Arab Spring
The 2011 wave of uprisings that toppled four Arab rulers, produced one democracy, two failed states, and a decade of war.
On 17 December 2010 a fruit seller in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid named Mohamed Bouazizi had his cart confiscated by a municipal official, was slapped and humiliated when he protested, and set himself on fire outside the governor's office. He died on 4 January. By then Tunisia was in revolt, and on 14 January President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled for twenty-three years, boarded a plane to Saudi Arabia. Within weeks the same demand, the people want the fall of the regime, was being chanted in Cairo, Sanaa, Manama, Benghazi, and Damascus.
Why then
The grievances were old. What was new was a combination. Arab states had unusually young populations with unusually high rates of educated unemployment, a demographic bulge with nothing to do. Global food prices hit record highs in late 2010 and early 2011, and Arab states are the world's largest per-capita wheat importers, so bread prices moved fast. Satellite television, above all Al Jazeera, and social media let people in each country watch protesters in the next one succeed, which broke the assumption that these regimes could not fall.
Ben Ali went in twenty-eight days. Hosni Mubarak, after eighteen days of occupation of Tahrir Square and the army's refusal to fire on the crowds, resigned on 11 February 2011. Muammar Gaddafi was killed in October after a NATO air campaign. Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh signed away power in November under a Gulf-brokered deal.
Why it mostly failed
The outcomes diverged sharply, and the reasons are structural rather than cultural.
The monarchies survived. Morocco and Jordan conceded constitutional reforms and rode it out. The Gulf states bought their way through: Saudi Arabia announced enormous welfare packages, and Saudi and Emirati troops crossed the causeway into Bahrain in March 2011 to put down the protests there. Oil revenue is a shock absorber that republics without it did not have.
Militaries decided the republics. In Tunisia the army was small, professionally separate from the ruling party, and unwilling to shoot, so the regime fell and a transition happened. In Egypt the army was the regime's core institution and the owner of a large slice of the economy, so it removed Mubarak to protect itself, tolerated an elected Muslim Brotherhood government for one year, and took the state back in the coup of July 2013.
Where the security forces split along sectarian or tribal lines rather than holding or standing aside, the state itself collapsed. Syria, Libya, and Yemen became civil wars, then proxy wars, with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Emirates, and Russia funding rival sides.
What was left
Tunisia was the single democratic survivor, and in 2021 its president suspended parliament and ruled by decree, closing that exception too. The regional death toll from the wars that followed runs to well over half a million, and the refugee flows from Syria reshaped European politics, feeding the nationalist parties that surged after 2015.
The lesson drawn by the region's rulers was not that they should reform. It was that Mubarak fell because he hesitated and Assad survived because he did not, and repression across the Arab world is measurably harsher now than it was in 2010. The lesson drawn by the protesters was that removing a dictator is the easy part, and that a revolution without an organized party to inherit the state hands it to whoever already has one, which in 2011 meant the army and the Islamists.