The passing of the bipolar cold war brought a new kind of revolution. But it too is changing as American policy and global politics move on.
The conflict of radical Shi'a-Sunni forces is fuelled by unyielding absolutisms that oppose the world's leading trends over the past century.
The Middle East's political map survived decades of tumult. Its long-term unravelling began with Iran's uprising in 1979.
The Arab world is often misunderstood by the tendency to ignore or flatten its differences - through time, across states, between peoples. Challenging this essentialism is the condition of progress.
The fragility of Arab capital cities reflects the lack of legitimacy among their rulers and the wider popular antagonism they provoke.
The fragility of Arab national identity makes it difficult to resist the Islamic State. This makes the Kurdish experience relevant to the prospects of war against the movement.
Most doctrines, political or religious, are embodied in sacred texts that act as guide and inspiration to their followers. Modern Islamists are significantly different.
Iraq's escalating crisis highlights the contrasting attitudes to the United States of politicians in Baghdad and the Kurdish region.
Behind the Arab rhetoric of unity over Gaza - and Syria or Iraq - lie deep and dangerous fractures.
Iraq's fragmentation and Syria's implosion are the long-term outcome of the follies of their Ba'athist and other Arab nationalist leaders.
The influential nationalist-modernist ideology once attracted religious-sectarian support. Today that process is over, as the latter forces reclaim their older identities.
The crisis around Iraq-Syria reflects the weight of a past that is no longer relevant to the region's peoples, says Hazem Saghieh.
