Violent Protests and Transitional Regimes: Empirical Evidence from Arab Spring

Abstract

Introduction :

In December 2010, a wave of protests and uprisings, popularly referred as ‘Arab Spring’, spread throughout the MENA counties. It first started in Tunisia after Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed 26-year-old Tunisian citizen, protested government corruption by setting fire to himself on December 17 2010. Soon the protests and uprisings spread to other countries of the region like Egypt Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. In Tunisia and Egypt the protests resulted in the toppling of earlier authoritarian regimes and establishment of new democratic governments. In other cases like Libya and Syria, the uprisings led to civil wars and huge casualties and destructions. However, Bahrain and Yemen experienced waves of protests as well, but in both cases the protests were dismissed peacefully by political settlement. Apart from the above cases of Arab spring, no serious uprising or revolution happened in other countries of the region. Hence, the first question that comes to mind is what are the factors which caused public uprisings and revolutions in some countries but not in others?

However, It is not so obvious from the socio-economic conditions of the MENA region whether it was socio-economic distresses which caused Arab Spring events or a desire for more political rights and civil liberties. It is to be noted that in the 2000s, many developing countries in MENA region did well in terms of poverty statistics and human development indicators. The region had notable achievements in terms of Millennium Development Goals related to poverty, access to infrastructure services, sanitation, internet connectivity, reducing hunger, child and maternal mortality, and increasing school enrollment (Iqbal and Kindrebeogo, 2015). This apparently opposing relationship between socio-economic conditions in the decade prior to Arab spring and the onset of Arab spring protests, calls for a deeper and more careful empirical study between the political structure and type of regimes common to the MENA region and onset of the protests. One cause for the onset of uprisings and instability in developing countries is the so called ‘intermediate/transitional regimes’ thesis which postulates that regimes with intermediate levels of political rights and democratization are more prone to destabilization, than consolidated dictatorships or democracies (Gates, et al., 2000; Goldstone et al., 2010; Korotayev, et al., 2018).