Whatever happened to the ‘Arab Spring’?

Since early 2011, protests and full-scale revolts have brought down governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, and shaken others in Yemen, Bahrain and beyond. Syria slides toward all-out civil war. But has real freedom arrived anywhere — even in the Arab societies that have experienced relatively peaceful transitions toward some form of democracy? In the Arab world, there’s the seen and the unseen — the roiling surface and what flows beneath.