The Arab uprisings of 2011–2012 successfully deposed dictatorships in four Arab countries—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. But the political challenges faced by these countries post-revolution remain extraordinarily daunting. These challenges include: serious polarization along sectarian, regional, tribal, and political lines; deep-seated grievances sown by the sins of dictatorship (extra-judicial imprisonment, torture, execution, disappearances, marginalization . . . ); and the difficulty many of these countries face in defining a common vision for the future given the decades-long repression of collective political deliberation by the ancien regime. (Compounding this rudderlessness: the fact that the uprisings were largely leaderless and lacking in ideological compass.) Whatever the country’s post-revolutionary ambition—be it transition to fully-fledged democracy or merely sustainable peace and security—the path forward is rocky.

In Unfinished Revolutions Ibrahim Fraihat aims to grapple with these challenges. Deeply ensconced in the theory and practice of conflict resolution and drawing on two years of field work in the Middle East and North Africa, Fraihat explores the patterns and possibilities of national reconciliation in three countries: Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia. His work is both prescriptive and descriptive.

Prescriptively, Fraihat draws liberally from the transitional justice tool kit. To foster national reconciliation and to hammer out a common roadmap for the future, Fraihat advocates dialogue, truth-seeking, the exposure of atrocities, the imposition of accountability for crimes and injustices, and the provision of reparations, both moral and material, to those aggrieved. These measures will end rumination, sanitize memory, foster justice, encourage forgiveness, heal social fissures, unify the national narrative, and build the foundation for an ethical future. The pieties are many, moving, and sincere.

But Fraihat is well aware that serious political constraints compromise this moral path. Too much accountability (as in the wholesale punishment of ancien regime affiliates) will likely provoke backlash and instability. (Think of the failure of de-Ba’athification in Iraq under Bremer). Too much reparation will likely bankrupt the new regime. Too extensive a purge of venal bureaucrats will lead to devastating staffing gaps (given limitations in human capital resources). Fraihat makes some practical recommendations to manage these trade-offs. To get around the problem of “excessive accountability,” he recommends targeted justice, that is, pursuing individuals guilty of corruption and human rights violations rather than embracing wholesale lustration. To get around the problem of financial limitations, he recommends greater reliance on reparations that are “moral” rather than material (for example, public acknowledgement of mistreatment through public apologies, establishment of memorials, mention in school textbooks, etc.).

Still the tightrope that must be walked between moral imperatives and political realities in engineering transitional justice is treacherous and eminently susceptible to failure. Fraihart makes this clear in his descriptive account of three country cases. Libya is an example of “too much” transitional justice. In the wake of the uprising, one camp of revolutionaries used its (momentary) political advantage to (literally) force Libya’s parliament to pass a Political Isolation Law, excluding nearly everyone associated with the Qaddafi regime from the political sphere. The law fostered a culture of “revenge” and set the country up for deeper polarization and civil war rather than national reconciliation. By contrast, Yemen is an example of “too little” transitional justice. Faced with the pressing reality of a military politically divided and a country descending into chaos, the Gulf Cooperation Council brokered a law granting total immunity to the affiliates of the ancien regime. The hope was to bring everyone on board for a national dialogue. But in the end the process delivered no justice and no accountability and the dialogue, while extensive, did not manage to resolve society’s most deeply-divisive issues or prevent the resumption of civil war. Of the three countries, Tunisia is the great success story—the sole country to achieve Goldilocks' “just right” execution of transitional justice. Tunisia embraced a locally-led, inclusive, bottom-up process of dialogue. It opted for targeted justice (rather than wholesale lustration) and embraced moral as much as material reparations. The result was restorative, not retributive justice, and significant progress toward national reconciliation.

But pragmatically speaking, what does this comparative account teach us? Does the Tunisia case really show the way to deal with post-uprising polarization? Certainly inclusive dialogue is laudable, as is bottom-up, civil society-led truth-seeking. But Tunisia’s relative success at national reconciliation has been as much a consequence of its favorable starting point as anything else. As Fraihat shows, Tunisians suffered significantly lower levels of torture, disappearances, and politically-driven executions than was the case in either Libya or Yemen. Also, Tunisia was not deeply divided along tribal/ethnic lines as were the others. Finally, the two main groups at odds in Tunisia (Ennahda supporters vs. non-Islamists) were neither armed nor they had ever been assigned the responsibility to provide security to their members as was the case, historically, for tribal and regional groups in Yemen and Libya. The polarization in Tunisia was thus less likely to slide into violence and civil war.

To my mind, one of the most important contributions of Unfinished Revolutions is the identification of the political constraints that make national reconciliation so challenging in Libya, Yemen, and beyond. First and foremost is the problem of incentivizing reconciliation. In both Yemen and Libya, various tribal, regional, and religious groups have taken up arms and command mini-fiefdoms; this role bestows upon their leaders power and privileges that get them invested in the persistence of conflict rather than the pursuit of reconciliation. And so long as regional powers support and subsidize the opposing camps (Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen; Egypt, UAE, Qatar, and Turkey in Libya), why reconcile? Was this not the lesson of Lebanon where civil war ground on for 15 years, long after the population was exhausted, because outside powers playing proxy wars materially incentivized the warlords to keep pummeling each other?

A second lesson suggested by Unfinished Revolutions, and frankly one that introduces some skepticism about the utility of the transitional justice toolkit in defusing polarization, concerns the sequential relationship between security and reconciliation. At one point Fraihat says “reconciliation cannot take place in the context of an insecure environment” (p. 227) and that militias must disarm first in order to foster depolarization and trust-building. Otherwise conditions may not be “ripe” for effective dialogue. But is it reasonable to expect polarized groups to lay down their arms without some level of trust or depolarization already established? So which comes first? And what is the utility of dialogue if it cannot bridge the cleavages of such deeply polarized societies? Must something else (e.g., pressure/material incentives from external powers) be mobilized to get the depolarization ball rolling?

In the final analysis perhaps it comes down to Fraihat’s observation that “national reconciliation is not a linear process” (p. 68). There is no unidirectional sequence but rather a process of trial and error, of tacking back and forth between successes and failures, as parties negotiate relationships and trust. As the veteran track II diplomat Yair Hirscheld said with regard to resolving a very different source of conflict in the Middle East: “You can’t succeed at negotiation unless you are willing to fail. Failure multiple times is essential to success” (“The Gaza Violence and the Future of Track II Diplomacy,” talk presented at the Brandeis Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, on September 18, 2014). And so it seems for national reconciliation as well.