Disillusionment and Complexity: The Arab Spring and Kurdish Dynamics

On Syria, the fall of Assad, and nationalism in the Middle-East.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Historian Djene Bajalan talks to Alex about a major rearrangement in the Levant. We discuss:

• Who are Syria's new rulers HTS, and what is their vision – if any?

• Did geopolitics really determine the fall of Assad and the Ba'ath Party?

• How HTS's victory is so profoundly different from Islamism in Iran 1979

• Why 2025 finally closes the book on the Arab Spring – and on secular Arab nationalism

• Were the Kurds wrong to rely on US protection?

And in the full episode we continue by discussing...

• Is Turkey the big winner of the decade?

• What the Left gets wrong on nationalism

• Civic versus ethnic nationalism, revisited

• What was democratic, liberal and revolutionary about nationalism – and whether it can be again

• How conservatives recuperate left-wing ideas, which were always conservative from the start

Links:

• Djene's writing at Jacobin

• /95/ The Fall of Rojava? ft. Dani Ellis / Alexander Norton