After the Arab spring : how the Islamists hijacked the Middle East revolts

When popular revolutions erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, Western pundits were quick to hail the stirrings of an Arab Spring and draw parallels between the resulting upheaval in the Middle East and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

In The Tunisian Tsunami John R. Bradley offers a sober counternarrative to this outlook.

It is not liberalism, democracy, and pluralism that will emerge triumphant, he argues, but instead radical Islam.

Bradley illustrates how, in a region awash with extremist Wahhabi ideology, intertribal rivalries, and Sunni-Shia divisions, the idea that liberal and progressive trends will prevail is little more than wishful thinking.