Scholar Suzanne Maloney: The Arab Spring

When a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire in December 2010 to protest treatment by a police officer, he set off an unlikely chain of uprisings throughout the region, now dubbed as the “Arab Spring.”

Marcia Franklin talks with Suzanne Maloney, an expert on Iran who was at the time a scholar at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, about how uprisings in the Middle East affect the United States. Maloney is now a vice president of Brookings and director of its foreign policy program.

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Originally Aired: 10/6/2011 

The interview is part of Dialogue’s series “Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference” and was taped at the 2011 conference. Since 1995, the conference has been bringing together some of the world’s most well-known and illuminating authors to discuss literature and life.