An Empirical Look To The Arab Spring: Causes And Consequences (original) (raw)
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The Arab Spring: Causes, Conditions, and Driving Forces
The Arab world (and the MENA region in general) tends to be perceived as a zone of instability where various wars, violent conflicts, and other upheavals are likely. 1 The protests and revolutions of 2011, known as the "Arab Spring," fit quite well into the stormy history of this region (e.g., Grinin & Korotayev, 2016a, 2016b; Korotayev et al., 2016). However, from the 1980s, the region had seemed to settle into a period of stable authoritarianism. After decades of political hibernation (Gardner, 2011), one could hardly fail to be impressed by the unexpectedness and energy of the social explosion, the enormous geographic scope of the Arab Spring "from the Ocean to the Gulf" (e.g., Mirskiy, 2011), the synchronicity of the "color revolutions" and social protests, and the prevalence in 2011 of sociopolitical (rather than interethnic or interconfessional) motifs. The upheavals and protests involved more than a dozen Arab countries, including 1 On the revolutionary events in the MENA region in the 1950s-1990s see Chapter "Revolutionary Waves and Lines of the Twentieth Century" (Grinin & Grinin, 2022, in this volume).
Understanding the Arab Spring: One Region, Several Puzzles, and Many Explanations
Government and Opposition, 2015
This comprehensive review essay ties together the latest scholarly interventions from the study of the Arab Spring. It finds that beyond a mass of descriptive generalizations, the best works on the uprisings focus upon three questions. First, how did the Arab Spring begin – that is, what were the causative origins of popular mobilization in these non-democratic states? Second, how did national insurrections that varied in length and escalation become a truly regional wave of contention, spreading so quickly across borders? Third, why did regime trajectories and outcomes vary so widely, from revolutionary insurrections to leadership survival to civil war?
THE ARAB SPRING: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
Arab Studies Quarterly, 2014
"The quantitative analysis of the Arab Spring events is a rather difficult task. Respective difficulties are related to the variety of factors affecting social instability, and to individual peculiarities of historical, cultural, socio-economic, and political processes in the region. As a result of the research, we found out that the processes of social and political destabilization in the countries of Arab Spring were caused by a complex set of factors. The most significant factors that tended to reduce the scale of sociopolitical destabilization during the Arab Spring have turned out to be the following: the ability of the government to reduce social tensions and the presence of “immunity” to internal conflicts. However, such indicators as structural and demographical characteristics and external influences turned out to be less significant in the context of the Arab Spring. It should be mentioned that the significance of the external influences indicator notably increases when the model is used to account for the death toll resultant from anti-government protests. We also discuss the possibility of applying the developed model of sociopolitical destabilization to forecast sociopolitical upheavals in future."
Causes of the Arab Spring: A Critical Analysis
This research paper examines thoroughly and critically all the causes and facilitators of the Arab Spring - from twitter and facebook to the relative deprivation of the numerous youth in the Arab World. In addition, this research paper for the first time outlines the necessary and sufficient conditions under which regime change was effectuated and, thus, explains the resilience of certain regimes and the vulnerability of others.
THE LEGACY OF THE ARAB SPRING: NEW FORCES AND FAULT LINES
"The Legacy of the Arab Spring: New Forces and Fault Lines," R/evolutions: Global Trends & Regional Issues, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2016
How did the Arab Spring change the Middle East? That is the main question on which this fourth issue of R/evolutions wants to zoom in. This issue therefore is divided in three parts: 'The Arab Spring in Perspective' provides an overview and some historical context of the Arab Uprisings to highlight its increasing complexity and interconnectedness in a globalizing world with various competing political groups. The second part, 'Unraveling the Uprisings,' focuses on the “Spring” itself by explaining the role of internal and external actors, and uncovering some underexplored dimensions. By deconstructing these ‘revolutions’ this part aims to provides an insightful glimpse of their transformative potential. The last part,' New Fault Lines & Legacies' will assess how MENA has been transformed by the Arab uprisings. Firstly by explaining the origins, drivers and impact of sectarianization in the region and then by focusing on Tunisia, the only successful democratic transition in the region triggered by the Arab Spring.
Revisiting "The Arab Spring", 2018
The article presents a critical analysis of the imposed construct of ‘The Arab Spring’. Instead it presents an analytic description of a more realistic picture of what happened in the Arab World. There was discontent fomenting among the Arab peoples following what they saw had happened to them, not by them, starting with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, resulting in its breakup as a unified nation, the dismantling of its army and its institutions, the killing of its President, and the growing wave of the ‘Islamic Caliphate’ sweeping the Arab world. Egypt is now, six years after the second phase of the Revolution (2011-2013) growing into a democracy that is born out of Egypt’s historical identity, the national character of Egyptians, and the unique societal fabric of integrated diversity that rejects extremism and western-imposed models.
Perturbations in the Arab World during the Arab Spring: A General Analysis (Springer, 2018)
2018
This chapter offers an analysis of the conditions in the MENA countries on the eve of the Arab Spring in the World System perspective, as well as causes (internal and external, general and specific) and certain consequences of the Arab revolutions in certain countries, the MENA region and in the World System. We will discuss Arab revolutions in a wide historical and theoretical context. It is very useful to compare the causes of revolutions in modern and previous epochs, in Arab and others countries; to find similarities and specificity. For example, in Arab revolutions, a very important role was played by new information technologies. The revolutionary sentiments are especially fueled by the diffusion of radical ideas and ideologies in a society, as well as by a rapid urbanization, growing youth share in the demographic composition and rapidly increasing education level of a part of population in combination with poor education of the other part. Thus, the rapid unregulated changes, and increasing structural disproportions may bring a society to a modernization trap which often causes revolutions and other political upheavals. All these phenomena were present in the Arab countries on the eve of the Arab Spring, especially in Egypt and Tunisia.