The Causal Factors of the Arab Spring

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In December 2010, the whole Arab world was changed when a desperate Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire after local police officers in the peripheral rural town of Sidi Bouzid had mistreated him and confiscated his wares. The young man died after a few days but his act sparked the Arab revolutions, which swept across Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, Morocco, Syria and other Arab countries. The unprecedented popular movements had toppled, though in different ways, authoritarian leaders including Zine El Abidine Bin Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya.
In this article, I review the causal factors of the Arab Spring as perceived by scholars who applied qualitative methods (Weyland, 2013; Travis, 2012) or quantitative methods (García-Rivero, 2013; Archilov, 2013).

Qualitative approach to unterstand the Arab Spring
This section will summarize two articles that applied qualitative methods to analyze the causes of the Arab Spring. The first article uses a heuristic case study to explain the parallel between the Arab Spring movement and the 1848 “Springtime of the Peoples” in Europe, and to demonstrate the process of decision-making among participants in social movements within suppressed societies (Weyland, 2013). The second article uses a comparative approach that contrasts the socio-economic conditions in different states in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with a far-reaching focus on security issues and the responsibility of the UN to prevent potential genocides (Travis, 2012).
The Arab Spring: Why the Surprising Similarities with the Revolutionary Wave of 1848?
Kurt Weyland (2013) analyzes causal mechanisms that help to demonstra...

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...e of Hosni Mubarak before the Tunisian revolution, they failed to achieve their goals. Moreover, this approach overlooks major differences between Arab states, such as the personality of the ruler, the structure of the regime, the army and its position, and the geopolitical importance of the states.

Works Cited

Achilov, D. (2013). Social Capital, Islam, and the Arab Spring in the Middle East. Journal of Civil Society, 9(3), 268-286.
García-Rivero, C. (2013). Democratisation, State and Society in the Middle East and North Africa. Comparative Sociology, 12(4), 477-504.
Travis, H. (2012). Wargaming the ‘Arab Spring': Predicting Likely Outcomes and Planning UN Responses. Cornell International Law Journal, 45, 12-07.
Weyland, K. (2012). The Arab Spring: Why the Surprising Similarities with the Revolutionary Wave of 1848?. Perspectives on Politics, 10(04), 917-934.

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