‘Tragedy” generally connotes fateful disaster: predestined failure, star-crossed lovers, young lives cut short, unexpected natural catastrophes. Greek tragedy, in particular, involves themes of destiny and fortune, where no matter how hard the hero strives to overcome his nature, he’s doomed to fall victim to his fate.
But in Noah Feldman’s tragedy The Arab Winter, a concise, convincing recapitulation of the causes and consequences of the Arab Spring, “the protagonists make choices based on their individual characters and by their actions participate in the construction of their fates.” The series of uprisings across the Arab world in the early 2010s resulted in death, dislocation, ethnic cleansing, and few significant changes to the political and economic status quo in the greater Middle East, but, in Feldman’s telling, they nevertheless demonstrated a new agency among would-be Arab reformers, an unprecedented effort to take matters into their own hands, that may yet pay dividends.
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