The Arab Spring Pdf

[Aliza Pointon]

The Arab Spring was a series of pro-democracy uprisings that enveloped several largely Muslim countries, including Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Bahrain. The events in these nations generally began in the spring of 2011, which led to the name. However, the political and social impact of these popular uprisings remains significant today, years after many of them ended.

The Arab Spring began in December 2010 when Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the arbitrary seizing of his vegetable stand by police over failure to obtain a permit.

The participants in these grassroots movements sought increased social freedoms and greater participation in the political process. Notably, this includes the Tahrir Square uprisings in Cairo, Egypt and similar protests in Bahrain.

While the uprising in Tunisia led to some improvements in the country from a human-rights perspective, not all of the nations that witnessed such social and political upheaval in the spring of 2011 changed for the better.

Most notably, in Egypt, where early changes arising from the Arab Spring gave many hope after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, authoritarian rule has apparently returned. Following the controversial election of Mohamed Morsi in 2012, a coup led by defense minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi installed the latter as president in 2013, and he remains in power today.

In Libya, meanwhile, authoritarian dictator Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was overthrown in October 2011, during a violent civil war, and he was tortured (literally dragged through the streets) and executed by opposition fighters. Video footage of his death was seen by millions online.

This has contributed, in part, to the ongoing worldwide refugee crisis, which has seen thousands flee Libya, most often by boat across the Mediterranean Sea, with hopes of new opportunities in Europe.

And in Bahrain, peaceful pro-democracy protests in the capital Manama in 2011 and 2012 were violently suppressed by the government of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Officially, the country has a constitutional monarchy form of government, but personal freedoms remain limited.

December 17, 2010: Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire outside a local government office in an act of protest after being arrested by police for not having a permit to run a vegetable stall. Street protests begin soon after his death throughout the country.

Arab Uprisings. BBC News.
The Arab Spring: The Uprising and Its Significance. Trinity University.
The Arab Spring: A Year of Revolution. NPR.
The Arab Spring: Five Years On: Amnesty International.
The Arab Spring: Six Years Later. Huffington Post.
Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark. Al Jazeera.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: Facing down rebellion. BBC.
Timeline: Arab Spring. Al Jazeera.

The wave of initial revolutions and protests faded by mid-2012, as many Arab Spring demonstrations were met with violent responses from authorities,[5][6][7] pro-government militias, counterdemonstrators, and militaries. These attacks were answered with violence from protesters in some cases.[8][9][10] Multiple large-scale conflicts followed: the Syrian civil war;[11][12] the rise of ISIL,[13] insurgency in Iraq and the following civil war;[14] the Egyptian Crisis, election and removal from office of Mohamed Morsi, and subsequent unrest and insurgency;[15] the Libyan Crisis; and the Yemeni crisis and subsequent civil war.[16] Regimes that lacked major oil wealth and hereditary succession arrangements were more likely to undergo regime change.[17]

A power struggle continued after the immediate response to the Arab Spring. While leadership changed and regimes were held accountable, power vacuums opened across the Arab world. Ultimately, it resulted in a contentious battle between a consolidation of power by religious elites and the growing support for democracy in many Muslim-majority states.[18] The early hopes that these popular movements would end corruption, increase political participation, and bring about greater economic equity quickly collapsed in the wake of the counter-revolutionary moves by foreign state actors in Yemen,[19] the regional and international military interventions in Bahrain and Yemen, and the destructive civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen.[20]

Some have referred to the succeeding and still ongoing conflicts as the Arab Winter.[11][12][14][15][16] Recent uprisings in Sudan and Algeria show that the conditions that started the Arab Spring have not faded and political movements against authoritarianism and exploitation are still occurring.[21] Since late 2018, multiple uprisings and protest movements in Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt have been seen as a continuation of the Arab Spring.[22][23]

As of 2021[update], multiple conflicts are still continuing that might be seen as a result of the Arab Spring. The Syrian Civil War has caused massive political instability and economic hardship in Syria, with the Syrian pound plunging to new lows.[24] In Libya, a major civil war recently concluded, with foreign powers intervening.[25][26] In Yemen, a civil war continues to affect the country.[27] In Lebanon, a major banking crisis is threatening the country's economy as well as that of neighboring Syria.

The world watched the events of the Arab Spring unfold, "gripped by the narrative of a young generation peacefully rising up against oppressive authoritarianism to secure a more democratic political system and a brighter economic future".[20] The Arab Spring is widely believed to have been instigated by dissatisfaction, particularly of youth and unions, with the rule of local governments, though some have speculated that wide gaps in income levels and pressures caused by the Great Recession may have had a hand as well.[34] Some activists had taken part in programs sponsored by the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy, but the US government claimed that they did not initiate the uprisings.[35]

Numerous factors led to the protests, including issues such as reform,[36] human rights violations, political corruption, economic decline, unemployment, extreme poverty, and a number of demographic structural factors,[37] such as a large percentage of educated but dissatisfied youth within the entire population.[38][39] Catalysts for the revolts in all Northern African and Persian Gulf countries included the concentration of wealth in the hands of monarchs in power for decades, insufficient transparency of its redistribution, corruption, and especially the refusal of the youth to accept the status quo.[40]

Some protesters looked to the Turkish model as an ideal (contested but peaceful elections, fast-growing but liberal economy, secular constitution but Islamist government).[41][42][43][44] Other analysts blamed the rise in food prices on commodity traders and the conversion of crops to ethanol.[45] Yet others have claimed that the context of high rates of unemployment and corrupt political regimes led to dissent movements within the region.[46][47]

In the wake of the Arab Spring protests, a considerable amount of attention focused on the role of social media and digital technologies in allowing citizens within areas affected by "the Arab Uprisings" as a means for collective activism to circumvent state-operated media channels.[48] The influence of social media on political activism during the Arab Spring has, however, been much debated.[49][50][51] Protests took place both in states with a very high level of Internet usage (such as Bahrain with 88% of its population online in 2011) and in states with some of the lowest Internet penetration (Yemen and Libya).[52]

Facebook, Twitter, and other major social media played a key role in the movement of Egyptian and Tunisian activists in particular.[52][58] Nine out of ten Egyptians and Tunisians responded to a poll that they used Facebook to organize protests and spread awareness.[53] This large population of young Egyptian men referred to themselves as "the Facebook generation", exemplifying their escape from their non-modernized past.[59] Furthermore, 28% of Egyptians and 29% of Tunisians from the same poll said that blocking Facebook greatly hindered and/or disrupted communication. Social media sites were a platform for different movements formed by many frustrated citizens, including the 2008 "April 6 Youth Movement" organized by Ahmed Mahed, which set out to organize and promote a nationwide labor strike and which inspired the later creation of the "Progressive Youth of Tunisia".[60]

During the Arab Spring, people created pages on Facebook to raise awareness about alleged crimes against humanity, such as police brutality in the Egyptian Revolution (see Wael Ghonim and Death of Khaled Mohamed Saeed).[61] Whether the project of raising awareness was primarily pursued by Arabs themselves or simply advertised by Western social media users is a matter of debate. Jared Keller, a journalist for The Atlantic, claims that most activists and protesters used Facebook (among other social media) to organize; however, what influenced Iran was "good old-fashioned word of mouth". Jared Keller argued that the sudden and anomalous social media output was caused from Westerners witnessing the situation(s), and then broadcasting them. The Middle East and North Africa used texting, emailing, and blogging only to organize and communicate information about internal local protests.[62]

A study by Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina and Christopher Wilson of the United Nations Development Program concluded that "social media in general, and Facebook in particular, provided new sources of information the regime could not easily control and were crucial in shaping how citizens made individual decisions about participating in protests, the logistics of protest, and the likelihood of success."[63] Marc Lynch of George Washington University said, "while social media boosters envisioned the creation of a new public sphere based on dialogue and mutual respect, the reality is that Islamists and their adversaries retreat to their respective camps, reinforcing each other's prejudices while throwing the occasional rhetorical bomb across the no-man's land that the center has become."[63] Lynch also stated in a Foreign Policy article, "There is something very different about scrolling through pictures and videos of unified, chanting Yemeni or Egyptian crowds demanding democratic change and waking up to a gory image of a headless 6-year-old girl on your Facebook news feed."[64]

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