The story of the Egyptian demonstrations continues to unfold (photograph courtesy of Rami Raoof under Creative Commons license)
The current events unfolding in Cairo offer little in the way of narrative comfort. Instead, news commentators, analysts, even participants—weighing in breathlessly from the street on Twitter or Al Jazeera—seem struck by ambiguous meaning of events. Is looting spontaneous or sponsored by the Mubarak government to provoke requests for government protection? There are no clear successors to a Mubarak government, and no clear mechanism for a non-military succession. Why have the police abandoned the protests?