As the decade ends, many distant corners of the world are engulfed in protest (from Hong Kong to Lebanon to Bolivia to Haiti to France, to name just a few). But this resurgence of people power began in earnest at the beginning of the decade, in 2011. That was the year of the Arab Spring, which began in the last days of 2010 with protests in Tunisia, after despondent street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi publicly set himself on fire because his produce cart had been violently seized by police.
While the protests in Tunisia received some international attention in 2010, they made global headlines in the early days of 2011. On January 2, the activist hacker collective known as Anonymous launched cyberattacks against the Tunisian government in solidarity with the protestors. By the end of the month, major protests were occurring in half a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and the Arab Spring engulfed the region.
Though protests have, of course, been a continuous part of politics around the world (2010, for example, saw a number of anti-austerity demonstrations across Europe), 2011 changed things in several important ways.
The Arab Spring challenged the stability of long-standing dictatorships that many scholars and pundits saw as unassailable — either because the dictators had apparently mastered the political techniques of authoritarianism, or because they simply enjoyed the luxury of living in a region that did not value democratic principles. When Francis Fukuyama asked in 1989 whether humanity had reached “the end of history” with the universal acceptance of liberal democracy, cultural relativists offered the so-called incompatibility between Islam and democratic values as a rebuttal to his argument. But even though dictatorship mostly endured in the region (although specific rulers like Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak fell), the tens of millions of people who came out into the streets showed that authoritarianism was contrary to the will of the people. In the words of the late Jamal Khashoggi:
“The debate about the relationship between Islam and democracy conclusively ended with the coming of the Arab Spring, when the people of the Arab world — especially the youth, and even the Islamists, including some Salafis, who were always critical of democracy — supported the protests for democratic and political change.”
The Arab Spring’s demonstration of widespread support for democracy also highlighted the role of youth in the movement. The Middle East is experiencing a youth bulge, and these young people are technologically savvy and significantly more educated than their parents. But they are also frustrated by mass unemployment and the lack of the political freedoms they are able to observe in other parts of the world. Using both old-fashioned mobilisation techniques and social media, these young people drove the push for democracy and freedom in their countries. More recent protests in countries like Lebanon and Iraq show that this desire for change has not abated.
Even if the Arab Spring had been the only major protest movement of 2011, it would have made a strong case for that year being the most important of the decade. But the uprisings that swept across the Middle East and North Africa at the beginning of the year inspired another movement.
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