Mideast: The Arab Spring Then and now

On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi set up his wares as he did any other day. He sold fruit roadside in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. Like many Tunisians in their 20s, Mohamed struggled to find work and had turned to hardly lucrative micro-entrepreneurship. That unfortunate day, a city inspector came along and confiscated his fruit upon discovering his lack of permits and permissions. Later that day, Mohamed Bouazizi poured gasoline over himself and struck a flame. 

Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation inspired mobilization across Tunisia. Workers, students, and activists took to the streets and organized against the government. In 2011, the use of social media, especially Facebook, rapidly increased across the Arab world. The outrage expressed in Tunisia was seen across the world, and people began organizing in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Bahrain; before long, there were major protests in every Arab nation except Saudi Arabia. 

The protests were extremely powerful. Less than a month after Bouazizi’s radical act of self-harm, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s dictator of over two decades, packed up and fled the country. Tunisia’s revolution was spontaneous. There was no leading organization, there was no military intervention, nor violent militant uprisings; it was swift, popular, and decisive. 

Tunisia was being choked out by Ben Ali. His grip on power was unyielding. His party was the state, and they were harshly against any form of opposition or criticism. Additionally, young people were unemployed at around 30 percent. People lacked political and economic freedom, and thus they rebelled. 

One month after Ben Ali fled Tunisia, Egyptians overthrew the government of Hosni Mubarak, who then stood trial for corruption and political executions. The first Egyptian deposition during the Arab Spring was in February 2011. The second was in July 2013. Egyptians overthrew Mubarak’s replacement, Mohamed Morsi, and charged him with inciting violence and espionage for foreign militants. Egyptian politics did not settle until the election of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the current president of Egypt. 

Protests in Syria and Yemen began in January 2011 as well. By 2014, both nations had fallen to civil war. In Syria, similar to Egypt and Tunisia, the people were fed up with the oppressive dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. Assad was brutal and ineffective. Syrians were hungry and restricted in their political freedoms. Yemen’s state was weaker than Syria’s. Yemen is one of the poorest countries on earth, and its government was widely understood to be corrupt and harmful. 

Arab countries had far too many dictators as their rulers in 2011, and people rebelled en masse. Each country had its own set of issues the people were protesting, some related, others not. For instance, the protests in Western Sahara were about Morocco’s colonial rule of their land and predated the Tunisian protests, but because they happened in late 2010, they are often grouped with the Arab Spring protests.

Because of the many differences between the protests and the numerous complexities involved in grouping them together, some thought leaders reject the phrase “Arab Spring” altogether. 

Regardless of terminology, in and around the spring of 2011, protests erupted in over a dozen Arab countries across the Middle East. And almost fifteen years later, we are still watching the impact of those protests unfold. 

It is March 26, in the spring of 2025, fourteen years after the first protests of the Arab Spring. What has become of the movements from 2011? Many regimes have changed, wars have been fought, concessions won, and politics changed. Were there similar changes across the board? Did all Arab leaders respond the same way?

No, of course not. The protests' impacts were different in each country, just as the protests themselves differed.

In Egypt, despite the successful deposition of multiple corrupt leaders, the current president is widely condemned as corrupt, violent, and authoritarian. He imprisons those he disagrees with, and empowers dangerous armed groups. The economy is weak, and the country is in massive debt. Egyptians face high rates of unemployment and regular shortages of essential goods and services. Protests against his regime regularly crop up in Cairo, and the sentiments ring the same as they did in 2011. The people demand freedom, politically and economically. 

In Yemen and Syria, the wars that began after the Arab Spring protests still rage on. For Yemenis, the internationally recognized government is in shambles and barely rules half the country. The Houthis have emerged as Yemen’s strongest political force and have taken over much of the land and the economy in the name of religious extremism and anti-liberal sentiments. The Yemeni people are in a desperate situation, even more desperate than in 2011 when their protests began. It is home to one of the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophes, with severely limited access to water, food, education, and medicine.

The Syrian government, which was so hated in 2011, fell in the final days of 2024. Rebel groups deposed Bashar al-Assad and exiled him to Russia. The country is now in a state of flux as armed groups warily eye each other down along religious and political faultlines. The world had moved on from Syria’s civil war and no longer followed closely the uprisings occurring there. Then in December, the vision of activists during the Arab Spring was realized. The new leaders promise more freedom, and the people are cautious but optimistic. 

The biggest problem with calling the Arab Spring the Arab Spring is not the generalisms, the nonspecificity, or the orientalism, though those are all legitimate concerns. It is in the naming itself. In the naming of a historical event, we tie a bow on it and call it complete. That happened. What happens next? But, here we are, far from the Arab Spring, more than a decade later, and the same movements that took place in 2011 are continuing today. History books centuries from now will not distinguish between the movements that took place in 2011 and their legacies today; this will be understood as a continuous historical flow. In so far as the Arab Spring was a true phenomenon, it is still occurring.