(Huffington Post) The heady optimism of 2011 and the rapid fall of the regimes of Gaddafi, Mubarak and Ben Ali, has been replaced by disappointment in the new military leadership in Cairo, deep divisions in Libya and of course the continued brutal clampdown against protestors in Syria. Western public's confidence in the Arab Spring, divided from the start between support to the non-violent square seizing revolutionaries and scepticism about the religious slogan chanting Islamists, can be forgiven for wondering what will happen next.

In the interests of creative thinking I suggest that there are a series of interesting parallels with the original Star Wars trilogy (episodes IV-VI) can provide a practical narrative of understanding.

This may appear a little bizarre but it is worth remembering that the original Star Wars films chronicled the story of a hero who represents a crucially important demographic component of what would form the Arab Spring's revolutionary vanguard. Indeed Luke Skywalker was a under-employed young graduate, living at home with high expectations for his future not being met by the Empire's lack of attention to the provincial backwater where he lived. As the Observer's Henry Porter explained, "youth unemployment and the grinding lack of hope are the source of the most serious social and political problems across the Arab world. The unemployment rate among Tunisians under 25 is about 26%. Half of the 60,000 graduates released on to the jobs market every year will not find work".

Skywalker would ultimately be responsible for the destruction of Empire's most fearsome weapon largely due to secret official documents being smuggled to the rebels that he joined. Although it cannot be said to be of the same impact, the smuggled official secret US diplomatic cables, revealed in the Wikileaks documents, highlighted cases of massive corruption in the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes. As the US Ambassador in Tunis wrote "whether it's cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali's family is rumoured to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants".

James Denselow & Sam Hardy, London, Asharq Al-Awsat. Lance Price, a former BBC political journalist and media adviser to then Prime Minister Tony Blair, wrote in 2010 that “Britain boasts one of the oldest democracies on earth. Her political traditions have been admired and copied the world over. Yet today they are in crisis”. Price was unaware at the time that a greater crisis was brewing at the heart of the British political and media establishment that would explode in a frenzy of allegations around phone hacking that would bring down the best-selling English language newspaper on the planet in July 2011 and lead to the creation into an inquiry that would seek to challenge the foundations of how the media in Britain operates.

That paper was the News of the World, a Sunday tabloid with a 168-year old history that was famous for its explosive 'scoops' where it beat its rivals to a story or exposed a high-profile incident or celebrity. It was famous for deploying a 'Fake Sheikh', the undercover journalist Mazher Mahmood, who would conduct sting operations with the assistance of hidden cameras. The paper claimed that his actions led to the arrest of over 250 criminals, his most famous scoop was in August 2010 when he exposed a cricket bookie named Mazhar Majeed who revealed that Pakistani cricketers had committed spot-fixing during Pakistan's 2010 tour of England. The paper was owned by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation - the world's second-largest media conglomerate - whose chairman is the Australian born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch's power and influence over British politics has been an issue of constant speculation. Before he became Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted in 1994 that in the next election “the only thing that matters in this campaign is the media”. In 1995 Blair would lay the groundwork for Murdoch's support of his 1997 election win when, as leader of the opposition, he flew to a small Australian island to speak at one of his conference’s.

Can the Arab League finally live up to its potential?

(Huffington Post) It was not Facebook, Twitter or YouTube that brought down Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian people did that. But this does not mean that social media and internet-based technologies played no role, or that their role was insignificant, as some have alleged. Rather, events in Egypt and countries across the Middle East and North Africa have shown in the 'Arab Spring' that internet platforms and technologies should be seen for what they are: effective tools for the conduct of political campaigns in authoritarian contexts.

This conclusion was reached in a new paper written by Tim Eaton who currently works for BBC Media Action on media development projects in the Middle East. The paper is the product of over a year of research and seeks to analyze the use of online activism in the Egyptian uprisings of January and February 2011, drawing out the lessons learned in addition to applying them to the wider context of the Arab Spring.