Reflecting on the first anniversary of the Arab uprising, Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif commented: “A revolution is a process, not an event. And, as you know, our Egyptian revolution is ongoing. And its path has not been smooth.” After ten years of the uprising, she remarked that it is “very, very painful” to look back at the eighteen days of Tahrir Square experience, in which she was an active participant. The activists of the uprising, says Soueif, “keep the 18 days in a place where they can be safe, where we protect them against accusations of having been a collective hallucination.”

It is critical to acknowledge both the process and the event, the mundane as well as the spectacular. If participants in the uprisings felt freedom and pain, memory and loss as they reflected on the event, it meant that the collective action of waging a movement had a deep impact on the very self of the activist. Any socio-political movement is only worthy of the name if, on the one hand, it substantially alters the realities on the ground in some discernible ways and, on the other hand, it allows participants to move in newer directions of selfreflexive transformation. An event of such significance is constituted by the deployment of human bodily movements in ways that challenge the regular norms of everyday conduct. The act of resistance, as well as the assertion of a new alternate subjectivity, distinguishes the event as politically significant. Analyses of the Arab uprising of 2011 that focus solely on macro-political regime transformation completely miss this point, resulting in flawed notions of the Arab spring turning into the Arab winter and the like. Changes at the state level occurred, as did setbacks. However, changes in attitudes and political values are also important.

In the decade since the uprising began, the Arab world has witnessed unprecedented political turbulence. The Arab uprisings against dictatorships in 2011 were instrumental in deposing long-held regimes such as Zain al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.