The Arab Spring and the Challenge of Nation-Building
by Samer Badawi
The series of popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring began in 2011. They quickly toppled the autocratic governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen and sparked mass protests throughout the Middle East and North Africa. They set off a civil war in Syria. Most observers agree that the rapid political upheaval that began in 2011 ended with the crushing of revolt in Syria in 2012. But the core issues at the heart of the Arab Spring remain.
The Syrian civil war set off by the Arab Spring has had especially dire consequences. The war itself has killed more than half-a-million people. According to relief agencies, the ensuing refugee crisis has been the worst since World War II, with more than 13.5 million of Syria’s 18.4 million people — or 73 percent — displaced by the conflict there.
Despite this, stirrings of the Arab Spring continue in Algeria, Jordan, and the occupied Palestinian territories where near-weekly protests against government mismanagement continue. That the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad survived thanks to a relentless campaign of Russian airstrikes brings the story of the Arab Spring full circle — to a history mired by external powers seeking to control the region’s oil wealth and its more than 400 million people.
Like so many powerful stories, though, the Arab Spring began with a single human act.
The Spark
By all accounts, Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor from a small town in central Tunisia, kept to himself, selling fruit from a simple cart. It was the kind of work he had done since the age of ten to support his widowed mother and five siblings.
On December 17, 2010, on an otherwise ordinary day, a government inspector harassed Bouazizi and threatened to confiscate his fruit. When Bouazizi resisted, the official slapped him and seized his property anyway.
Despite several attempts to log a complaint with municipal agencies that morning, Bouazizi was beaten twice. He was unable to retrieve the few possessions with which he earned his meager living. Humiliated and ignored, he stood outside the local governor’s office, doused his clothes in paint thinner, and tragically set himself on fire.
When Bouazizi died from his burns less than three weeks later, massive protests erupted throughout Tunisia. The protests toppled the 21-year regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in just 10 days. The Arab Spring was born.
The Kindling
Just three weeks after Bouazizi’s death, on January 4, 2011, another outpouring of protest began in Cairo, capital of the Arab world’s most populous country, Egypt. Hosni Mubarak had ruled there for nearly three decades.
Most of Mubarak’s rule was under a so-called Emergency Law, instituted by Mubarak’s predecessor. It effectively criminalized any political activity not sanctioned by the government. This left Egyptians with no independent press, no protections against arbitrary detention, and no way to organize against the government without risking arrest, torture, or worse.
It was little wonder, then, that when an estimated half-a-million citizens packed Cairo’s Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011, to demand Mubarak’s ouster, the government was caught completely off-guard. Confrontations between the military and protesters cost more than 800 lives.
By February 11, Mubarak was forced to resign. It was an outcome so unthinkable just weeks earlier that Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman, announcing the resignation on state television, pronounced, “May God help everybody.”
To understand how so many Egyptians managed to organize such a massive show of grassroots civil disobedience — one that became known as the “Twitter Revolution” — we first have to understand what economists call the Arab world’s “youth bulge.”
According to the World Bank, working-age men and women under the age of 30 comprise up to 65 percent of the Arab world. As many as 40 percent of them are unemployed. Analysts estimate that the region needs to create some 80 million new jobs in the next 15 years alone to simply maintain this status quo. At the same time, with jobs scarce, these unemployed millions have little access to financial services — like affordable loans or safe places to save (i.e., banks) — that might allow them to start and grow their own small businesses.
Mohamed Bouazizi was among the 80 percent of the Arab world that does not have access to a bank account. That statistic, in part, explains why the World Bank ranks the Middle East and North Africa last among the six regions it measures for “financial inclusion.” In practice, this means that only five percent of adults in the region have access to formal loans that can help them weather financial hardship, finance schooling, or start their own businesses.
Combine this lack of opportunity with a regional poverty rate exceeding 50 percent, and the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were bound to be just the beginning of the Arab Spring. Many hoped that the ensuing uprisings would result in widespread nation-building, or the creation of new, unified states after the toppling of old regimes.
The Fire
By October 2011, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was gone, and fighting had broken out in Yemen and Bahrain. Previously unheard-of protests were being reported in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, too, where absolute monarchies showed no tolerance for political dissent. But no country was to leave as lasting a mark on the Arab Spring as Syria.
Peaceful protests there, which began in March 2011, were met with a brutal response by the Assad regime, which vowed to maintain power at all costs. Assad himself, along with his late father, Hafez, who ruled Syria for 29 years, hails from a minority sect, the Druze, which claims close ties to Iran and its shia branch of Islam.
What began as an uprising quickly devolved into a brutal civil war, fueled by outside interests. The historical kinship between the Druze and shia Islam prompted the Iranian government to lend financial and material support to the Assad regime, including through its proxy Lebanese militia Hezbollah. In neighboring Saudi Arabia, the majority of the population belongs to the sunni branch of Islam. With Iran involved in Syria, the Saudis began bankrolling opposition to the Assad regime.
Making matters worse, Saudi funds reportedly went to extremist groups early in the conflict, giving Assad and his military an excuse to target civilian areas — all in the name of “fighting terrorism.” Saudi-funded groups also splintered into other militias, some with allegiances to neighboring Turkey, where the government there feared that a large population of minority Kurds along the border would destabilize the country.
Out of this complex web of battling groups emerged the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, a group that sought to reestablish an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East. The group’s tactics were horrifying, leading to widespread condemnation from the international community and helping to forge a consensus around the aim of destroying ISIS.
Assad made a point of casting himself as a champion of that cause, successfully branding any opposition to his regime as “terror.” The Syrian dictator found a willing ally in Russian President Vladimir Putin, who dispatched fighter planes to the region and established airbases with Assad’s consent. The ensuing air war exacted a devastating toll on Syria’s civilian population, pushing the casualty numbers past half-a-million and leveling entire towns and cities to the ground.
Facing a growing influx of refugees from this humanitarian catastrophe, European powers, which had earlier called for Assad to step down, began signaling their willingness to once again accept the regime as Syria’s legitimate government. At the same time, Putin’s seemingly permanent military presence in the country tempered the United States’ earlier insistence that, in the words of President Barack Obama, “Assad must go.”
Eight years later, there is little doubt that what began as pro-democracy protests in Syria have been crushed, taking with them the Arab Spring that inspired them.
The Aftermath
Amid the tragedy of Syria, much of the hope inspired by the Arab Spring has been rolled back by a return to autocracy and the political and economic duress it helps to maintain. In Egypt, the democratically elected government that followed Mubarak’s fall was removed in a coup by military strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The Emergency Law continues, and government forces routinely silence dissent through arbitrary arrests and indiscriminate violence.
At the same time, the core issues at the heart of the Arab Spring — disengaged youth, unemployment, widespread poverty, and a lack of economic opportunity — remain, suggesting ongoing volatility and the prospect of more instability. Could a second Arab Spring be in the offing? What does the Arab world’s experiment with democracy reveal about the challenges of nation-building? These and other questions may define America’s response to pro-democracy movements for years to come.
Wael Ghonim: Spokesman for a Revolution
Writing in 2011, just two months after protesters forced Egypt’s longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak to step down, veteran Egyptian diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei penned this profile of Wael Ghonim, one of the leaders of the Egyptian revolution, for Time magazine, which had named Ghonim one of the year’s “Time 100” for his role in the country’s revolution.
Wael Ghonim embodies the youth who constitute the majority of Egyptian society — a young man who excelled and became a Google executive but, as with many of his generation, remained apolitical due to loss of hope that things could change in a society permeated for decades with a culture of fear.
Over the past few years, Wael, 30, began working outside the box to make his peers understand that only their unstoppable people power could effect real change. He quickly grasped that social media, notably Facebook, were emerging as the most powerful communication tools to mobilize and develop ideas. . . .
The response was miraculous: a movement that started with thousands on Jan. 25 ended with 12 million Egyptians removing Hosni Mubarak and his regime. What Wael and the young Egyptians did spread like wildfire across the Arab world. . .
This article was originally published in the Summer 2019 issue of Bill of Rights in Action (BRIA), the quarterly curricular magazine of Constitutional Rights Foundation. Click here for a classroom activity on this article, plus writing and discussion questions for use with high school students. You can also subscribe to BRIA for free here.
