Journeys Through The Arab Spring Analysis

Johnny West was born in an Anglo-Irish family in London in 1964. He was a scholar at Balliol college, Oxford. He worked for Reuters as a correspondent. He spent in the Middle East about 10 years. He worked in Afghanistan after 9/11 and spent three years there where he built networks of local radio stations. In 2008, he translated an Iraqi account of the gulf war into English. He now works for the United Nations in the Middle East. He speaks Arabic, French and Persian well. Johnny West ‘s book aims at discussing the reasons of the revolutions that have been erupted in three Arab countries, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but through their iconic figures. West traveled from a country to another and from a governorate to another just to meet the families and neighbors of the revolutions’ icons and listen to their stories. He sees that gathering that amount of information from the eye witnesses will put the truth in the reader’s hands and he/she is the person to decide the fate of this revolution. This is a reason for having a subtitle to his book “journeys through the Arab spring”. West does not only keep the title and the subtitle as they are, he rather adds another description for his book on its cover; “exhilarating encounters with those who sparked a revolution.” This attractive description
Its unpredictability is its right of entry to what might be called, courtesy Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Black Swan Hall of Fame, joining the collapse of communism, the ill-fated Oslo peace agreements and global financial meltdown…. But even before I hit the ground in Tunisia, one word kept cropping up again and again on the Arabic channels when the protesters, singly or in groups, described how they felt, and what they thought they were doing. Karama-dignity, or honour, or perhaps even self-respect…. I wanted to see that Karama. I set out to find it, at the well-spring of all the Arab revolutions.