Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
While the changes affecting the BRICS nations and the emergence of China as an economic power-
house were breathtaking in scope and suddenness, perhaps the greatest upheaval of the world order in the
early days of the twenty-first century took place in some of the oldest nations in civilization.
Beginning in late 2010, a wind of unexpected power, protest, resistance, and rebellion blew across
North Africa and through other Middle Eastern Arab states with something like hurricane force. The winds
swept away some of the most entrenched dictatorships that had ruled for decades in such countries as
Tunisia, Yemen, Libya—where NATO forces helped topple strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi, captured and
killed by rebels—and Egypt, the most populous Arab state, where military dictator Hosni Mubarak had
ruled for thirty years. He was deposed, tried, and sentenced to life in prison in 2012.
The successive waves of demonstrations and protests that came to be known as the Arab Spring (or the
Arab Awakening or Arab Uprisings) actually began in December 2010 and continued to roil through the
Arab world well into 2012 in such countries as Syria, where massacres of civilians continued to be repor-
ted in June of that year.
The protests, strikes, rallies, and demonstrations had affected many other countries in the area, includ-
ing Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, and Oman, among others. In most cases, the protests were met
with violent opposition by military authorities and pro-government militias.
In each of these Arabic countries, new social media sites spawned by the Internet age such as
Twitter and Facebook, and the widespread availability of cell phone technology, clearly helped spread the
groundswell of protests and were used as tools to organize demonstrations and even military operations.
Television stations, including the Al Jazeera Arabic-language news network, were also instrumental in fos-
tering the wave of revolution around the region.
But more fundamentally, what these extraordinary and historic protests shared was a lingering frus-
tration over stagnant economies, limited economic opportunities, corrupt and often brutally repressive re-
gimes, and a fundamental lack of democracy along with basic civil and human rights.
Although the long-range impact of the Arab Spring is impossible to gauge, an entire region that had
been focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades, was instead undergoing revolutionary upheaval. It
was in one sense the triumph of technology and the force of globalization that shaped the Arab Spring in a
revolution whose speed was almost breathtaking but which was far from over.
As Thomas Friedman of the
New York Times
wrote in 2011, while the Arab Spring reached a climax,
“Surely one of the iconic images of this time is the picture of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak—for three
decades a modern pharaoh—being hauled into court, held in a cage with his two sons and tried for attempt-
ing to crush his people's peaceful demonstrations. Every leader and C.E.O. should reflect on that photo.
'The power pyramid is being turned upside down,' said Yaron Ezrahi, an Israeli political theorist.”
Geographic Voices
In
Why Nations Fail
, a topic that examines the huge disparities in incomes and liv-
ing standards around the world, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson commented on the Arab Spring,
specifically in Egypt.
The roots of discontent in these countries lie in their poverty. The average Egyptian has an in-
come level of around 12 percent of the average citizen of the United States and can expect to live
ten fewer years: 20 percent of the population is in dire poverty. Though these differences are signi-
ficant, they are actually quite small compared with those between the United States and the poorest
countries in the world, such as North Korea, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, where well over half the
population lives in poverty. . . . Why is Egypt so much poorer than the United States? What are the
constraints that keep Egyptians from becoming more prosperous . . . To Egyptians, the things that
have held them back include an inefficient and corrupt state and a society where they cannot use
their talent, ambition, ingenuity and what education they can get. But they also recognize that the
