E. I. ZELENEV Doctor of Historical Sciences Faculty of Oriental Studies, Saint Petersburg State University Arab countries Keywords:, mass political unrest, turmoil, historical knowledge History is reflexive. Translated from Greek, "history" simply means "study", and study is possible if there is a subject (who studies) and an object (subject of study). Historical knowledge is never just knowledge about something in the past, but it is always knowledge about oneself, at least about one's own relation to something in the past. As Robin George Collingwood wrote, the historian is not a God who looks at the world from above and from the outside. "He is a man, and a man of his place and time. He looks at the past from the point of view of the present, and he looks at all countries and civilizations from his own point of view. This point of view is correct only for him and for people who are in the same conditions as him. But for him, it is correct. He must hold fast to it, because if it were not for this point of view, he would not see anything at all. " 1 BIFURCATION POINT**: Back to the Future There are several possible historical points of view on events in the Arab world from a rational and critical perspective: 1. Unrest and unrest, which in some cases turn into an armed struggle with the authorities, have a purely internal predestination, and their coincidence in time in a number of Arab countries is accidental. 2. There is a systemic crisis in an important segment of international relations - the model of public administration in the Arab world. 3. The most important factor is the external factor, which is why all the past revolutions are so similar to each other. 4. We are not dealing with a crisis of public administration or a regional problem, or even an international conspiracy against the Arabs, but with one of the stages of the "reset" of the system of international relations at the global level, the initiative of which comes from areas that are not directly ... Read more