Arab Spring

• 1. Introduction

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  The Arab Spring began with a confiscated fruit stand. On the 17th of December 2010, in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, a municipal inspector seized the wares of Mohamed Bouazizi. He could not find other work and had been selling fruit from a roadside stand. About an hour later, he poured gasoline over himself and set himself on fire. The first protests broke out in Sidi Bouzid on the 18th of December 2010. Bouazizi died on the 4th of January 2011.

  What followed was a wave of pro-democracy protests, uprisings and armed rebellions across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. Some toppled rulers. Others ended in civil war. This documentary asks why one man's despair travelled so far. It asks who named the movement, and whether the people in the streets ever accepted that name. It asks what the crowds were really after, and why such similar protests ended in such different places. It also asks whether the story is over, because conflicts that some trace back to it were still burning in 2025.

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• 2. A Borrowed Name

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  Marc Lynch, a political scientist, described Arab Spring as a term he may have unintentionally coined in a Foreign Policy article of the 6th of January 2011. The American political journal may indeed have been the first to apply the words to these events. The people in the streets chose other language. They spoke of an uprising, which in Arabic is intifada, of an awakening called sahwa, and of a renaissance called nahda. They reached for karama, meaning dignity, and thawra, meaning revolution. One phrase, al-marar al-Arabi, meant the Arab bitterness. Their best-known slogan was ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām.

  Critics see the borrowed label as a quiet act of editing. Some authors argue that Western governments, scholars and media used it to shrink the protesters' revolutionary aims. Joseph Massad, writing for Al Jazeera, called it "part of a US strategy of controlling the movement's aims and goals". In his view, the strategy steered events toward Western-style liberal democracy.

  The word Spring has its own ancestry. It echoes the Revolutions of 1848, nicknamed the Spring of Nations, and the Prague Spring of 1968. In Prague, a Czech student named Jan Palach set himself on fire, an act that would later find an echo in Tunisia. After the Iraq War, commentators and bloggers had already been using the phrase while hoping for a major Arab movement toward democratization. Scholars note that this made the term a statement of expectation, as if the region would replay the democratic revolutions of the West.

  When Islamist parties won elections in some countries after the protests, American pundits coined Islamist Spring and Islamist Winter. Other labels include Arab Awakening and Arab Uprisings, even though not every participant was Arab. Long before anyone reached for a season, grievances had been gathering in places such as the mining region of Gafsa.

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• 3. Before the Spark

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  In 2008, the mining area of Gafsa in Tunisia saw protests that continued for many months. They included rallies, sit-ins and strikes. Two people died, an unspecified number were wounded, and dozens were arrested.

  Egypt's labor movement had been strong for years, with more than 3000 labor actions since 2004. On the 6th of April 2008, workers attempted a strike at the state-run textile factories of al-Mahalla al-Kubra, just outside Cairo. Computer-literate working-class youths and their middle-class student supporters spread the idea across the country. A Facebook page promoting the strike drew tens of thousands of followers. The government used infiltration and riot police and partly forestalled the strike. Even so, dissidents formed the 6th of April Committee of youths and labor activists. It became one of the major forces calling for the anti-Mubarak demonstration on the 25th of January in Tahrir Square.

  In February 2008, US Ambassador Robert Ford wrote a diplomatic cable, later leaked, describing Algeria as unhappy. He reported food strikes almost every week, demonstrations somewhere in the country every day, and a corrupt and fragile government. Some claimed that in 2010 there were as many as 9,700 riots and unrests. Complaints ranged from education and health care to rampant corruption.

  On the 9th of October 2010, a group of young Sahrawis set up the Gdeim Izik protest camp, 12 km southeast of El Aaiún in Western Sahara. They were protesting labor discrimination, unemployment, the looting of resources and human rights abuses. On the 8th of November 2010, Moroccan security forces destroyed the camp and evicted its inhabitants. Rioting spread to El Aaiún and other towns, with an unknown number of injuries and deaths. Violence against Sahrawis afterwards was cited as a reason for renewed protests once the Arab Spring began.

  Observers list many causes. They include corruption, unemployment, extreme poverty, economic decline and human rights violations. A large share of the population was educated but dissatisfied youth. In North African and Persian Gulf countries, wealth had gathered in the hands of monarchs who had ruled for decades, with little transparency about how it was redistributed. Some analysts blamed rising food prices on commodity traders and on crops being converted to ethanol. Others speculated that wide income gaps and the Great Recession played a part. Some protesters admired the Turkish model, with its contested but peaceful elections, fast-growing liberal economy and secular constitution under an Islamist government.

  Some activists had taken part in programs sponsored by the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy. The American government said it did not start the uprisings.

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• 4. The Facebook Generation

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  In 2011-88 percent of Bahrain's population was online, while Yemen and Libya had some of the lowest rates of Internet use in the affected countries. Protests broke out in both kinds of place. Social media use more than doubled in Arab countries during the protests, with Libya the exception. At one count, Facebook users in the Arab world passed 27.7 million.

  A poll found that nine out of ten Egyptians and Tunisians used Facebook to organize protests and spread awareness. A large group of young Egyptian men called themselves the Facebook generation, a name that signalled their break with a non-modernized past. In the same poll, 28 percent of Egyptians and 29 percent of Tunisians said that blocking Facebook greatly hindered or disrupted communication. Activists built pages to publicize alleged crimes such as police brutality in Egypt, a cause tied to the death of Khaled Mohamed Saeed. The Progressive Youth of Tunisia took its inspiration from Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement, which Ahmed Mahed had organized.

  Not everyone accepts the story of a Facebook revolution. Jared Keller, a journalist for The Atlantic, agreed that most activists used Facebook to organize. He added that in Iran the driving force was "good old-fashioned word of mouth". He argued that the sudden surge of online material came from Westerners who watched events and then rebroadcast them.

  A study by Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina and Christopher Wilson of the United Nations Development Program reached a firmer conclusion. They wrote that social media, and Facebook in particular, "provided new sources of information the regime could not easily control". They found it crucial in shaping individual decisions to join protests, the logistics of protest, and the likelihood of success.

  Marc Lynch of George Washington University offered a darker view. Social media boosters had imagined a new public sphere built on dialogue and mutual respect. Instead, he said, Islamists and their adversaries retreated into separate camps and reinforced each other's prejudices. He also noted how a feed could jump from images of unified, chanting crowds to a gory photograph of a child.

  Where online networks were thin, other tools did the work. In Yemen and Libya, cellular phones, emails and video clips on YouTube carried news of the protests to the outside world. In Cairo, mosques were among the main platforms for coordinating action and spreading awareness. Beginning around midnight on the 28th of January 2011, the Egyptian government tried to cut the nation's Internet access, with partial success.

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• 5. Nobody Saw It Coming

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  Political scientist Gregory Gause reviewed a decade of Middle Eastern studies and concluded that almost no scholar had foreseen the uprisings. Ehud R. Toledano of Tel Aviv University called the finding "a strong and sincere mea culpa". Toledano said experts had underestimated the hidden forces driving change while busy explaining the stability of repressive regimes. Gause himself said that those experts "need to reconsider long-held assumptions about the Arab world."

  One prediction was on the record. In his 1993 sociological study of Arab societies, Halim Barakat wrote that "one should expect the first Arab popular revolution to take place in Egypt or Tunisia." Few other analysts expected a mass movement large enough to threaten the existing order.

  The activists were just as startled. Wael Ghonim, an Internet activist who later became internationally famous, said his Facebook page was a simple reaction to events in Tunisia. He recalled "no master plans or strategies". The April 6 Movement, a leading force in Egypt, stated explicitly that it wanted reform through peaceful means. One of its activists recalled the scene in Tahrir Square: "we were very surprised by the people wanting the downfall of the regime; and not a single one of us had expected this."

  The leadership was missing too. Contrary to expectations, Islamists did not direct the uprisings, and there was hardly any central leadership at all. In Egypt, the Salafis, al-Azhar and the Coptic Church initially opposed the revolution. The mufti Ali Gomaa proclaimed that rising against a lawful ruler, President Mubarak, was haram. The Muslim Brotherhood's old guard joined only reluctantly, after pressure from the group's young members.

  The sociologist Asef Bayat, who describes himself as a participant-observer, saw these revolutions as unlike those of the 1960s and 1970s in places such as Yemen, Nicaragua and Iran. In his analysis they lacked an intellectual anchor, and secular and Islamist voices alike took free markets and neoliberal rationality for granted. Their horizontal networks distrusted the state, so capturing it was not the aim. Bayat coined the word refolution to describe something between revolution and reform.

  The early mood was hopeful. Two months into the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, The Economist wrote that the revolutions were "going the right way", with free elections in the offing. On the streets of Egypt, the favorite slogan was "bread, freedom and social justice".

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• 6. Tunisia and Egypt

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  Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia on the 14th of January 2011, ending 23 years in power. Increasingly violent demonstrations had run through December 2010, fed by high unemployment, food inflation, corruption and a lack of political freedom. It was the most dramatic unrest in Tunisia in three decades. Scores died, most at the hands of police and security forces.

  A caretaker coalition took over, including members of Ben Ali's party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally. The five newly appointed non-party ministers resigned almost immediately. On the 27th of January, Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi removed all former party members from the cabinet except himself. The party was suspended on the 6th of February and dissolved on the 9th of March. Ghannouchi resigned on the 27th of February, and Beji Caid Essebsi became prime minister.

  On the 23rd of October 2011, Tunisians elected a 217-member constituent assembly. The Islamist party Ennahda won 37 percent of the vote and elected 42 women. A new constitution followed on the 26th of January 2014, widely seen as progressive on human rights and gender equality. Parliamentary elections came on the 26th of October 2014 and a presidential election on the 23rd of November 2014. The secular Nidaa Tounes party finished first, ahead of a fading Ennahda. Yet the picture clouded. The text describes an autocracy that later formed, and a World Bank figure from 2016 put unemployment at 15.3 percent, down from 16.7 percent in 2011 but above the pre-revolution 13 percent.

  In Egypt, potential presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei had warned of a "Tunisia-style explosion". Protests began on the 25th of January 2011 and ran for 18 days. On the 28th of January, as tens of thousands filled the streets of major cities, President Hosni Mubarak dismissed his government. He appointed the first vice president in almost 30 years. On the 10th of February he handed power to Vice President Omar Suleiman, then said he would stay until his term ended. Protests continued, and the next day Suleiman announced that Mubarak had resigned and passed power to the armed forces. The 30-year presidency was over.

  The military dissolved parliament, suspended the constitution and promised to end the emergency laws. A civilian, Essam Sharaf, became prime minister on the 4th of March to wide approval in Tahrir Square. Violent protests persisted through the end of 2011 over the slow pace of reform under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Mubarak and his former interior minister Habib el-Adly were sentenced to life in prison for failing to stop the killings during the first six days.

  The Muslim Brotherhood had not set out to seize power. Cambridge sociologist Hazem Kandil describes talks between Mohamed Morsi and Suleiman that produced an informal deal: "withdraw your members from Tahrir Square, and we allow you to form a political party." Morsi, the Brotherhood-affiliated Islamist, won a 2012 presidential election that observers regarded as free and fair. Fresh protests erupted on the 22nd of November 2012 and again in June 2013. On the 3rd of July 2013, the military overthrew his government. Researcher Housam Darwisheh argues that the uprising neither dismantled the old regime nor built new institutions, which let the so-called deep state reassert itself.

  A December 2020 report by the public radio program The World said Egypt had more than doubled its executions, putting roughly 60 people to death. Activists of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights were arrested in November 2020. The founder of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy believed that even ten years after the uprising, Egypt was at its lowest point for human rights.

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• 7. Wars and Crackdowns

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  Libya's protests began on the 15th of February 2011. By the 18th, the opposition controlled most of Benghazi, the second-largest city, and had repelled the elite troops and militia sent to retake it. When protests reached Tripoli by the 20th, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi warned on television that the country could descend into civil war. The death toll climbed into the thousands, several Libyan diplomats resigned, and the opposition set up an interim government in Benghazi.

  On the 17th of March, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized a no-fly zone and "all necessary measures" to protect civilians. Two days later, France, the United States and the United Kingdom began bombing pro-Gaddafi forces, and a coalition of 27 states soon joined. A loyalist siege of Misrata, the third-largest city, lasted three months before air strikes helped break it. In late August, anti-Gaddafi fighters captured Tripoli, ending 42 years of his rule. Gaddafi regrouped in Sirte and declared it the new capital. On the 20th of October, fighters under the National Transitional Council seized Sirte and killed him. The civil war went on. Weapons and Tuareg fighters returning from Libya stoked a conflict in Mali that has been called fallout from the Arab Spring.

  In Syria, the spark came on the 6th of March 2011, when security forces arrested about 15 children in Daraa for writing slogans against the government. On the 15th of March, thousands gathered in Damascus, Aleppo, al-Hasakah, Daraa, Deir ez-Zor and Hama. Suhair Atassi, a recently released politician, became an unofficial spokesperson. On the 18th of April, about 100,000 protesters sat in the central square of Homs. On the 31st of July, army tanks stormed several cities, and at least 136 people were killed, the deadliest single day so far. On the 5th of August, security forces reportedly shot protesters from inside ambulances, killing 11. By June 2012 the unrest had become a full-scale civil war.

  On the 8th of December 2024, the Assad regime collapsed during an offensive led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham and supported mainly by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. Bashar al-Assad flew to Russia, where he was granted asylum. The fall came after 54 years of family rule and 13 years of civil war. Opposition fighters themselves were surprised by how quickly the government crumbled. Analysts saw a blow to Iran's Axis of Resistance, since Syria had been a waypoint for arms to Hezbollah.

  Yemen's protests began in mid-January 2011. On the 3rd of February, human rights activist Tawakkol Karman called a Day of Rage, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh promised not to seek another term in 2013. He then pretended to accept a Gulf Cooperation Council plan to cede power for immunity, backing away three separate times before signing. On the 3rd of June, an assassination attempt left him injured by a blast in the mosque of the presidential compound. He was evacuated to Saudi Arabia, kept appearing on television from Riyadh, and returned abruptly on the 23rd of September. He signed the plan in Riyadh on the 23rd of November. Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, the only candidate, won 99.8 percent of the vote on the 21st of February 2012. Houthi rebels overthrew the replacement government on the 22nd of January 2015, starting the Yemeni Civil War. Saleh was killed by the Houthis in 2017.

  The world took notice. Karman shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for organizing peaceful protests. In December 2011, Time magazine named the Protester its Person of the Year. Spanish photographer Samuel Aranda won the 2011 World Press Photo award for an image of a Yemeni woman holding an injured family member, taken on the 15th of October 2011.

  Bahrain's protests began on the 14th of February 2011 and did not initially aim to threaten the monarchy. They grew from frustration among the Shiite majority at being ruled by a Sunni government. A pre-dawn police raid on Pearl Roundabout in Manama on the 17th of February killed four protesters, and some demonstrators began calling for the monarchy's end. On the 14th of March, GCC forces, mainly Saudi and Emirati troops, entered at the government's request. King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa declared a three-month state of emergency the next day. On the 16th of March, soldiers and riot police cleared the camp, and on the 18th the government tore down the roundabout's monument. An independent commission reported on the 23rd of November 2011 that the government had systematically tortured prisoners. It rejected the claim that Iran instigated the protests. More than 2,929 people were arrested and at least five died from torture in custody. Saudi Arabia quashed its own protests as well. Jamal Khashoggi covered the Arab Spring and criticized the Saudi government, and he was later murdered by that government.

  In the United Arab Emirates, 133 peaceful activists signed a 2011 petition calling for elections, more power for the Federal National Council and an independent judiciary. In 2012, authorities arrested 94 of the signers and held them in secret detention. The trial began in March 2013 and ended on the 2nd of July 2013, with 69 men convicted on the basis of forced confessions and sentenced to up to 15 years. The case became known as UAE-94. In July 2021, Amnesty International called for the release of 60 prisoners from the case, still detained nine years after their arrests. Human Rights Watch said at least 51 remained jailed after finishing their sentences.

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• 8. Winter and Second Wave

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  When the uprisings began, Tunisia had an established infrastructure and less petty corruption than Libya. After the old regime fell, there was less to repair, so building a democratic system was easier. Social scientists comparing outcomes keep returning to the balance between state strength and civil society. Countries with stronger civil society networks reformed more successfully. Press coverage mattered too. Channels such as Al Jazeera and BBC News gave Tahrir Square worldwide exposure and helped prevent mass violence by the Egyptian government. Libya, Bahrain and Syria had little such coverage, so their governments acted more freely. Social media alone was never enough, because street-level organization did the heavy lifting.

  The stance of the army was decisive. In Egypt and Tunisia, the military took part in ousting the regime and in paving the way to elections. Saudi Arabia used its forces against protesters and ended the revolts. Libya and Syria could not stop the protests and fell into civil war. Where the ruling elite was closely tied to an ethnic or religious group, as in Saudi Arabia and Syria, the military sided with the regime and cast itself as protector of minorities.

  Social class also left a mark. Saudi Arabia and Jordan combined strong welfare programs with a weak middle class. Yemen, Libya and Morocco had great economic disparity and an impoverished working class. None had a successful revolution, and neither did the oil-rich rentier states of the Persian Gulf. The sociologist Göran Therborn pointed to the volatility of Egypt's middle class, with its "sharp turns in Egypt, from acclamation of democracy to adulation of the military".

  In Morocco and the Gulf monarchies, rulers co-opted the movement and kept order without major change. Jordan's King Abdullah sacked four successive governments. In Kuwait, Prime Minister Nasser Al-Sabah's cabinet resigned. Sultan Qaboos of Oman offered economic concessions. King Mohammed VI of Morocco won a new constitution through a referendum. In Saudi Arabia, male-only municipal elections were held on the 29th of September 2011, and King Abdullah announced that women could vote and stand in the 2015 municipal elections.

  Some called the conflicts that followed the Arab Winter. Early hopes of ending corruption, widening participation and bringing greater economic equity collapsed amid counter-revolutionary moves by foreign state actors. Regional and international military interventions in Bahrain and Yemen added to the damage, as did destructive civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. Observers Quinn Mecham and Tarek Osman noted that Islamists filled the void where states failed, with militia-based governance. They called the Islamic State the most expansive of these new models.

  Many describe a Sunni-Shia divide, sharpened by the proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, writing in The New Yorker, argue otherwise. They say the bloodiest struggles occur inside the Sunni world, and that sectarianism is a "politically expedient fable" covering old power struggles. They add that even in Syria the Assad regime relied on an alliance that included middle-class Sunnis.

  A new wave of protests began in 2018. It led to the resignation of Iraq's prime minister Haider al-Abadi in 2018 and Lebanon's Saad Hariri in 2020, and to the overthrow of presidents Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria in 2019. Sometimes called the Second Arab Spring, it suggested that the conditions behind the first had not faded. Al-Bashir had announced in the first wave that he would not seek reelection in 2015. He retracted the pledge and ran anyway.

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