The past fifteen years of Arab history will be remembered as a transition. What was before could be seen as staleness where many in the elite of Arab politics had sought to maintain the status quo at all costs, only to reap acute changes that uprooted their regimes and in many cases shattered the networks that had sustained their powers. Yet, the promise that came with the changes quickly disappeared, and large sections of Arabs were left with crushed dreams, with many having to flee their homes to build futures in far flung places.

As this series has tried to show, the past fifteen years brought some achievements and many failures. But transitions are, by default, transient. They ought to lead the societies undergoing them to new destinations. Amidst the few achievements, many defeats, and various challenges in the past fifteen years, the Arab world is now looking at a spectrum of futures.

One future entails divisions of Arab countries, whether at the peripheries or the core of the Arab world. In optimistic scenarios, these divisions could usher in forms of federalisms that maintain some cohesiveness in these countries’ national security and sense of identity. Here, federalism could, in some cases, spare these societies further infighting, and with time, federalism could become a workable way for these societies to establish functional political and economic institutions and ways of operation. In other scenarios, however, some of these Arab countries could witness sharp divisions in which segments of their societies cleave away from the others, and in the process destroy the national identities that had gathered them together in the past century, since the fall of the Ottomans. Here, time could wither away the commonalities that have gathered these social groups together. We might see a regression towards the situation that had existed in parts of the Arab world centuries ago, in which statelets of narrow identities, often in the fold of Arabness and often against it, become the norm.

This could give rise to a wave of thinking in which minorities, particularly in the wider Levant, see their future better off in enclaves, and not in large, centralised countries with an overarching Arab identity. Such a situation would be yet another devastating blow to the notion of Arab nationalism that has been on a weakened trajectory for at least three decades.

In this scenario, religious factionalism and sectarianism would thrive. The more communities in the Arab world, especially minorities, take refuge from threats they perceive in narrow identities, the more insular these communities would be, and the more sectarianism would be entrenched as the political anchor and frame of reference for these communities.

If minorities embrace isolationism and insularity, the same mindset would prevail amongst the majority. In this scenario, old or new forms of political Islam - as well as of political Christianity - would return or emerge in different parts of the Arab world, primarily but not only in the wider Levant. And amidst the factionalism and sectarianism, we could see new versions of coalitions of minorities in the face of headwinds they sense might come from within the majority. Even within the majority, in this scenario we would likely see the return of old distinctions, for example the emergence of new expressions of political Sunnism and political Shiism.

The big Arab countries with more cohesive societies are not threatened by such divisions. But they face a set of acute challenges in which the economic and the political float over what appears to be a calm ocean of social comity. But the social and economic pressures some of these societies have been subjected to for many years, and the lack of avenues for expressing frustrations, could make these waters erupt into nasty storms.

In the glamorous centres of current Arab modernisation, largely in the Arabian Peninsula, the future appears glittered with potential. And although glitter could entail gold as well as cheap metals, what seems to be coming to these societies is largely more progress and opportunities. And yet, detachment from the rest of the Arab world, and a search for new forms of identities, especially amidst skewed and diverse demographics, also seem in the cards. With that, these societies will also have to think carefully about their place in the world. Many in the Gulf might find the model of world cities - such as Singapore now and Hong Kong in a previous era - inspiring. But world cities always face the difficult task of creating and maintaining balances with much larger powers with whom they have different interests. This is far from easy, and is fraught with risks, especially at a time, like ours, in which global geopolitics are undergoing a radical realignment. The societies of the Arabian Peninsula have major resources at their disposal, and some of them have demonstrated, in the past two decades, marvellous agility and shrewdness, in dealing with challenges and opportunities in the region and beyond. And yet, these societies might well forge their futures at a time, many of their segments would be sailing away from the culture to which these societies have been anchored for centuries.

Whether in the parts of the Arab world that will likely see further polarisations and potentially divisions, or in the parts that could witness further socioeconomic challenges, or where the future seems full of potential yet also of big questions about identity and destination, the Arab world is constrained by the reach and power of non-Arab actors whose projects collide on its lands. This situation is the result of Arab failure, not in the past fifteen years, but in the past five decades, to create for itself a workable socio-political project in which a majority of its people believe. In those five decades, all the political projects that had once stirred the imagination of a section of Arabs have collapsed. Amidst the vacuum, the Arabs almost unconsciously have abdicated their responsibility about their own future. As Naguib Mahfouz portrayed it in his insightful novel “Adrift on the Nile”, something is dead, perhaps a crime have been committed (in this case, against Arab future), but the onlookers are divided between the bewildered, the perpetrators, the resigned, and the forsaken.

Arab prospects in the foreseeable future need not be like that. As this series has presented, there lurk in all parts of the Arab world generators of power, sources of dynamism, real wealth, and a drive amongst large sections of young Arabs for forging for themselves and for their societies different realities. And yet, talk of potential without a serious sense of will for change would, at this stage, be delusional. As a famous notion in Islamic theology goes, the Divine does not change the conditions of a group of people until they change the conditions within themselves.

Transitions could, at their end, point to Elysian Fields in the horizon, or be omens of approaching a purgatory in which atonement for long-accumulating sins, would be long and painful. Arab collective choices in the past have put many of them on the route to the latter. And yet, Arab history include moments, admittedly rare, in which the Arabs, at moments of peril, saw the abysses they were approaching, and managed, with serious will, to resuscitate the potential to create different, brighter futures.