ABSTRACT
Introduction It became fashionable for political and economic pundits to declare in 2011 that as a result of the arrival of the Arab Spring, the world had become a more dangerous place, and that the risks associated with conducting crossborder business had risen. One could perhaps legitimately make such an argument in the countries directly affected by the Spring, but was crossborder risk in 2011 really more generally perilous than it was in, say, 1988 or 2001, when global shock waves resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the War on Terror? Not in my view-yet the chorus of analysts’ voices made it sound as if the Arab Spring had an equally profound impact on global trade and investment.
