Bahrain Analysis: Are the Sunni Movements Still Awake? (Gengler)

National Day Rally, 16 December 2011More than sixteen months have passed since the start of Bahrain's Sunni Awakening, the mass political mobilization of Sunni citizens launched exactly one week into last year’s Shi‘a-led uprising. While the unprecedented scale of the counter-movement was and still remains clear (supporters famously, if implausibly, claimed attendance of more than 300,000), what exactly it represented is as much a puzzle now as it was then.

More than a year later, these platforms remain ambiguous. Does the post-February explosion of popular political enthusiasm in this only-too-recently apolitical community represent a genuine shift in Bahrain’s political landscape? Or is the mobilization tied somehow to existing Sunni political powers—or even to the state itself?

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