Durac, Vincent, and Francesco Cavatorta. "The Arab Awakening" In Politics and Governance in the Middle East, by Vincent Durac and Francesco Cavatorta, 11-32. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Durac, Vincent, and Francesco Cavatorta. "The Arab Awakening" In Politics and Governance in the Middle East, by Vincent Durac and Francesco Cavatorta, 11-32. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

• In the first decade of the 21st Century, the Arab world looked remarkably stable, with the majority of its leaders having been in power for decades and expected to remain in power for several more: Hosni Mubarak in Egypt since 1981, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia since 1987, Ali Abdallah Saleh in Yemen since 1990 and head of North Yemen since 1978, Muammar Ghaddafi in Libya since 1969, Bashar al Assad in Syria since 2000 succeeding his father's rule since 1970, Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria since 1999, established hereditary monarchies in Jordan, Morocco, and the Gulf states, and a theocracy in Iran since 1979 (11).
• After independence, many Arab countries entered into political situations where the government promised economic growth in return for limited political freedoms. This situation lasted roughly until the 1990s, earlier in Tunisia and Morocco, when Arab states implemented neoliberal reforms that introduced market forces that made the socioeconomic condition of the poor and middle classes much more precarious (21-22).
• Neoliberal reforms did not result in greater political freedom in Arab states and, moreover, the economic windfall of these reforms disproportionately benefitted insides in these regimes. Lacking social support, these regimes increasingly depended on the security services to retain power (22).
• The high proportion of young people in the Arab world, where 30% of the population is between 14 and 24, and 60% are under 30 years old, made that region more prone to protest and revolt, especially as neoliberal reforms reduced the economic prospects of this group (23).
• Between 1987 and 2005, Tunisia spent around 20% of the annual budget on social welfare, but this percentage declined sharply during a series of neoliberal reforms in the early 2000s. At the same time, greater economic disparities encouraged mounting household debt among the middle class. The loss of public sector jobs also led to higher unemployment among college graduates (23).
• Economic growth under neoliberalism was also regionally concentrated, with unemployment dropping in the north and northwest, but poverty and unemployment becoming more concentrated in the interior and south (24).
• The Ben Ali government was also deeply corrupt, with President Ben Ali's family and regime insiders becoming fabulously wealthy. State investment and development funds were used to finance the private business ambitions of powerful Tunisian political elites (24).
• Although Tunisia experienced a brief experiment in political liberalization in the 1980s, after that the Ben Ali government concentrated power and won a series of fraudulent elections. Media freedom was minimal, with most major newspapers owned by regime allies and family members, and internet censorship was pervasive. Tunisia was also one of the most policed countries on Earth, with one policeman for every 80 citizens (24-25).
• Tunisia did experience a number of anti-government incidents prior to 2010, particularly a riot in Gafsa in 2008. Other notable precursors are a number of anti-police riots around sports games and rural strikes (25).
• In the 1980s, over half of Egyptian GDP was from the public sector, which received over 80% of domestic investment. This was matched by a extensive welfare system. However, population growth put pressure on this system and in the 2000s the Egyptian government initiated neoliberal reforms that dismantled the public sector. These reforms benefitted some Egyptian skilled workers, but it saw real wages decline for most Egyptian workers, civil servants, and pensioners (26).
• These neoliberal reforms massively exacerbated wealth inequality in Egypt, especially in terms of impoverishment, and by 2011, over 40% of the population lived under the poverty line. Rising unemployment was particularly hard of the young, as those under the age of 30 constituted 80% of the large numbers of unemployed (26).
• Corruption was pervasive under the Mubarak government, experienced in daily bribes and larger understandings that the economic and political system served the interests of a small number of businessmen and politicians with ties to Hosni Mubarak and his family (26).
• Egypt maintained a multiparty electoral system, which it had introduced in the 1970s, but the ruling National Democratic Party retained a majority and no major opposition existed outside of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nevertheless, the Brotherhood was given electoral representation and won a minority of seats in the 2005 elections (26-27).
• The positioning of the Brotherhood as the primary opposition group in Egypt benefitted the Mubarak government by allowing it to represent politics as a choice between itself and the Brotherhood (27).
• In 2010, the political system tightened again and the National Democratic Party won 93% of the seats in parliament, leaving the Brotherhood with only a single representative (27).
• The Mubarak government maintained a brutal police force and security apparatus that it used to repress earlier protests. This opposition usually took the form of strikes, student protests, and civil society campaigns against specific acts of oppression, most notably the Kifaya movement (27).
• The 2011 revolution succeeded because it connected middle-class protest movements with lower class and youth-based activism and revolt (27).
• Yemen had experienced economic issues following unification. In the mid-1990s, the government was forced to make neoliberal reforms in exchange for receiving IMF assistance. These reforms fired thousands of state employees, major cuts in subsidies and social welfare, and privatization. Although growth rates increased, poverty and unemployment rates rose sharply after these reforms (27).
• The Yemeni economy remained overwhelmingly dependent on oil and gas sales, controlled by the government, which account for 90% of exports by value and constituted 75% of the annual budget. Other profitable economic areas, like import and export licensing, oil distribution and production, and mobile and internet services, were monopolized by elites (28).
• These economic sectors were dominated by elites who were prominent in the armed forces, including members of Ali Saleh's family, powerful tribal groups, Yemen's traditional bazaari merchants, and prominent members of the General People's Congress and the Joint Meeting Parties (28). 
• By 2010, the longterm effects of these reforms meant that unemployment was close to 25%, and over 50% for youth, and over 40% of the population was in extreme poverty. (27-28).
• Yemen's politics were dominated by the largely unresponsible General People's Congress, with real power being wielded by President Saleh, his immediate family and closest allies, and a number of other key political figures. These personal political relations were demonstrated during the 2006 election, when President Saleh was reelected due partially to the support of the head of Islah, the main Islamist party and, ostensibly, leader of the opposition (28).
• Libya did not experience significant unemployment and had relatively high living standards prior to the Arab Spring. However, wealth was still disproportionately concentrated among the country's elites. Political power was concentrated among a small number of Muammar Ghadaffi's family and closest advisors and many felt that they were wasting Libya's oil wealth on funding rebel groups and terrorists, as well as a costly war with Chad (28-29).
• Syria implemented neoliberal reforms over the course of a decade that impoverished the workers and peasants who had been the Baathist government's traditional base of support. The new economic order increasingly benefitted only a small number of urban merchants with close ties to the government (29).
• Corrupt and wasteful schemes that squandered the country's oil resources in the 1980s led Algeria to begin economic liberalization following 1988. However, these reforms have done little to reduce corruption and the countries suffers from high levels of unemployment, corruption, and stagnating living standards (29).
• Morocco still faces major issues of unemployment and poverty, with a stagnating human development index, despite over 20 years of neoliberal reforms. Most protests in Morocco focus on corruption, unemployment, and the rising cost of living. Despite political reforms, the monarchy retains most power in the political system, making many skeptical of the government's democratic credentials (30).
• Oliver Schlumberger noted in 2007 that the Middle East was undergoing political liberalization under a combination of protest movements and external pressure for 'good governance' (11). He also argued that, despite these changes, the Middle East remains almost uniformly undemocratic and its collective lack of civil liberties makes it unique as a region. This is part of a wider collection of scholarship claiming the Middle East is an exception to global norms of liberal democracy (12).
• Many scholars view the reform process of Middle Eastern countries with skepticism, seeing it as an attempt to curry international favor with limited reforms while still remaining basically illiberal and autocratic governments (12-14).
• Steven Heydemann identifies a number of ways in which authoritarian regimes adapt and change to meet domestic and foreign demands for democratic reform. They have controlled civil society through government-sponsored NGOs, created fake political parties to create a veneer of democratic competition, they selectively liberalized the economy to make sure that privatization mainly benefitted a select group of supporters, they made sure new technologies were used for the purposes of the state, and they found sources of foreign support and finance outside of the West (13).
• Protests broke out in Tunisia in late December following the self immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid after his his goods and street cart were confiscated by local inspectors on 17 December 2010. After the local government failed to respond, he dosed himself and paint thinner and lit himself on fire in front of the government building (14).
• The protests spread through personal networks, especially among the young, although most established political forces, including the Union Generale Travailleurs Tunisiens, initially refused to join (14-15).
• By 13 January, the protests had become serious enough that President Ben Ali ordered his Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Rachid Ammar, to fire on the protesters. General Ammar refused and was placed under house arrest. President Ben Ali took this as a sign that his support had vanished and left for exile in Saudi Arabia by 14 January 2011 (15).
• Prior to Zine Ben Ali's resignation, Tunisia had been considered the most stable Arab dictatorship next to Syria, having experienced strong economic growth under his rule and build up a repressive police state. His flight to Saudi Arabia triggered similar protests in Egypt. Although the Muslim Brotherhood and other major opposition parties refused to take a leading role in the protests, they continued to grow. On 11 February 2011, President Mubarak was forced to resign and handed power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (15).
• On 15 February 2011, the arrest of human rights activist Fethi Tarbel triggered protests, which became riots, in Benghazi after he commemorated the massacre of 1,200 political prisoners in Abu Salim prison in 1996. Coordinated protests began in a number of cities, mostly in the east, on 17 February. By 20 February, armed anti-government groups had seized control of Benghazi and Misrata (15-16).
• Muammar Ghaddafi looked at the capitulation of Zine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak and concluded that armed forces was needed to save his regime. Armed resistance to his rule was supported and financed by France, the UK,, the USA, and the Arab League. On 17 March, these countries succeeded in placing a NATO no-fly zone over Libya. General Ghaddafi continued to fight the rebels until his death on 20 October 2011 (16).
• The massive protests against Zine Ben Ali inspired similar protests in Sana'a, Yemen, which spread across the country beginning in late December 2010. In March 2011, a coalition of opposition leftist and Islamist parties, the Joint Meeting Parties, officially supported the protesters (16-17).
• On 17 March 2011, a crackdown on protests by the security forces led to dozens of deaths. In this aftermath, half of the resident ambassadors resigned in protest and a senior military commander defected to the opposition. Saudi Arabia got spooked by potential unrest in Yemen and pressured President Saleh to accept an agreement by which he would resign, be replaced with his vice president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, and Yemen would be governed by a coalition of the Joint Meeting Parties and the ruling General People's Congress (17).
• Protests spread to Algeria by early 2011, but failed to gain traction despite several copycat self-immolations in Algerian towns in January. Protests broke out in several towns, but focused on local issues and failed to gain national traction. Algerians were also reluctant to join the protests because they feared the chaos that had existed until the end of the civil war in the 1990s, and because President Bouteflika responded by lifting the emergency law and promising constitutional reforms and economic reforms designed to reduce unemployment and lift wages (17).
• The Arab Spring protest movement in Morocco, named the February 20 Movement, gathered a broad range of groups opposed to King Mohammad VI. The Movement was preempted by King Mohammad before it gained traction among the political elites, as he recognized their demands as legitimate and proposed a new, slightly more democratic, constitution that still maintained the primacy of the monarchy. The opposition parties of the February 20 Movement generally accepted these reforms and returned to the fold, a move that discredited them (17-18).
• The Gulf states responded to the Arab Spring with economic largess and police repression. In Kuwait, the government distributed $3,500 and a year's ration of staple goods to all families. In February 2011, the Saudi government announced a massive spending increase on welfare and public sector wages. Qatar promised an $8 billion increase in pensions and public sector wages in September 2011. Oman promised more jobs for unemployed youth (18).
• The most severe protests in the Gulf were in Bahrain. There, the government painted the protesters as Shias backed by Iran against the Sunni monarchy. This was a lie, as Sunnis were involved in the protests from the beginning. Although this portrayal alienated Shiite Bahrainis, it anti-Iran message won it the support of the West and the Gulf monarchies. In March 2011, Saudi and Emirati soldiers deployed in Bahrain to help local forces crush the protests (18-19).
• The Gulf monarchies may not be immune to future bouts of political unrest. This is particularly true for Saudi Arabia, which risks losing the moral and religious justification for its rule and faces issues of rising poverty and unemployment despite immense oil wealth (30).
• The Arab Spring in Syria escalated in March 2011, when a group of teenagers in Daraa who had spraypainted anti-government slogans were tortured and killed by the security forces. Protests spread across the country despite violent repression, gradually becoming armed and violent. The country has since descended into civil war (19-20).
• Bashar al Assad did not expect opposition to his government, as security forces had destroyed most opposition groups and he could claim legitimacy on the basis of anti-Israeli policies. Many pundits agreed with this interpretation and believed Syria would not be affected by the Arab Spring (19).
• In early 2011, the American academic, Marc Lynch, referred to the protests as the 'Arab Spring', a name which recalled earlier revolutions in Europe in 1848 and revolts against Communist rule in the 1960s. The name stuck and allowed foreign observers to imagine that the revolutions were in favor of liberal democracy (20).
• A precursor of the Arab Spring protests was the Green Movement in Iran in 2009. After presidential elections in that year, urban citizens claimed that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's victory was the result of electoral fraud. They were crushed after a long period of time through police repression (30-31). 
• All the Arab Spring protests have similar causes: authoritarianism and poorly implemented neoliberal reforms resulting in the marginalization of large parts of the population (31).