Hom, Andrew. "Angst Springs Eternal: Dangerous times and the dangers of timing the ‘Arab Spring". Security Dialogue, Vol.47, No.2 (2016): 165-183.

Hom, Andrew. "Angst Springs Eternal: Dangerous times and the dangers of timing the ‘Arab Spring". Security Dialogue, Vol.47, No.2 (2016): 165-183.

• Analysts and experts were shocked by the events of the Arab Spring, and were often anxious that the situation was unstable, and might just as likely lead to state failure or terrorism than the belated arrival of democracy in the Middle East (165, 170).
• Conceptions of security increasingly require knowledge and control of the future, as scholars argue that to provide security today, they need to predict and control for threats in the future (167).
• Not enough work has gone into understanding how these connections between security and concepts of time and the future have impacted scholarly research and analysis (168).
• Discussions of the timing of political events usually impose artificial narratives of larger trends on specific sets of events. Placed within the context of these constructed thematic narratives -- like the birth of democracy -- events either have 'good timing', they match up with the thematic expectations, or 'bad timing', they do not. These thematic narratives don't actually exist, and so describing the timing of events on this basis imposes a categorization does not actually exist (168-169).
• When events occur that do not match the existing thematic narratives, the ideas about the progression of events have to be changed to fit these new realities. This is done by emphasizing new thematic narrative elements and reinterpreting past events in light of this new narrative (169).
• Minimal changes to these thematic narratives are preferred since they retain the most legitimacy and give the greatest sense of the future being predictable. This discourages large changes or totally new narratives, since this would throw doubt on the possibility of predicting the future (173).
• Placing events within these thematic narratives makes us feel comfortable and safe because we feel that the future can be predicted, and thus prepared for. There is, therefore, a constant effort to place events within these narratives (170). 
• If thematic narratives are not imposed on events, then the future remains unknown and unpredictable. If the future is unpredicted, then it potentially holds all possible negative events. Not having thematic narratives, therefore, causes anxiety because it forces people to recognize the unpredictable nature of the future (171).
• Uncertainty, unpredictability, and instability are inherent qualities of time, as all good things in the present can be destroyed with the passage of time. Since stability and permanence are seen as positive concepts, the passage of time has negative connotations because it represents instability and impermanence (170).
• Although most observers were happy about the end of autocratic stability in the Middle East, the future is by definition uncertain. Since the future is unknown, it contains the possibility of every bad event and is feared because of these possible negative outcomes (170-171).
• The use of language related to flowing water and floods -- like 'flood', 'surge', 'spill', 'wave', or 'flux' -- creates a sense of insecurity and the danger of structures being washed away (171).
• The use of terminology related to 'waves' to describe events indicates a sense of unpredictability and a lack of control over spontaneous events. They describe events that are unstoppable and uncontrollable, with the threat of washing away structures they come into contact with (171-172).
• The word 'surge' indicates surprise, rapid progression of events, and disorder. It indicates that events are unpredictable and potentially destabilizing (172).
• The word 'flood' describes the transformation of a previously passive body into a force of change. It indicates massive numbers of people, all involved in leaderless action. Floods are unpredictable and likely to cause change (172).
• Metaphors involving 'spilling' indicate surprise, uncertainty, disorder, and crisis, as previous geographic or social divides are crossed by some new phenomenon (172).
• Describing events as 'fluid' or 'in flux' indicate surprise and deep uncertainty about the course of future events. This implies that change is likely to be sudden and unpredictable (172-173).
• Faced with the novel events of the Arab Spring, analysts and scholars responded by linking contemporary events to earlier periods of history with known outcomes, a process called 'temporal othering'. This allows scholars to feel that they can predict the future, since they know about these other periods (173).
• This can also be done by connecting current events to larger ideological narratives, like democratization. Once this model is used, it allows future events to be predicted -- even if those predictions are incorrect -- because the end point of the current sequence of events has been determined. In the case of the Arab Spring, discussing it in terms of democratization allows the future to be predicted because the end result of the revolutions -- liberal democracy -- is predetermined  (173-174). 
• A common form of temporal othering is connecting current events to a humanity-wide trajectory. By assuming that human society has a common endpoint that all societies will progress towards, novel events anywhere in the world can be placed within this narrative and allow the future to be predicted (175).
• Most accounts using this strategy refer to societies at different stages of development or civilization. This implies that 'immature' or 'juvenile' societies will grow into 'developed' or 'mature' societies, usually using extant countries as a model for this development (175-176).
• The use of this language of maturity and immaturity implies a power relationship between mature states and immature states. Since mature states are simply further along the same linear path of development as the immature states, they have a responsibility to mentor and teach less developed societies (176).
• The Arab Spring destroyed a previous sense of stability about the Middle East and challenge dominant narratives that did not predict sudden change. The new conceptions of the Arab Spring have responded by stressing the unpredictability of events, and the dangers inherent in that. What thematic narratives are applied emphasize the immature nature of Arab democracies on a linear development path (176-177).
• The lack of knowledge about future events in the Middle East is portrayed as a security threat, because the essential lack of predictability in the future has been revealed. The rapid pace of change only further reveals this unpredictability and heightens security fears (177).
• Recognizing the conservative tendency to preserve existing thematic narratives while describing events, the author calls for scholars to explicitly reject these narratives and go looking for entirely new ones that better explain the Arab Spring, especially ones that recognizing the roots of the crisis in the preceding autocratic regimes (177-179).
• The author also recommends that scholars stop using metaphors related to floods or flowing water, because it sets up a number of unhelpful implicit assumptions about the Arab Spring (178).
• The author further recommends that scholars and analysts just stop trying to predict events long into the future or guess at the overall tendency of the Arab Spring or other currently unfolding events. Predicting these things is impossible anyway, and scholars should recognize that and work within their own limitations (179).