Almost all aspects of what has been going on in the Arab countries lately have already been covered. I agree with Bilgrami that thanks to Al Jazeera and other events there was the prior existence of a transnational public space.

Though revolutions are not predictable and we can spend our lives to reflect on what has caused them, in a way the Arab revolts have come totally predicted, there were doubts only about the timing.

I think three dates and events are crucial to understand what is happening in Tunisia, Egypt and so on. First, September 11 and the jihadist project whether it is successful or not. Whether it succeeded in arousing Muslim or Arab societies, it certainly got the US to react in the way probably Al Qaeda has expected and that already set us up in a trajectory.

The second date is 2002, with the publication of the Arab Human Development Report which was for the first time specifically intended for Arab countries and prepared by Arab social scientists in order to obtain the clearest view of these societies. Issues like that have their own way to percolating to the public consciousness, even indirectly.

The third event is the Iraq war started in 2003. We spoke about revolts and revolutions, whether they will transform into that. The working definition of a revolution is the change in the social basis for political power: the American invasion in Iraq did precisely that, it destroyed the social basis in political power and it gave to non Arabs and non Sunni Arabs a lot of power with repercussions throughout in the Arab world which no one would ever foresee. You may dislike the Iraq war and I guess everybody should, but at the end of the day the war did happen and one of its consequences is a revolutionary change in the construction of political power in Iraq, that had an obvious impact everywhere in the Middle East. Since we cannot undo what has been done, what Al Jazeera showed on the one hand was that you could have elections in the middle of an extremely cruel and bitter civil war, that you can have elections under occupation both in Palestine and Iraq: and they happen to be the only two examples of close to free elections in the Arab world.

In my view, all this has accumulated until the very final choice of Buazizi, who did not attack the police and did not wear a belt and set himself on fire in a shopping centre: he didn’t take it on the others to be responsible for what happened to him. I think there is a symbolical and power shift in the way he chose to deal with problems, most of them arising from the increase in food prices with immediate effects on the population till to the point that a rather corrupted system has collapsed. What is going to happen next? Will the revolts turn in revolutions? In Tunisia it might, in Egypt it doesn’t look so although there the basis of political power is going to be broadened with the inclusion of the Muslim brotherhood. A third observation is that this revolutionary wave like the Iranian one does not include the peasantry, they are essentially urban movements.

I disagree with Amato about the role of the international actors: if the Iraq war had an unforeseen positive impact on shaking things up it also had an unforeseen negative impact for the Us with the reduction of their prestige and power to almost nothing; it is their weakest point in the region since 1945, they cannot even influence Egypt’s foreign politics since the country is opening to Iran and Hamas. I consider Obama’s historical mission to stage an orderly retreat of United States and to eventually focus where it really matters, that is South Asia and the Gulf. The military industrial complex is with no doubt very powerful but we must consider the fact the Us need to borrow a trillion dollars a year for their defensive expenses with an aging population, they cannot cut Medicare or take similar measures otherwise they’ll face the resistance of the population as it happened in Wisconsin.