In late 2010, a Tunisian named Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest against the poor economic situation in which he was living (CNN, 2011). Other Tunisians soon took the opportunity to resist their government and possible overthrow the leadership of Ben Ali. They took it as their responsibility to fight for the common good. Simple demonstration against the Tunisian government soon went ahead to an extent that Ben Ali had to leave the country. The events that followed the departures of the Tunisian president were the least expected. The revolts in Tunisia spurred citizens of other Arab nations to revolt against their governments. By the end of the years 2011, the Arab spring had claimed the presidency of three long serving presidents and …show more content…
Before them was a whole generation of limited opportunities and deprived rights. Their calls for reforms were, however, hampered by the police and security agencies.
Most individuals who were involved in the protests were led by the belief that it was through the protests that they could better their lives. The majority of the Egyptian citizens have felt down, trodden and despised over the recent years by their governments. Most governments were revolts were witnessed had stayed in power for a long period of time. In Egypt, for example, Mubarak had stayed in power for more than 40 years. Removing him from powered through democratic means had borne no fruits since most presidential elections had been marred by instances or rigging and corruption. He had therefore instituted himself as a president for life. One aspect of Mubarak’s governments was that it was dictatorial. Besides, the people surrounding Mubarak were so powerful that talking negatively about the president could easily lead an individual into trouble.
The government of Mubarak initiated several techniques aimed at restoring normalcy and preventing protests. In Cairo, for example, the city remained under several days of curfew. During this time, the regime, aided by the Peninsula Shield Force, carried out brutal crackdown on the protesters. For example, Doctors would be detained for treating
Wednesday, April 13th authorities took custody of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons, Gamal and Alaa. He is being held in Sharm el-Sheikh while authorities investigate his political crimes over the past thirty years, illicit gain, corruption allegations and particularly the deaths of hundreds of protesters during the uprising. Officials reported, Mubarak was not in the best of health after announcing he would not run for re-election, a precedent to his heart-attack during interrogation last Thursday. Mubarak is currently undergoing interrogation in an Sharm el-Sheikh hospital. Protesters worked continually during their three months of rallies and demonstrations to speak out against Mubarak's thirty year reign of
There has been a rebellion going on for years now. This rebellion included people that broke the laws. My information will be coming from the passages “Cairo: My City, Our Revolution”, “Lolita in Tehran”, and “Persepolis”
The "I Have a Dream" speech was given on august 28, 1968 to 250,000 supporters at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This speech called for the demand of freedom for African Americans. The texts “I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King Jr., Reading Lolita in Teheran by Azar Nafisi, and “Cairo: My City, Our Revolution” by Ahadf Soueif all share a similar message about the demand of freedom. We wait for freedom to be given, when we should be demanding it because a legal document dose not ensure true freedom, we must combine together and rebel against the opposing forces.
It has been six years since Egypt drove itself into oppositions of institutions in 2011. Still to this day, there is no label of the revolution to be a “success” or “failure”. It is easy to stop the moment of a unethical government was taken down, the reconstruction of Egypt and its laws is an ongoing struggle. In American history, there was no specific day when we came out of mass chaos into a united country of freedom and democracy. For Egypt's sake, all we can do is give them time to get the government back on their feet and support them in what they are still going
The peoples of the Arab Spring were confronting an age-old problem in political theory: Under what circumstances is it acceptable to rise up against an unjust government? In Bronze Age China, notions of legitimate popular uprisings served as an important potential curb over otherwise formidable imperial authority. Since then, the same question has plagued or empowered Islamic caliphs, medieval princes, and modern-day despots and democrats in turn.
Discuss the structural factors which contributed to the onset of the Arab Spring in 2011. Based on what you learned about the origins of revolutions in this class, was this wave of contention inevitable?
The Arab Spring was a very important public movement against tyranny because people want to be free, fed, have freedom of speech, etc. In Islamic understanding, this movement was totally foolish because any Islamic government uses theocratic tyranny to govern its people. In this manner public rebellions occurred during the Arab Spring. Today, the Turkish Government want to change the regime from democracy into theocratic tyranny because in theocratic tyranny, the dictators will be fed, not the people. The Middle East needs more democracy to heal
The Revolutions of 1848 and the Arab Spring Movement are similar because of the method the authorities used to stop the uprisings, which is exemplified in France, Egypt, and Syria. In Horace Vernet’s “La barricade de la rue Soufflot,” it shows French uniform soldiers firing onto protestors in a major
In the late 1970s, al-Assad made a religious declaration for his sect, the Alawites, that infuriated the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Ba’ath Party’s major rivals. Rioting and insurrection burst out over the country, focusing particularly on the city of Hama. Al-Assad attempted to calm the uprisings by implementing placatory measures favoring the Muslim Brotherhood. (Polk) Yet, still the tensions rose. Hafez received death threats, and revolution seemed inevitable. Finally in 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood could wait no longer. A government unit sent to Hama was ambushed and killed. That was the spark. The Islamic forces rose to overthrow the government. And, in one coldly brutal move, Hafez al-Assad leveled half of Hama, slaughtering at least 10,000 residents. (MacFarquhar) Blood ran freely down the streets of Hama that night, in an all-out, “take no prisoners” battle. By the end, most of
Abstract: To understand why the Tunisian uprising and its aftermath, the dominant narratives of secularism, Islamism and the political weakness of the youth should be set aside. Those contentious and seductive issues lead us astray from the more fundamental and essential role of the ruling elite, without whom no country can make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. We must think of those old elites, even in a revolutionary uprising, as active participants who are neither passive nor innocent. Democratization succeeded in Tunisia because the old elite was neither excluded nor subjected to the threat of
The Arab Spring is faced with many different initial goals and resulting outcomes. Due to the vast amount of countries involved in the uprising, there is not concrete way to answer if the Arab Spring was truly a success or failure. Each country has different cultural, social, religious, and economic situations which greatly affected the result of each country's
As street protests flared for a fifth day, Mr. Mubarak fired his cabinet and appointed Omar Suleiman, his right-hand man and the country’s intelligence chief, as vice president. Mr. Mubarak, who was vice president himself when he took power after the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat, had until now steadfastly refused pressure to name any successor, so the move stirred speculation that he was planning to
It is important to note that these two case studies share a number of similarities that are worth pointing about before emphasizing their distinctiveness. Firstly, both the uprisings in Tunisia as well as the Syrian conflict both belong to the arena of collective political action, that is rather than individual acts of political dissent. Secondly, they are employed by organized opposition movements representing an oppressed minority of the disempowered majority, engaged against the unjust action of the state and institutionalized violence they exert. Thirdly, each operate outside the bound of conventional political channels such that they are non-institutional. Arguably, the most important similar factor is that the both belong to the larger
A revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both violent and non-violent), riots, and civil wars in the Arab World that began on 18 December 2010, later gained the heading “The Arab spring”. The Arab spring began by a twenty six year old boy named Mohammed Bouazizi was getting ready to sell fruits and vegetables in a rural town of Sidi Bouzid Tunisia. Bouazizi was the primary supporter for his widowed mother and six of his siblings. The entire incident originated when the police officer asked bouazizi to hand over his wooden cart, he refused the police women allegedly slapped him after being publicly humiliated bouazizi marched in front of a government building and set himself on fire. The Jasmine revolution in Tunisia, the shock wave swept across the country which threatened the stability of this oil-rich region with repercussion felt internationally. After the world witnessed what happened in Tunisia, it caused a spilled over into most of the Arab countries. Such as Egypt, Libya Syria and Yemen. Aim of this paper is to show that the current situation corollary of decades of failed policies, exacerbated by an unsolicited foreign intervention. The extensive consequences, I will argue, require cautious attention and careful management from international communities as well as the Arab human rights committee. This paper seeks to explore the profound causes that prompted the so called “Arab awakening” and the covert hidden agenda behind the sudden pro democratic
“When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right” is a quote from Victor Hugo that symbolizes the new age of human rights. Over the years, countries around the world have witnessed terrifying yet life-changing revolutions, but no one in history had expected for such a quick and sudden revolution to begin like the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring has allowed people, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, to speak out for what they believe in today. Many laws have been overturned due to the amount of pressure the people are putting on their government. One revolution started it all, and ever since then, we have realized many of the biggest protests in history, the rise and downfalls of the economy, a different side to the