Twelve years have passed since the Arab Spring, and both Egypt and Tunisia are facing a stark economic crisis. Both are currently under the mercy of extremely unfavorable structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund, relying heavily on food imports, mired in debt, and facing historic inflation rates with unprecedented hikes in food prices. The rise of authoritarianism in both countries has only worsened this dire economic situation. The prevailing atmosphere indicates that the counterrevolution has won out and that the emancipatory forces behind the revolution a dozen years ago have receded from political life.

Every year, the anniversary of the January uprisings prompts renewed reflection. Not only do radicals mourn the revolution’s defeat, but they have to negotiate the steady barrage of new analysis that seeks to grapple with the same questions every year. There is an insatiable desire among the commentariat to offer fresh responses to questions already answered by a dozen years of retrenchment. Without irony, writers revisit age-old issues about the relative merits of horizontal or vertical leadership or the value of leaderlessness that date back to the break between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, which have eternally divided the Left between two camps, those guided by the spirit of 1917 vs. loyalists to 1968.

A book that stands out in this genre for its brilliance and lack of sentimentality is Asef Bayat’s Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring. Published in 2017, it has become one of the most referenced in the field. In it, the Iranian American sociologist grapples with the idea of what revolution means in a post–Cold War era. Correctly, Bayat attributes the failure of the January uprisings, despite their extraordinary mobilization and resistance, to a lack of revolutionary vision, political organization, and a dearth of intellectual articulation by its leaders.