Anti-government Yemenis wave a Libyan old national flag during a demonstration in Sanaa on March 11, 2011 as President Ali Abdullah Saleh bowed to pressure after a month of violent protests.
How worried should you be about the Middle East right now? We have no idea, and nobody's giving us a good one. Which is exactly why we turned to Juan Cole — Middle East scholar, endowed professor of history at Michigan, and author of the influential blog Informed Comment — who sat down with us recently to help put the Arab uprisings in perspective. There's good news, there's bad news, and there's the really surprising news that the seeds of revolution were sown in the dictators' own state-run classrooms — where young Arabs literally learned to talk to each other in a universal Arabic language, and so were able to support each other when the time for revolution arrived.
ESQ: To what extent are all these uprisings and revolutions of a piece? They're being treated as such by a lot of the media but I'm not sure that'd stand up to scrutiny.
JUAN COLE: The dissatisfactions of blue-collar and white-collar labor and of college-educated youth were more important in Tunisia and in Egypt, whereas dissatisfaction with the authoritarian character of the regime is more important in Libya and Yemen and Bahrain. In those three cases, the factory workers don't seem to be the leading element, just because they aren't highly industrial societies unlike Egypt — 25 percent of its economy is now industrial. In Tunisia, it's smaller, but there's still a longstanding and important set of trade unions in Tunisia that were extremely active in the protest. When you get to the social issues, they're somewhat different.
Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/juan-cole-interview-5382077?src=rss
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