people that we should go on spending resources on these foreign colonies was not easy. And so these countries became independent. And initially, their independence really depended on strongmen coming to power who had typically played a role in opposing the colonial regime. And those strongmen were, you know, of the modernization sort because its controversial among historians whether these colonial regimes actually stood in the way of things like education or industrialization or whether they just werent very interested in promoting those things. But the arab world as it came into the mid 20th century was illiterate and rural. There was very little in the way of infrastructure, there was very little in the way of industry, there was and most people couldnt read and write. Most people lived in villages. And so these leaders, frankly, looked to the model of how you do stateled industrialization. They nationalized things, and they made state cement companies, and they built enormous numbers of schools and universities. They transformed the region. Per capita income went up substantially, people moved to cities and so forth. But then the soviet union fell, and that model of, you know, having the goth the government be 50 maybe of the economy and direct everything fell apart. There was a lot of pressure on these rulers to privatize. Sell off to government companies. And in some instances maybe thats all to the good. Some of the companies, frankly, were not very efficient and didnt make things that the world market wanted to the buy. Wanted to buy. But these rulers who were dictators knew which companies were going to be sold off because they owned them. I mean, the state owned them. So there was an opportunity for insider trading. And they would call up their relatives or their cronies and say, you know, how would you like a steel mill . And they got in on the ground floor and got the good deals, and they turned these, their cronies and their relatives into billionaires. There was enormous corruption. And then they blocked everybody else economically and politically. You couldnt really run for office unless they wanted you to run for office, you couldnt win very easily, you could easily be jailed for complaining about the situation. The corruption was so bad in these regimes that economists think that it took between one and three points a year off of Economic Growth. Well, if tunisia or egypt had grown 3 more a year than they did, there might not have been such a big economic crunch. And at the same time, you had all of these young people coming up. The population of egypt doubled between 1980 and the present. Imagine how many they added a whole new egypt of young people, of millennials. And they didnt add a whole new egypt worth of jobs or of economic or political opportunities. So these young people look at these regimes, and they see them as a roadblock that needs to be removed if their countrys ever going to go forward, theyre ever going to amount to something. And its not just that the regimes were, you know, led by a dictator and his picture was everywhere and his police were always patting you down and so forth. They started making arrangements for their sons to take over after them. So this situation was projected into the future for decades. And so a lot of the dissidents that began dissidence that began 15 years ago was around getting rid of the president s for life and, more especially, making sure that the president s for life were succeeded by their sons that became president s for life. The one place where that plan, that sort of die nastic republicanism actually was implemented was syria. They all had these kinds of plans to pass on the family firm. And so the young people exploded in rage at this prospect. And i have to say, you know, people ask me what did they really accomplish. I think they accomplished a lot more than is credited to them, and i think its very early days to make a judgment about where all this is going. But it is the case that president s for life had become much more rare have become much more rare in the arab world, and the idea of a president for life being succeeded by a relative, dynastic rule, it is on the trash heap of history. Thats just not going to happen. Syria was the only one. And even in egypt which has regressed to a kind of soft military dictatorship, had president ial elections recently which were an authoritarian plebe side rather than a real election, even in egypt the new constitution specifies two fouryear terms for the president. And so this is not going to be a president for life. General assisi, that was in egypt in march, and i saw him on television, and he was saying things like, you know, we understand now that you dont get to be president of egypt unless the egyptian people vote for you. Theres no more, you know, used to be the president was the one who was chosen by the previous president in consultation with the generals. And while that kind of thing kind of happened with assisi, there had to be a public acclimation for it to work. And i think the public acclimation was probably somewhat genuine in this case. So in tunisia youve had a really important set of transitions where you had a parliamentary election, the new articlement was a con parliament was a constituent assembly that was to write a constitution, and there was a lot of wrangling between the religious right and the more secular leftist forces, but they were in coalition with one another, and they made the hard compromises. And last january they voted for the constitution. Among the issues in the constitution which the young people really watched like a hawk and mobilized around were womens rights. So the religious right in tunisia said, well, women and men, you know, they have complimentary rights. [laughter] so, you know, tunisian mamas didnt raise any fools, everybody understood exactly what that meant. So the young people on the left mobilized, they allied with the major labor union w the student unions. They came back out into the streets. All last summer and fall in tunisia theres been another kind of civil revolution, and they demanded that there be equal rights for women, that the constitution guarantee workers rights and so forth and freedom of conscience was another issue. Because the religious right in tunisia, you know, wanted to put curbs on that. And they got everything that they demanded. And they also demanded that the right that the elected government step down and allow a technocratic government to be formed which would oversee further elections so that there was no advantage to the incumbents or thumb on the till. And it all worked. The new constitution specifies that women and men have equal rights, there is no institution in charge of internet censorship. There is no internet censorship in tunisia. And that was a country that really specialized in cyber police in the old odays. In the old days. So this is a remarkable story. And, of course, tunisia is a country of maybe 11 million, and so its small, and its not big on the worlds radar perhaps, but you can say that the Tunisian Youth you cant say that the Tunisian Youth didnt accomplish anything. They accomplished an enormous amount a. And then in yemen as well theres been a relatively healthy transition. Theyre going to have elections early next year, and, you know, theres pushback in egypt, but the generation, i argue, hasnt gone any place. Now, it may be that the 60somethings are powerful, they control institutions, they have a lot of wealth, they dont like the changes that were demanded, and so theyve pushed back in some instances fairly successfully for the moment. But the 20somethings do have one advantage over the 60somethings [laughter] in the long run, its the 20somethings, todays 20somethings that are going to be in control, and we cant know, of course, what they will do when they get in control. But i, you know, i mentioned the story in the book the prague spring in czechoslovakia happened in 1968. I remember it very well. And health care abel was a and haber was a playwright who got on kind of a pirate Radio Station and was protesting the soviet crackdown on the tanks approaching prague, and he was arrested. And in that system, you know, if you stood up to the authorities and you lost, then you were kind of a nonperp. So he wasnt nonperson. So he wasnt allowed to put on his plays while he had to work in a brewery. Then by the early 90s was president of the czech republic. So we shouldnt think that just because some of these young people now, prominent dissidents of 2010, 2011 who helped to make the egyptian revolution, who lionized and so forth, the egyptian, the current Egyptian Government has put them in jail. But so, too, was habel arrested. And i dont think that we have heard the last of them. It is a remark bl journey. Remarkable journey. I tell the story in this book of tunisia and egypt and libya over the past decade that have and a half or so, but coming almost right up to the president. I didnt want to do a quickie book in 2011. Being a historian, having a little bit of perspective is thought well of in my profession, and so even [laughter] to write something after three years is kind of audacious on my part. But i think ive avoided some of the glib, you know, generalizations. Theres kind of been generations of scholarship on these arab youth revolutions, and the first generation, you know, talked about how, well, it was mainly the liberal and left youth that carried out the revolutions and maybe political islam is dead, and then the political islamists were elected into office in 20112012, and there were a whole raft of folks that said, well, this is, you know, this is the islamic winter. Its not the arab spring. And then the Islamist Groups were either overthrown or forced into compromise with the leftists, and so now were at the point in the story where those books dont make much sense. But i tried to to stand back and say, well, lets not talk so much about, you know, the specifics of a particular revolutionary change, lets talk about the young people who made the changes, lets talk about this generation. What are they like, who are they and what have they done and what are they doing now . So let me just read a little bit from the book about an internet activist of the early 00s in tunisia who was named yayawi. Section zohair set up a magazine which was very lively and very much disliked by the dictatorship. And he, he ran this for some years. And then ben alis Internet Police finally tracked him down. At 5 p. M. On june 4, 2002, six plain clothes policemen raided the internet cafe where he worked and took him to his apartment where they confiscated his perm computer and his personal computer and files. He was subjected to brutal interrogation. Three times in the course of this questioning he was strung up by his wrists so that his feet barely touched the ground. During the third round of suspension, he finally gave up the password to his site. Which allowed the authorities to take it down temporarily. Zohair was tried with blinding speed and sentenced on july 10th to one year in prison for spreading false news and another year and a half for the fraudulent use of means of communication because he secretly used the equipment at the internet cafe where he worked. Soon after his arrest, sofie, his girlfriend, regained access to the site and reinstated the digital archives which she had preserved, and zohairs circle kept it going. His cousin recalls the internet was very often cut off. Every time it was necessary to create a new account using the names of friends or neighbors. Zohair suffered in prison. According to his brother, there were 120 inmates in a big hall with just one bathroom and hardly any water. The first half of 2003 he launched a Hunger Strike to demand his release. He ended it and then began another. In the same period, muslim fuldist journalisty malady of the renaissance b party, also in jail, began his own Hunger Strike. The conditions of the prison, bad food, lack of water along with Hunger Strikes deeply damaged his health. Zohairs imprisonment caused a breach with his father according to the cousin. The poor man never understood and never accepted what zohair had done. He could not reconcile himself to his sons having defied the police and getting arrested, could never excuse it. He died while zohair was in prison, perhaps of chagrin. On the morning of the funeral, the mother came to the room and cried out that zohair had been given permission to come home to pay his last respects to his father. The family hurried, still in pajamas, to the nearby house of zohairs deceased father. Day had barely broken