Today marks the fifth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprising. Sparked in Tunisia on December 17, 2010, a wave of revolutionary contagion spread across the Arab world. Millions of people took to the streets demanding dignity, democracy, and social justice. Mass mobilizations on an unprecedented scale in recent history took place in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, and transformed social and political dynamics across the whole region. A politics of hope became possible.

Five years into the uprisings, however, counterrevolutionary forces composed of the old regimes and Islamic fundamentalist forces have regained the political initiative, and are now violently vying for control. Egypt is under a worse dictatorship than before its uprising, and civil wars have broken out in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Hundreds of thousands have died, and many millions have been displaced.

How to take stock of this conjuncture? What are its main features and possibilities? Nada Matta for Jacobin sought the answers to these questions with Gilbert Achcar, one of the world’s leading analysts of the Arab region.