The Arab spring at ten

IT IS AN anniversary no one is eager to mark. The numbers boggle the mind: half a million people dead; another 16m displaced from states no longer recognisable. There are the individual stories too, of dreams dashed and hopes shattered. One former activist, who long since gave up on the politics of his native Egypt, scrolls through the contacts on his phone, stopping now and then to list his friends’ fates: exiled, disappeared, dead.

Ten years have passed since Muhammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian street peddler, set himself ablaze to protest against the corrupt police who confiscated his wares. His self-immolation, on December 17th, is widely seen as the spark that ignited the Arab spring, a wave of revolutionary protest that swept across the region. Those early days were a time of unbridled optimism. Dictators who had looked invulnerable fell, one after the other—in Tunisia, Egypt and, later, Libya and Yemen.