The Winter of Arab Discontent
Dr Benjamin MacQueen
Dr Benjamin MacQueen, School of Political and Social Inquiry
The unrest that has consumed the Arab world since December 2010 is difficult to define as well as difficult to underestimate.
Apart from the courage of people staring down some of the fiercest regimes of the modern era, these uprisings are monumental in their significance in that they represent genuine, organic challenges to state authority. They also represent the collapse of a political order that has defined the region for almost 50 years.
Traditionally, social contracts in the Arab Middle East have rested on a basic equation, namely a promise of a modicum of political and economic stability in exchange for political freedoms. This has varied from country to country, particularly affected by access to oil revenues. However, it has been the organising principle behind much of Arab politics since independence.
This is not to say that this was a widely accepted scenario, with states having to frequently deploy security services to suppress unrest, political strategies to divide opposition movements, and the tools of patronage to co-opt potential rival centres of power.
The unsustainability of this equation has given rise to broader forms of unrest previously. In 1988, the bread riots in Algeria led to the end of the single party regime there and the imposition of a pluralist electoral process (this ended abruptly with a military coup in 1992, the cancelling of elections and the outbreak of a 10 year civil war which led to over 200,000 deaths).
However, there is something fundamentally different today.
Social media has certainly played a part in organising opposition forces, but was not a catalyst. Instead, the collapse of regional economies, particularly in non-oil producing states such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Jordan has contributed to the ending of food subsidies, wide unemployment amongst the young population and housing shortages. We should also factor in the less tangible but equally important dynamic of relative deprivation brought about by increased levels of education, greater access to information and news coupled with diminishing prospects for employment and social mobility.
In this regard, the uprising in the Arab world is one that manifested in response to an act of humiliation, the tragic events around the self-immolation of Mouhammad Bouazizi on 17 December 2010 in Kasserine, Tunisia, and symbolises a withdrawal from the social contract by large sections of the Arab public.
No longer do people feel part of the systems that have governed them since independence. Instead, new arrangements must be made for how the Arab world will govern itself into what is likely to be a very tempestuous economic and political future.
Dr Benjamin MacQueen is the Deputy Director of the Global Terrorism Research Unit and Senior Lecturer in the School of Political and Social Inquiry.