The year is 2010, and a particularly arid American summer season results in lower crop yields than initially expected. While this story would typically be picked up by the media and scrutinized with great enthusiasm, perhaps foreboding the end of the country’s agricultural independence, instead, America was embroiled in a counter-terrorism campaign that saw their troops being sent abroad.
Meanwhile, in Russia, a heat wave with temperatures as high as 112 degrees Fahrenheit in some regions, lowered the country’s rates of grain production. Neighboring Ukraine, however, faced an entirely different problem. As part of Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych’s fiscal strategy, the country limited its grain exports to instead focus on attracting foreign investment, a plan that devastated countries dependent on Ukraine’s agricultural exports.
Unfortunately for the global economy, the United States, Russia, and Ukraine are the three largest grain exporters in the world. With their combined cultivation catastrophes, the commodity market crashed, with the IMF Food Price Index spiking by roughly 50 percent during the crisis.
Fast forward to December 2011, where, on a street corner in the North African country of Tunisia, a hard-working 26-year-old by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi is selling produce to provide for his family. The profits act as their sole source of income. Unexpectedly, a police officer looking to abuse his power confiscates Mohammad’s vending license. Enraged, the man decides to light himself on fire in an act of protest. While print media in the country at the time was confined to a tightly-controlled, pro-government narrative, social media users dutifully assumed the roles of field reporters and journalists, using sites like Facebook to spread awareness of the protests.
Following the virality of Bouazizi’s draconian demonstration, popular uprisings in Tunisia gained significant traction, with many participants simply being disillusioned with the authoritarian regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in general, particularly with rising levels of food insecurity and cost of living. From here, the greater Jasmine Revolution began to take shape, a series of protests eventually culminating in the president’s resignation after 29 days, ending the grip he had on the country for more than two decades.
Just one month after the Tunisian protests, citizens in Egypt too began inheriting these anti-establishment ideals. An internet user in the country, Wael Ghonim, created a Facebook group known as “We Are All Khaled Said.” Said, whom the group was named after, was a victim of police brutality who was fatally killed by officers for attempting to bring allegations of corruption within the force to light. Demonstrations soon followed, with it becoming readily apparent that the country’s circumstances were fertile for political dissidence.
Protestors gathered in Tahrir Square listing a multitude of grievances they had with their long-standing, unpopular regime ranging from labor disputes to voicing opposition towards the American intervention in Iraq. Prominent revolutionary figures, such as Asmaa Mahfouz, who organized the call-to-action at Tahrir Square, resonated with the country’s youth and kept the cause alive.
On February 11, Egypt’s autocratic leader, President Honsi Muburak resigned, relinquishing his power to the military. Free elections were held shortly after, with candidate Mohammed Morsi becoming president.
Around the same time as the protest in Egypt, protestors in Bahrain, a country on the eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, took to the streets, demanding democratic reforms to the state’s antiquated monarchy. The response to the demonstrations, however, was swift and brutal. Police officers swarmed the Pearl Roundabout where the protesters were located, killing a total of seven over several days and injuring dozens more. After the protest, the government banned the participation of a prominent opposition party in the country’s parliament and jailed more demonstrators.
On the same day as the Bahraini revolts, citizens in Libya protested the autocratic rule of Muammar al-Gaddafi in the country’s second-largest city, Benghazi, by using peaceful methods such as sit-ins or mass gatherings. These demonstrations were sparked by the politically-motivated prosecution of human-rights lawyer, Fethi Tarbel. He was denied a trial, instead being extradited to one of the country’s many infamously-inhume prisons to be senselessly beaten in an attempt to make an example out of him.
In a 2013 interview, he stated,”They would tie my hands together behind my back and hang me over the door like a coat, the door between my arms and my back. I would move with the movement of the door, and my arms would lose blood flow to the extent that they couldn’t function once they eventually let me down.” While Tarbel left the prison alive due to being deemed “low-risk,” many others, over a thousand, were executed within its walls.
Unlike other Arab Spring protests, the movement eventually morphed into an improvised rebel coup against Gaddafi’s government, with them arming themselves and conquering Libyan territory. By mid-October of the same year, Gaddafi was found hiding in his hometown of Sirte and promptly executed. With no one in line to succeed him, a power vacuum opened up in Libya, leading to the beginning of its still-ongoing civil war.
On February 17, 2012, Yemen’s autocratic government, led by Ali Abdullah Saleh, was ousted from power following several destabilizing setbacks on the battlefield to terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and the Houthi rebels and Arab Spring protests.
In a settlement reached in negotiation with several neighboring countries, Saleh agreed to step down as president and give his position to Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. At first, hopes for this new president were high, as he proposed adding more democratic provisions to Yemen’s constitution. However, he’s arrested by the Houthis before he can do so. While he does manage to escape soon after, he simply decides to seek asylum in Saudi Arabia.
In March, protests advocating for democratic reform broke out in Syria following an incident where a group of teenagers were arrested and beaten for spray painting anti-government slogans on the side of their school building. After security forces opened fire on the protesters, several were killed, bringing more demonstrators to the streets. Rebels began to arm themselves, leading to the formation of impromptu militias that took swathes of Syrian territory with them.
On October 23, 2011, Tunisia held its first free parliamentary election, with a moderate Islamist party winning 40% of the vote, no one group holding an outright majority in the country’s parliament, with the government consisting of a coalition of religious parties. This coalition also reformed Tunisia’s constitution in an effort to promote further democratic reforms.
In June of 2012, after nearly a year of being Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, Mohammed Morsi was deposed by a military coup led by prominent general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, causing many to lose faith in the hope that once sparked the Arab Spring.
On September 30, 2015, Russia launched a pro-Syrian intervention into the country’s civil war, launching airstrikes on rebel positions, and allowing dictator Bashar al-Assad’s forces to take back significant amounts of territory they had lost to the rebels previously.
While the Arab Spring did initially serve a concrete ideological purpose, it began to drift further away from its origins as time went on, causing the initiative itself to become disorganized and easily compartmentalized. Add to that the various interventions and counter-resistance movements these regimes instigated to combat it, and the cause began to crumble.
