Five years ago this month, the "Arab Spring" got underway with the non-violent overthrow of Tunisia's long-ruling dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. He dared not order the army to open fire on the demonstrators (because it might not obey), he was running out of money, and eventually he flew off to Saudi Arabia to seek asylum.
In an Arab world where satellite television broadcasts and social media had effectively destroyed the power of the censors, practically everybody else spent the four weeks of civil protest in Tunisa tensely watching what the Tunisians were doing. When the Tunisian revolutionaries won, similar non-violent demonstrations demanding democracy immediately broke out in half a dozen other Arab countries.
It felt like huge change was on the way, because the world had got used to the idea that non-violent revolutions spread irresistibly, and usually win in the end. The ground-breaking "People Power" revolution in the Philippines in 1986, for example, was followed in the next three years in Asia by non-violent democratization in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Bangladesh, and failed attempts at non-violent revolution in Myanmar and China.