The Immanent Frame

No one expected this unfolding series of events—certainly, no one of my generation (those of us in our mid-forties), nor of my parents’ generation, and the generation in between. But the death, in December 2010, of twenty-six-year-old Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi, who doused himself in petrol and set himself alight, which was soon followed by that of Sidi Bouzid, who electrocuted himself, sparked Egyptian youth into an unprecedented mobilization for radical change—not just political, not just economic, and not only social, but a comprehensive call for the overthrow of a regime that is seen as embodying all that is socially unjust, politically illegitimate, economically corrupt, and legally impaired in Arab societies.