End of a year; end of a political era

As the fifth year after the explosion of the popular uprisings in December 2010 comes to an end, states and societies in the Arab world confront unenviable choices.

The great democratic expectations unleashed by what started as non-violent uprisings have been replaced either by mayhem and destruction in states torpedoed by sectarianised geopolitical battles or, alternatively, by the vengeful return of the authoritarian state.

Only Tunisia's limping democratic transition stands as an exception in what is otherwise an Arab landscape in ruins.

In Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the homogenised, centralised, authoritarian Arab state may finally be a thing of the past. But what will replace it does not bode well for the future of these states - or their peoples.

The world will undoubtedly remember 2015 as the year when Europe came face to face with the blowback effects of the war in Syria, in the form of an increasingly unmanageable refugee crisis and attacks, whether in Paris or elsewhere, orchestrated by the Islamic State group.

But in the Arab World, 2015 marked only the continuation of a downward spiral to a seemingly bottomless abyss.

Protesters - once united in their peaceful demand for regime change - now fortify sectarian, ethnic, and tribal barricades beween each other. The squares that symbolised the democratic ethos of citizens nonviolently reclaiming their inalienable political and socioeconomic rights are either empty or bulldozed.

Whole societies, once galvanised behind that mesmerizing anthem of the popular uprisings - "al-sha'b yurid isqat al-nizam" - "the people want to overthrow the regime" - are now silenced as the authoritarian state's coercive will to kill and incarcerate reasserts itself.

Sectarianised geopolitical battles have long ago derailed the popular uprisings from their original nonviolent objectives

Borders that proved permeable to popular demands for "freedom, work, and social justice" now export sectarian venom and all kinds of salafi-jihadi violence.

The crescendo of uprisings that swept across the Arab world only five years ago, promising to restore the will of the people and overhaul states and societies in a democratic fashion, now feels as if it all happened some 50 years ago. Such has been the impact of the counter-revolutionary assault against the popular uprisings.

Equally important in 2015, however, is the loss of that moment of popular and local agency and determination to change one's political world and remake it in a peaceful, more egalitarian and democratic way - at least for the foreseeable future.

Sectarianised geopolitical battles have long ago derailed the popular uprisings from their original nonviolent objectives, transforming them from agents of peaceful domestic change into instruments for settling geopolitical scores. The death and destruction in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen bears witness to the cruel barbarism of not only domestic actors but also geopolitical calculations.

But it is Russia's military intervention in Syria, and the regional and international chorus of musical chairs it triggered, that trampolined the region back to a future when the pen of a colonial administrator could prove mightier than the popular aspirations of entire peoples.

It is the final nail in the coffin of the popular uprisings as the great powers - this time in cahoots with domestic and regional protégés - prepare to vivisect Arab states and societies in a repeat of that moment after the First World War, when the fate of the Ottoman Empire was being drawn up in the halls of London, Paris, and San Remo.

There will be no place in this new order for experiments in intercultural democratic coexistence, however, only false celebrations of the victory of the always-imagined primordial ethnic, tribal, sectarian, or religious group and its homeland. A whole century, with all its dreams and agonies, wasted, scarified at the altar of the sect and other historically manufactured false atavisms.

Light in the dark?

But there were also signs in 2015 that the will of the peoples cannot be irreversibly broken. The fleeting anti-sectarian summer protests in Lebanon and Iraq are signs that perhaps not all is lost.

Like their counterparts in Spain and Greece, albeit in far more rudimentary and disorganised form, and facing overwhelmingly stronger sectarian adversaries, they are exemplary manifestations of a new kind of politics of opposition that grows up from the grassroots, rejecting established modes of political organisation, and in the process inventing new ways of polyphonic intersectarian citizenship.

Yet for such nascent movements to succeed in creating alternatives to the sectarian wave overcoming the region, they require, to borrow a phrase from Perry Anderson, the "manoeuvre of the intelligence, along with the intransigence of the will" - scarce commodities in the age of new social media and virtual reality.

But if the popular uprisings that exploded in Tunisia five years ago teach us anything, it is that lurking beneath the stability of everyday fear is the will to resist.

Regimes and their regional and international allies will always try to break this will, only to be surprised when it bounces back in creative and stubborn forms. For the time being, however, we are condemned to watch as history repeats itself once again in the Arab world, this time around more as macabre than just farce.