On the day of the protest, A.B. didn’t say a word to his friends or his family. The 27-year-old Damascus law student boarded the bus alone to the old city where a Facebook page had said to gather. He was surprised to recognize a few faces on the way there. “After today, we’re going to be very good friends,” he thought as he shot covert glances at other demonstrators.

The narrow winding streets in the Al Hamidiya neighborhood were filled with vendors that day, March 15, 2011. “We knew their main job was as secret police. They will take pictures of us, film us and report,” says A.B., using only his initials for the safety of his family still in Syria. Tense as the streets were, the demonstrators—maybe 40 or 50 of them—nonetheless gathered for the second Arab Spring demonstration in the capital. For 30 minutes, they marched shouting “ peaceful” in Arabic and dreaming of a word so far removed from life in Syria that they never thought to define it: freedom.


Then, the police came toward them in waves. “They did not wear uniforms, but they had weapons: knives and sticks,” A.B. recalls. “The vendors left their goods and attacked us.” He turned and ran.

A.B. recognized about half of the protestors that day. And of those he knew, almost all have been killed, arrested or are missing, swept up in what is now a three-year-old civil war between President Bashar Al Assad and those who oppose his regime. A few have claimed asylum in Europe, like A.B., who was kicked out of law school after demonstrating and today works as a translator, far from the ravaged country he once sought to change.

“Sometimes I blame myself” for the war that followed, he says. “I remember that day, and then I see this huge amount of blood and I regret it.”

Four years after Arab Spring protests spread across the Middle East and Northern Africa, the hopes of those initial demonstrators seem more distant than ever. It’s no secret that, with the exception of Tunisia, there is little democracy to show for the millions of people who protested and the hundreds of thousands who have died across the region since 2011. In Syria, no fewer than 200,000 people have been killed and another 10 million have left their homes, fleeing to other cities or countries in horrific conditions. Moderate rebels led partly by a defected officer core have been overpowered by al Qaeda offshoot the Islamic State (ISIL), which now controls a swathe of territory the size of Jordan. The Egyptian economy is in ruins; Yemen is overrun by militants; Libya has become a permanent battlefield; and Bahrain is mired in low-level unrest.

The autocrats and warlords’ stories have had their telling: They have, for the most part, held onto power, evaded punishment or been replaced by fellow strongmen. Also well-known is the swift rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood who promised “Islam is the solution” but quickly proved unable to govern inclusively. But less has been written about those first voices of protest—the dozens of activists whose audacious ideas and Twitter accounts galvanized millions—and where they are now. Unlike their rivals, no liberal spokesperson or umbrella group has emerged to carry their principles into politics. Left on the sidelines, those ideals have languished.

Turmoil of the past four years has swallowed up many of the original protesters and their ambitions, with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and at least that number imprisoned. Unprepared for the vacuum they had created by toppling dictators, liberals and progressives were easily outplayed. Realpolitik took hold, and activists scattered, some overseas, some to prison and some simply into silence. Today, one activist told me, many of Tahrir square’s ringleaders are more likely to be found in Manhattan.

Still, today, dozens of Arab liberals across the globe say they are working to safeguard and build on what gains have been made, as I heard in interviews with nearly two dozen activists and analysts, including some of the pivotal players from the 2011 uprisings. “I do believe there is a trend that cannot be reversed, and this is a trend toward liberalism,” argues Ahmed Benchemsi, a Moroccan writer who founded the news site Free Arabs to drive a liberal post-Arab Spring conversation. “There will be a profound and radical change in the Arab world in less than a generation.”

So where did the progressive sparkers of the Arab Spring go? Many of those still fighting for the cause are building new businesses, publications, charities, startups and manifestos that they still believe can yield change—if not a revolution, for now. “It hasn’t been easy and won’t be easy yet,” Palestinian activists Iyad El Baghdadi wrote on Twitter this morning, the fourth anniversary of the start of the Arab Spring. “But we’ll get there.”

***

No one in this story would have expected it to be written before the Arab Spring. The activists-to-be were, in 2010, just youth whose only preparation was their computers and like-minded friends. They wrote on the same web forums; they frequented the same haunts, like Café Riche near Cairo’s Tahrir Square or Costa Coffee on Bahrain’s Budaiya road.

By late 2010, Amira Yahyaoui, for example, was part of a group of Tunisian cyber activists trying to test the boundaries of expression online. They were about 300 in total, scattered across the country and abroad, she estimates, but 10 or 20 were the most influential. Some were good at hacking; others liked to write. “Everyone knew everyone. We were all friends,” she says.

When a young fruit vendor self-immolated, sparking the first Arab Spring protests in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on December 17 that year, their collective suddenly had a purpose. One activist in their clique had grown up in the birthplace of the unrest, so he took charge of tracking protests. Others manned social media and distributed videos. Yahyaoui, who had been exiled to France for her anti-censorship work five years earlier, liaised with the international press. Spontaneously, “everyone had his job,” she said.

There was no time to think at that stage about a guiding ideology. “We had zero strategy” to topple the regime, she continues. “It was war and we were soldiers. We weren’t generals, just soldiers, and we had to keep going and attack.”

But there were common principles that those initial revolutionaries shared, first among them a thirst for the justice that had been denied under dictatorship. With the simplicity of their message, the original vanguard of activists found appeal en masse, including among many who didn’t think like them. Unlike previous social movements, there was no need to organize at the grassroots before demonstrations. Social media offered a direct line to anyone with a mobile phone. When A.B. and millions more like him showed up to the protests they didn’t know who had organized them—and didn’t want to, out of fear of being accused of conspiring. “Liberal activists were outnumbered, but the immense crowds continued to play by the rules of the initiators,” Benchemsi explains.

Across the region, online networks sprung to life in much the same way, mostly within countries but across borders too. In places where the social architecture was new, it was built seemingly overnight. Atiaf Alwazir remembers going to her first protest in Sanaa, Yemen, and not recognizing a soul. Within days of meandering between protest tents, the Yemeni blogger had met the people who would become her best friends. Among progressives like herself, “everyone had felt that they were alone until the revolution happened,” she says, “and they met each other and realized they were not.”

The first days of protest saw something more significant in some ways than the unrest itself. As one Kuwaiti activist described it, society was re-tribed. The traditional categories of family and class broke down, in favor of like-mindedness. Opposition had long been an elite affair; not so in the online and activist circles, where some of the most influential came from the poorest backgrounds.

“These people who never would have talked to one another are now on the same side,” explains Suleiman Al-Jassem, a liberal from the opposition movement in Kuwait that in 2012 gathered tens of thousands to the streets. “The social map is being redrawn.”

***

It was when the revolution started succeeding in Egypt that activist Ramy Yaacoub began to fear. For weeks on Cairo’s Tahrir square, shouting at police and rattling politicians had been enough. They weren’t sleeping; friends had died; each had scars from police batons or worse; but this was progress. Distracted by immediate aims, the core group put off decisions about the future. “There was a lot of political talk, and the question was: Are we going to work with political parties, or are we going to bring the entire system down?”

For many of the leading activists in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, politics was anathema to all they were working toward. The leaderless masses were toppling regimes, so how could they submit to authority? Would that not risk creating the same enemy they had just defeated? In Morocco, for example, the February 20 protest movement held organizational meetings, governed entirely by consensus, that lasted hours and rarely yielded decisions

Yaacoub, who had studied in the United States and once interned with a U.S. senator (Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida), argued for more organization. “It was clear to me that we’ve created a vacuum, and someone will have to fill it. Should we not step up?”

Others were also warning that if the liberal vanguard didn’t organize, someone else would. While activists worried about tomorrow’s protest, “we’re distracting ourselves from the real problem. … The real problem is the intellectual vacuum,” El-Baghdadi, the Palestinian activist, argued in an August 2011 YouTube video titled “ Has the Arab Spring Failed?” He continued, “It remains up to us to find a political solution. … If we fail to produce a solution, the status quo of authoritarianism will take charge.”

Yaacoub and others lost that debate, and another group seized the initiative. They hadn’t participated in the first protests, but Islamist groups, mostly associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, had both ideology and machinery—an election-winning combination. Founded in Egypt but now with branches across the region, the Brotherhood argued that Islam provides the guiding principles of government. In addition to running extensive social support systems, the organization had a long-running flirtation with electoral politics in Egypt, alternately tolerated and cracked down on for close to a century.

From Cairo to Suez to Alexandria, the Muslim Brotherhood had allies on every block and neighborhood when the first parliamentary elections were held in November 2011. Tunisia’s Al-Nahda party drew upon decades of grassroots social work to rally votes. In Bahrain, it was the Shiite Islamist group Al Wefaq that had representatives in every village and street ready to call the movement to order. But their designs on social mores and women’s rights were diametrically opposed to liberal ideas of personal freedom.

“For 50 years, the only place where people were allowed to sit and talk was in the mosque, so to a big extent, Islamists were ready,” says Wissam Tarif, a Lebanese liberal who spread initial news of the Syrian uprising. “I can organize a meeting with 30 like-minded people, but a man in a mosque has the opportunity every Friday to preach to thousands without making an effort.”

Yaacoub, for one, joined the Free Egypt party, a new, explicitly liberal party that would field Mohammed ElBaredei as its presidential candidate. “There were 56 offices all over the country, with faxing, mailing and hotlines managed perfectly,” he recalls. But upon joining, he found there was no political office at all—no one even charged with the task of coming up with a platform.

A year into the unrest, it had become clear the young online cadre who nudged forward the protests were being overtaken politically. Lacking the desire or tools to build a coherent political platform, it didn’t matter that they had a direct, instantaneous line, via social media, to millions. In Egypt’s first parliamentary vote, seculars, liberals and leftists combined won 16 percent of seats, to the Brotherhood’s 45 percent.

***

Perhaps the greatest power of the Arab Spring activists had been their ability to prove that violence wasn’t necessary for regime change. So as the dominoes fell in Tunisia and Egypt, leaders elsewhere were watching closely. If nonviolence had toppled regimes, violence was the only means to regime survival.

The crackdowns were swift and targeted—not against the hardliners but rather the same nonviolent activists who had argued for social justice and moderation. At first, the attacks were a tactical distraction. When Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi sent out jets and tanks, the liberal-minded activist network switched to damage control, recalls Libyan writer Ghazi Ghelbawi. While he liaised between activists and international media from his base in London, others in his network sent cameras and clipped videos to post online, hoping the outside world would intervene. “The only way for you to respond as a peaceful activist is to document,” Ghelbawi said.

On the tiny island of Bahrain, the ruling family had cautiously tolerated the first days of protests in February 2011, allowing poetry recitations from a central roundabout. But as the demonstrations grew, so did their anxiety. The head of the liberal political society Wa’ad, Ibrahim Sharif, was arrested on March 17. Later that month, authorities raided the home of Mahmood Al-Yousif, known as the “blogfather” of Bahrain, who had days earlier written that he favored “sanity and tolerance” and tackling root injustices to end the unrest.

“This is the first time in our history that a liberal guy is the head of a social movement with no religious background,” says another protest leader, Nabeel Rajab, who is Bahrain’s most prominent liberal. He has spent more than two years in jail since 2011. “We are pushing for human rights. That’s what frightened the government and that’s why they put me in prison.”

As explosions of violence were ignited by their respective regimes, each reverberated in a way unique to the repression that had preceded. In Libya, activists once in a liberal clique lost hope for nonviolent revolution. Ghelbawi remembers a cyberactivist friend who “had a peaceful stand like us all,” but one day slipped away, apparently to become a fighter.

In Syria, the crackdown against moderates was ruthless from the early days. In July 2011, the folk singer Ibrahim Qashoush, whose lyrics “Come on, Bashar, Time to Leave” had become the theme of the revolution, was found dumped in the Orontes River with his throat slit. When the conflict began to arm, Assad targeted moderate rebels most fiercely, leaving radicals to flourish.

Violence decimated activist ranks. “I think there are still many people who have the goals of human rights and democracy inside Syria,” says Tarif. “But they are less visible and the role they play currently is much less significant.”

Psychologically, too, activists from Egypt to Bahrain to Tunisia say many of their ranks have suffered with depression and post-traumatic stress. A.B., who was arrested four times and today brandishes the scars of repeated torture, knows violence changed everything. “After my first experience in prison, I did not want freedom anymore,” he says. “But once you said no to this regime, you cannot back down. Most of the people now with weapons, they know that if they surrender, the regime will take revenge in the ugliest ways.”

***

From the beginning, the original Arab Spring activists wondered whether the United States was for or against their cause. Initial messaging in Egypt was confused about whether President Hosni Mubarak should stay or go. Libya’s Qaddafi was pushed out with the help of NATO airstrikes, but Syria’s Assad was left in power to drop barrel bombs and even chemical weapons on the population.

More fundamental was the question of whether Washington ever believed that the young and progressive could succeed. “There is an underlying assumption that religiosity and conservative mores are all what Arabness is culturally about,” argues Benchemsi, explaining a common reaction in Washington, where he now lives. “When I and others come with liberal ideas, there is an assumption that we are not really representative.”

Some liberals say they saw this in evidence with how quickly the United States seemed ready to cozy up to a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. “We over-corrected for our indulgence of [Mubarak] by trying to convince ourselves … that we could be just as blindly supportive of an Islamist authoritarian regime as we were of a secular regime,” argues Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Meanwhile, activists knew that the biggest threat to the gains of the revolutions was that progress wouldn’t come quickly enough—that before long the public would become nostalgic for the ancien regime. When transitions needed help to sustain public confidence, the response from Washington was meager and at times even misleading.

Early in the transitions, governments were promised access to some $38 billion in financing through the Deauville Partnership, an international initiative backed by United States, Europe and multilateral lenders. “The Egyptians and Tunisians and Libyans said, ‘Where do we go to sign up?’” recalls Ambassador William B. Taylor, who was the State Department’s special coordinator for Middle East transitions from 2011 to 2013. “But it turns out that there were conditions on all these funds, and just as you would expect, most of them didn’t materialize. … That was a great disappointment to these governments.”

The Middle East and North Africa Transitions Fund set up by the partnership has so far distributed just under $170 million, including less than $30 million from the United States. The amounts pale in comparison to injections from regional donors. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, for example, have together pledged $15 billion of loans, subsidies and support to Egypt in just the past 18 months.

Libya’s Ghelbawi was among those who advocated for the NATO-led coalition that used airstrikes to help prevent a massacre by Libyan forces on the Eastern city of Benghazi. The strikes helped rebels take Tripoli, and for a while, the future looked hopeful as a transitional government set up and elections were held. But the United States stepped back as the situation deteriorated. After the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stephens at the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, much-needed security aid was indefinitely delayed. “The easiest way to intervene is to send a bomb, but then to go away and leave what is left over. This wasn’t what we expected when we supported the intervention,” Ghelbawi says, adding that the aftermath has been “complete failure.”

On a humanitarian level, activists found U.S. support equally confused and disheartening. In February 2012, when the first Syrian regime jets began to bomb the civilian population in the city of Homs, activists scrambled to get the word out. “We really were thinking, ‘If only people knew what was going on, than they’re going to act,’” remembers Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian architect and writer who was among those working around the clock to spread videos then. She has been stunned by the lack of U.S. action. Although the United States has finally agreed to a modest training program that could help equip a moderate rebel force, the 5,000-person-a-year set up won’t be fully active until sometime in 2016.

Disappointment and mixed messaging may be one reason that some argue the best thing the United States did for Tunisia—the success story of the region so far—was to do not much at all. “Everywhere I go in the U.S., I say, ‘Thank you for not caring about us, really, and keep it that way,’” says Yahyaoui. There was some early support; Taylor’s office pushed through a $100 million cash transfer to the new government. They later followed up with a $500 million loan guarantee. But for the most part, the world focused on more alarming crises elsewhere, and Tunisia had the space to figure out things itself.

“I often wonder what would have happened without any foreign intervention,” says Alwazir in Yemen, where the transition process was guided by regional countries with Washington’s blessing. The “Yemen model” was lauded for its gradual transitioning of power, but it discarded much of the political organizing and ambitions of youth, leaving an old elite in power. “I think we could have at least started the real change, and building the foundations,” Alwazir says.

***

Four years after toppling dictators, activists from those initial uprisings know how easily success can slip away. Among the most urgent priorities for many now is safeguarding what remains. “Whatever you win is reversible, and any freedoms can be lost—and quickly,” says Ghelbawi of Libya.

The first things lost were people themselves. Dozens of activists from Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria and Yemen have packed their bags and left, forced out by insecurity or economic need. In 2013, there was a 288 percent rise in the number of asylum seekers departing to Europe by boat from Egypt and Libya compared to a year earlier; 25,500 Syrians alone took the journey that same year.

Others find themselves in a reality devoid of the luxury of intellectual debate. A.B. has spent much of his time learning Swedish and helping his mother, who cries each day she is away. “She asks me why I took her from the warmth of our country and her parents and family to the cold of Sweden,” he says. Many of the initial activists in Tunisia, meanwhile, are unemployed and struggling financially, Yahyaoui says. “Today, if you take a list of all of us, the absolute majority are lost. Most of them don’t know what to do,” she continues. “Most of us were very good on destruction and very bad on construction.”

The lost ideals that first sparked revolution must also be nurtured and clarified, activists suggest. Rajab of Bahrain, who spent much of his jail time thinking about what went wrong, believes this initial failure to articulate a clear agenda was the undoing of the country’s protest movement.

El Baghdadi agrees and has been working for several years to try and put onto paper the ideas that drove the Arab Spring, beginning with a human rights framework. “The main war is the war for ideas, and I think this should be the priority,” he says. “Because unless we have those ideas, we cannot build any institutionalization or influence anything that happens.”

In fact, many of the basic ideas of the Arab Spring are today contested battlegrounds. Liberals in Egypt have split over whether their creed is satisfied by the current government, which has protected social mores and removed traces of Islamist ideology from government but has cracked down hard against dissent. “A lot of people understood liberalism as anti-Islamism, and in some situations it is, but that’s not the essence of it,” says Yaacoub.

On the ground, others are building on their small successes by trying to give them space to grow. Yaacoub now works with the new Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, a Washington-based group that he says will publish reports for a U.S. audience based on more depth than a think tanker’s annual two-week trip to Cairo.

Also among them is Benchemsi, who moved to the United States in 2010 after building the best-selling Arabic and French magazines in Morocco, along with $10 million in annual revenue and 100 staffers. When the government pulled its advertising to make clear Benchemsi should go, he resigned to save the publications.

As he watched the Arab Spring and visited activists throughout 2011, Benchemsi grew concerned by how “the incredibly dynamic underground world of liberal Arab activists … were so easily outplayed by both enduring autocrats and ascendant Islamists,” as he wrote at the time. So he created a new platform—the website Free Arabs—for conversation where progressive-minded thinkers could air their views. Today, the site hosts essays mocking ISIL and personal struggles with religion, as well as deep investigations into crony corruption. But Benchemsi has struggled to find financial backers for the project in Washington, where many see the idea of Arab liberalism as far-fetched.

All this rethinking points to a future of gradual, rather than tumultuous, change. In Yemen, Alwazir is hopeful because of the small evolutions she has seen in the past four years. With her Arab Spring friends, she co-founded Support Yemen, which documents the untold stories of social change—for example a graffiti campaign that stenciled the names and faces of Yemen’s many disappeared. For the first time, talking about the missing was not taboo. Gender mixing, once uncommon, also became normal when activists started to work together openly. These are changes in mentality more than substance, but maybe that’s the real revolution.

“The price is extremely high, but you can’t go back before the age of the Arab Spring. It’s a threshold we have passed,” says Sergie Attar, who now devotes her time to a charity, Karam Foundation, helping Syrian refugees in neighboring countries. “When people say, ‘Why do you keep going? Syria’s already gone, there’s no point,’ the answer is there’s a duty. When you see this next generation, they are determined to go back and rebuild.”