In The Levant Express: The Arab Uprising, Human Rights, and the Future of the Middle East, Micheline R. Ishay uses the metaphor that compares the Arab Spring to a high-speed train making its way through the region with demands of human rights and democratization. However, as the Arab Spring chilled and transformed into a cold Arab Winter, the high-speed train is derailed and repressive and authoritarian governments are replaced with even more repressive and authoritarian regimes. She uses the metaphor to whet her reader’s curiosity by asking: What will put the high-speed train—demanding human rights—back on its tracks and carry on its journey through the region? Interestingly, however, Ishay’s metaphor is not only used to describe the growing demand for human rights during early 2011; rather, she uses it to describe the possibility of actually creating a railroad throughout the region connecting its countries via an economic route that...
University of California Press