A Decade of Spring

Tunisia’s Arab Spring starts with one man in Sidi Bouzid, 190 miles south of the capital Tunis. Mohamed Bouazizi’s suicide, the subsequent protests, Ben Ali’s resignation all had dramatic ramifications both at home and across the region.

At the end of 2010, Egypt had reached boiling point. What followed was a decade of upheaval — the toppling of Mubarak, democratic elections, a military coup, and the subsequent rollback of human rights — with a brutal crackdown on protesters. A decade later, has anything actually improved?

2011 is remembered as the year the uprisings which became known as the Arab Spring really began. But in Iraq it was the year the US formally ended its military intervention presence. As the Arab world felt a short-lived surge in optimism, Iraq descended into one of the most intense cycles of violence in its bloody history. Saddam Hussein brutally ruled Iraq for 30 years, marked by wars with Iran, massacres of his own people, and an invasion of Kuwait, which saw him repelled by an international coalition. So when he was finally forced out by a US invasion in 2003, many Iraqis felt things might get better. What followed was chaos. And in late 2019, things reached boiling point; protestors tired of corruption and economic stagnation took to the streets demanding change. Sound familiar? How did the earlier uprisings in the previous decade influence a new wave of demonstrations and were they successful?

The first wave of the Arab Spring didn’t spread immediately to Lebanon, but it didn’t take long for the effects to be felt here. One and a half million Syrians took refuge in here, to escape the civil war at home. Over the past decade there have been two major protests movements here, in 2011 and 2015. They were a foreshadowing of what was to come. Although the Lebanese state was collapsing slowly, it took a disaster to trigger national revolt. The events of late 2019 marked a shift in Lebanon but it was events that followed that continue to shape it today.