Popular uprisings in the Arab world, especially in Egypt, reflect a desperation for stability and for the government to provide basic services, and the US has little influence, according to Peter Mandaville from George Mason University in Washington.

Professor Mandaville also believes the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Syria is the ''harbinger of a new order'' in the Middle East, which is destined for a 20-year period of turmoil and the dismantling of national boundaries similar to that which took place in Yugoslavia from 1991 onwards.

In Melbourne to give the keynote address to an RMIT conference on Thursday, Professor Mandaville also suggests the West is seduced by the apparent triumph of Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in elections, and does not realise the region has already entered the post-Islamist age.

''Those who thronged Tahrir Square [in Cairo] in 2011 were not after democracy but a government that would be accountable and get things done,'' he said.

He said the US wanted to be ''in tune with the streets'' but was seen as handmaiden to the authoritarian regimes being rejected.

In Egypt it turned a blind eye to how people were treated, before and after the revolution, in return for support of the broad US agenda: peace with Israel, overflight rights for US planes and privileged access to the Suez Canal.

Professor Mandaville said the Egyptian army did not want to run the country but wanted to protect its privileges from civilian oversight. The army ran large chunks of the Egyptian economy, he said.

He said Syria represented the Balkanisation of the Middle East. A long-term perspective could see events there as a ''deferred nation-building exercise'' and a rejection of the boundaries set up by colonial powers after World War I.

For example, Iraq should have been three countries - one Sunni, one Shiite, and one Kurdish - although he did not think Iraq would disintegrate now. But Syria, Lebanon and other nations might.

The West would have to accept a diminished influence in the region, with emerging democracies - especially Turkey, but also such countries as India, Brazil and Indonesia - taking a larger role.

On political Islam, Professor Mandaville said such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood seemed to be the winners from the Arab Spring, but in fact ''we are now firmly in the era of post-Islamism''.

He said Islamist parties had diluted themselves in the attempt to become politically acceptable, and now generally endorsed Western solutions of democracy and neo-liberal capitalism under an Islamic veneer. Traditional Islamist parties had lost their monopoly to a host of emerging new social movements that had captured the imagination of young Muslims around the world, who were themselves ''incredibly enmeshed in global forms of communication and networking''.

Some, such as Egypt's Salafis, were even more conservative than the Brotherhood.

''The Muslim Brotherhood is working with a 1920s Marxist-Leninist model of what a political movement looks like, and the world doesn't work like that any more.''