Democracy and Reform in the Middle East and Asia SocialProtest and Authoritarian Rule after the Arab Spring Edited by Amin Saikal and Amitav Acharya (original) (raw)
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International Studies, 2020
Political developments, such as the ‘Arab Spring’, have led the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) towards instability, unrest and severe sectarian confrontations. Nearly 2 years before the ‘Arab Spring’, ‘the Iranian Green Movement’ swept over the country and led to the expectations that Iran would undergo a fundamental political change. The article addresses an important question as to why the 2009 Iranian unrest known as the ‘Green Movement’ did not lead to regime change, while on the other hand, the ‘Arab Spring’ ultimately led to the change of political systems in Tunisia and Egypt. Further, some significant factors are highlighted anticipating the degree of stability and instability for the future of political regimes in the MENA region.
The “Arab Spring” as Seen through the Prism of the 1979 Iranian Revolution
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2012
Revolutions are by nature unpredictable and unsettling. That the wave of revolutions in North Africa and the Arab Middle East began so unexpectedly and spread with such speed, leading to the fall of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, has added to the concern regarding the “new order” that is to come after the initial euphoria. From the outset, the fear has been that these revolutions will follow the same trajectory as Iran did in 1979—in other words, that they will marginalize those who launched the revolutions and provide the grounds for the rise to power of the most savvy, purposeful, and best organized of the opposition groups, namely, the Islamists. Yet when one considers the recent uprisings in the Arab world through the prism of Iran's experiences in 1979, the parallels are not so evident. Mindful of the variations and distinctions between each of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, it would appear that in broad terms, and beyond superficial similariti...
Jebat: Malaysian Journal of History, Politics & Strategic Studies, 2018
This article reviews the two major revolutionary events occurred in the Muslim world- the 1979 Iran’s Revolution and the 2011 Arab Uprisings. In particular, it highlights the snapshots of events’ background and examines the factors that ignited the mass uprisings, both in Iran in 1979 and selected countries in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. These two momentous events were significant in the context of Muslim politics as the nature and outcome of these events shared several common aspects for instance the elements of popular mass protest to topple an autocratic regime, ‘exports’ of the revolution to the global Muslim community as well as the prospect for political change in the countries involved. The methodology of this work employs document analysis, predominantly through published reports and secondary sources. This article revealed that serious economic downturn and unemployment crisis, along with the persistence of autocratic leadership and centralisation of power are the core reasons why the Iranian revolutionaries in 1979 and the Arab protesters in 2011 took to the streets to demand economic and political reform as well as an immediate resignation of their respective ruling regime. Regarding the trajectory of post-Arab Uprisings development in Syria, Yemen and Libya, the situation seems unpredictable, let alone to determine the prospect for democratic transition. Contrary to Iran’s case, those few Arab countries in the post-Uprisings are very unlikely to experience any holistic political change in the near future due to the escalation of on-going domestic tensions and global conflicts across the region.
The Arab Spring| A Revolution of the Imagination
International Journal of Communication, 2011
The new forms of cultural articulation we are seeing in the uprisings of the Arab Middle East are inseparable from the recent history of mediated culture in the region. In the production, distribution, and consumption of satellite television, as well as in the use and consumption of the global Internet, a new role for the work of the imagination has transformed culture and placed individuals at the centers of their own narratives in profound ways. This has led to the rejection of the tired, official narratives that have long dominated official mediated production in the Arab Middle East, and it continues to encourages Arabs to imagine themselves as subjects (and not, as the official narratives would have it, objects) of history. The unexpected uprisings of the "Arab Spring" demonstrate that new forms of political articulation and significantly new forms of political practice are taking root in the Arab world. In Egypt, this new relationship between government and governed-i.e., people in the streets refusing to obey the state-violates conventional wisdom about national political life. Most observers of Egypt have long argued that years of a dilapidated educational system, an ineffectual pretense of a democratic infrastructure, and the continued valorization of patriarchal culture had left Egyptians an apolitical, simple-minded, and ultimately fatalistic mass of apathetic (young) people.