High hopes in the region soon turned to exhaustion and despair. But the movement is not over

It is sometimes said that the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, when asked in 1972 about the influence of the French Revolution, replied: “Too soon to tell.” Though the tale is apocryphal – he was referring to the student revolts of 1968 – it reminds us that the world’s great events may look quite different from another temporal perspective.

In January 2011, Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled by protests triggered by the self-immolation of a street vendor weeks earlier. Within days, tens of thousands of Egyptians had flooded into Tahrir Square, forcing Hosni Mubarak from power and transforming the nascent movement into a true phenomenon. Yet a decade after the region rose up against its dictators, authoritarianism has a tighter grip than ever, and its people are drained or traumatised. Egypt, the most populous Arab nation, is in the throes of its worst human rights crisis for decades. Poverty has deepened, with the pandemic and falling oil prices exacerbating the impact.