# data[].attributes.body
Complete the attached Google Form. Once you have completed the form return back to this padlet and comment with your general understanding of what happened in the Arab Spring.

# data[].attributes.body
Choose an option from the choice board to answer the essential question for the unit: How did the Arab Spring reshape the political landscape of the Middle East, and what have been its lasting impacts on governance, society, and regional stability?

# data[].attributes.body
Use this flow chart template to break down each of the uprisings mentioned in the article.

# data[].attributes.body
After reading the interactive Washington Post Article complete the digital flow chart of the Arab Spring where you will summarize the situations of the countries before the Arab Spring, during the Arab Spring, one year after the Arab Spring, and 10 years after the Arab Spring.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lost Decade

The forces that unleashed uprisings across the Middle East remain as potent as ever

2011

2016

2021

Lost Decade

The forces that unleashed uprisings across the Middle East remain as potent as ever

Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience.

BEIRUT - Ten years ago, much of the Arab world erupted in jubilant revolt against the dictatorial regimes whose corruption, cruelty and mismanagement had mired the Middle East in poverty and backwardness for decades.

Ten years on, the hopes awakened by the protests have vanished - but the underlying conditions that drove the unrest are as acute as ever.

Autocrats rule with an even tighter grip. Wars unleashed by leaders whose control was threatened have killed hundreds of thousands of people. The rise of the Islamic State amid the resulting wreckage ravaged large parts of Syria and Iraq and drew the United States into another costly Middle East war.

Millions of people were driven from their homes to become refugees, many converging on the shores of Europe and beyond. The influx fueled a tide of nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment that brought populist leaders to power in Europe and the United States, as fears of terrorism eclipsed concerns for human rights as a Western priority.

Tunis, Tunisia

Jan. 18, 2021

Only in Tunisia, where the protests began, did anything resembling a democracy emerge from the upheaval. The fall of Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali after a month of street protests in Tunis inspired demonstrations across the Middle East, including the mass protest on Jan. 25, 2011, in Cairo's Tahrir Square that fixated world attention on what was prematurely labeled the Arab Spring.

On the face of it, the Arab Spring failed, and spectacularly so - not only by failing to deliver political freedom but by further entrenching the rule of corrupt leaders more intent on their own survival than delivering reforms.

"It's been a lost decade," said Tarik Yousef, director of the Brookings Doha Center, recalling the euphoria he initially felt when the fall of Libya's Moammar Gaddafi in August 2011 enabled him to return home for the first time in years. "Now, we have the return of fear and intimidation. The region has experienced setbacks at every turn."

For many of those who participated in the uprisings, the costs have been immeasurable. Esraa Eltaweel, 28, was partially paralyzed after a bullet fired by security forces sliced through her abdomen and chipped her spine during a protest in Cairo in 2014. Some of her friends were killed. Others were imprisoned, including her husband, who is still incarcerated. Eltaweel, who spent seven months in detention, has struggled to find work because of the stigma attached to political prisoners.

"We didn't achieve anything we aimed for. Things got worse," she said. "We believed we could change the system. But it is so rotten that it can't be changed."

Yet as long as the conditions that provoked the original uprisings persist, the possibility of more unrest cannot be ruled out, analysts say.

For many in the region, the Arab Spring is seen less as a failure than an ongoing process. Demonstrations that toppled the longtime presidents of Algeria and Sudan in 2019 and subsequent protest movements in Iraq and Lebanon have been hailed as a second Arab Spring, a reminder that the momentum that drove the revolts of a decade ago has not gone away. Even in Tunisia, frustration over unemployment and a stagnant economy has prompted a series of often violent demonstrations in recent days, with young protesters and security forces clashing in cities around the country.

"Dictators have prevailed, mainly through coercion," said Lina Khatib, who heads the Middle East and North Africa program at London-based Chatham House. "However, coercion seeds further grievances that will ultimately force citizens to seek political change."

Press Enter to skip to end of carousel

Lost Decade: Exploring the lessons and legacy of the Arab Spring

Carousel - $Lost Decade: Exploring the lessons and legacy of the Arab Spring: use tab or arrows to navigate

arrow-left arrow-right

The unfinished business of the Arab Spring

Egypt

Democracy versus stability

Coming next

Tunisia

Braving its own course

Coming soon

Libya

Into the foreigners' hands

Coming soon

Syria

The dividends of brutality

Coming soon

End of carousel
Others fear worse instability and violence as the collapse of oil prices - the mainstay of economies across the region for decades - and the fallout from coronavirus shutdowns take a toll.

"We have failing states across the entire region. We have a huge economic challenge coupled with a young generation rising and asking for a role. This puts us on the path to an explosion," said Bachar el-Halabi, a Lebanese political analyst and activist who relocated to Turkey last year because of anonymous threats to his safety. "The region is in a worse situation than ever before."

Rapidly growing populations

Tripoli, Lebanon

Jan. 3, 2021

The Middle East has the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, as it has for decades. The population of the region has grown by 70 million since the Arab Spring, and it is expected to increase by an additional 120 million by 2030, before stabilizing in the decades after that, according to World Bank figures and United Nations forecasts.

High population-growth rates don't necessarily result in growing impoverishment, economists note. In Southeast Asia at the end of the last century and in Europe a century before, rapid population growth fueled unprecedented economic expansion.

But in the Middle East, jobs have not kept pace with the rising numbers of people. Youth unemployment has worsened over the past 10 years - increasing from 32.9 percent in 2012 to 36.5 percent in 2020, according to the International Labor Organization.

The private sector remains small, constrained by layers of bureaucracy, corruption and a lack of government incentives, said Yousef. Foreign and domestic investors are deterred also by the political risks, according to surveys by the International Monetary Fund, trapping the region in a vicious cycle of decline and instability.

Jobs in the region's bloated public sector - the world's largest as a proportion of total employment - have traditionally served as the main source of employment, particularly for educated people. But the public sector has failed to keep pace both with the rising population and expanded access to higher education.

In the 1970s, a male Egyptian graduate had a 70 percent chance of securing a government job. By 2016, that had fallen to less than 25 percent, according to calculations by Ragui Assaad, a professor at the University of Minnesota and research fellow at the Cairo-based Economic Research Forum.

Even in Tunisia, where political reforms have brought new freedoms, jobs are scarce, a source of continued frustration for young Tunisians. "We gained democracy - that's a very important thing. We can do anything we want now, without limitations," said Mohammed Aissa, 25, who graduated with a degree in financial engineering two years ago but has since been unable to find work. "Democracy is a great gain for us. But unfortunately, the economic situation is very grave."

A steep descent into poverty

Cairo, Egypt

2018

In 1960, the economies of Egypt and South Korea were roughly the same size, said Yousef. Today, South Korea's economy is more than four times as large, and its population is only half the size of Egypt's.

In the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, immense oil wealth has funded the rise of glittering cities dotted with skyscrapers, shopping malls and art galleries. But these countries too have been confronted with falling incomes, investment and employment since the price of oil began to decline in 2015.

The double whammy of the coronavirus pandemic and lower oil prices will only accelerate the economic regression across a region where many Arab governments have relied on gulf aid and many citizens on work in gulf countries, economists say.

While the IMF projected an overall 4.1 percent decline in 2020 for economies in the Middle East and Central Asia, in line with the rest of the world, the figures mask far deeper hits to some countries. These include Iraq, where falling oil revenue was expected to lead to a 9.5 percent contraction of the economy, and Lebanon, where the setback due to coronavirus restrictions pales in comparison with that due to the collapse of the country's financial system. The Lebanese economy was projected by the IMF to shrink by at least 19.2 percent in 2020, compounding the impact of a 9 percent contraction in 2019.

Both countries have experienced unrest over the past year, linked to the deteriorating conditions. In an echo of the first wave of Arab Spring protests almost a decade earlier, huge crowds took to the streets in Baghdad and Beirut in October 2019 to demand an overhaul of political systems that are ostensibly democratic but have entrenched the power of ruling elites.

Those protests have fizzled, in part because of the impact of coronavirus restrictions and the brutal tactics deployed by security forces, particularly in Iraq, where more than 500 protesters were shot dead and dozens of activists have been assassinated in recent months by shadowy militias.

Frustrations remain high in Iraq, and the economy continues to deteriorate after a sharp depreciation of the currency in November. Yet there is little appetite for further action because fear is so high, said a Baghdad restaurant owner who joined in the protests. "What the security forces and militias did was horrific," said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. "We lost a lot of young people and nothing changed."

In Lebanon, economic collapse and the trauma from last summer's huge explosion at Beirut's port have muted the enthusiasm of those who initially took to the streets. "They're too broken to face what happened," Lama Jamaleddine, a student organizer, said as she surveyed the handful of people at a recent protest commemorating victims of the explosion.

But she said she believes that younger Lebanese have become aware of the damage wrought upon their country by the aging warlords who make up the ruling elite. In the fall, student union elections at Beirut's major universities were swept by independents and activists, dealing a blow to the traditional sectarian political parties.

"The younger generation is breaking away," she said. "It's quite difficult to break away from it, but after the explosion they have seen for themselves how damaging the system is."

Authoritarianism ascendant

If there is one overriding lesson from the Arab Spring, it is that tyranny can quell dissent as long as leaders exert enough force or offer enough incentives.

Darayya, Syria

Oct. 28, 2015

But his strategy has left a destroyed, depopulated and impoverished country where conditions have continued to deteriorate even after it was clear his forces had won militarily, according to Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Policy, who as a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department helped coordinate the Obama administration's response to the Arab Spring uprisings.

In Egypt, President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi - whose military coup in 2013 ousted the elected government that had emerged out of the Arab Spring - rules with a far tighter grip than longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak, whose rule ended with that uprising. Today, an estimated 60,000 people are imprisoned for their political views, compared with 5,000 to 10,000 in the last years of Mubarak's tenure, according to human rights groups.

Egypt still suffers from high levels of unemployment and poverty, but people are cowed into silence, said a 26-year-old photographer, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear. "I lost many friends. I got injured many times. I became disillusioned and defeated," he said.

He predicted that an Arab Spring uprising would never happen again: "The first time was a kind of miracle. People were fearless and the regime was weak. But now everyone has lost hope. Everyone sees the revolution as a failure that caused more economic problems and more oppression."

Throughout the Middle East, authoritarianism is ascendant, noted Halabi, the exiled Lebanese activist. The rise of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the kingdom's de facto ruler has brought a campaign of repression against dissenters, ranging from women who campaigned for the right to drive to rival princes in the royal family. The United Arab Emirates has championed authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere.

And the chaos unleashed in Syria, Yemen and Libya has dampened the appetite for unrest in many parts of the region, while the short-lived success in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood, seen as a threat to established elites, has prompted many Arab countries to curtail the space for political activity.

'The next explosion'

The Arab Spring also shattered a long-held myth that authoritarianism equals stability, said Cofman Wittes. She recalled the scramble inside the Obama administration to adjust to the 2011 toppling of Mubarak, who had been seen as a bulwark of U.S. policy aimed at securing stability in a volatile region.

"No one saw the Arab Spring coming," she said. "Repressive states always look stable, but when a government relies on coercion as a primary means of survival, it's inherently unstable."

A similar fate might await the oil-rich countries of the Arabian Peninsula, where hereditary monarchs quelled the stirrings of unrest in 2011 by distributing generous payoffs to citizens, said Assaad, the University of Minnesota professor. Over the decades, the gulf countries' oil wealth has allowed these autocrats to offer their citizens generous services and government employment in return for political quiet.

"A crucial question is what happens in the oil-rich countries," said Assaad. "They really are powder kegs in terms of the potential instability if oil prices are unable to grow and to drive the population to acquiescence, as they did in the Arab Spring."

The ripple effect of falling oil prices is already being felt well beyond the gulf. Countries such as Egypt and Jordan are seeing less aid from their richer allies, which had in the past helped shore up their governments, as well as a falloff in remittances from citizens who work in gulf economies but are now being sent home as a recession bites.

Further instability seems inevitable, said Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He believes the upheaval of the past 10 years represents the start of a long process of change that will eventually lead to a transformation of the Middle East.

"I don't think we're going to see any stability as long as dictators and military intelligence agencies continue to suffocate society," he said.

He also fears that the unrest could be more violent than it was a decade ago.

"The status quo is untenable, and the next explosion will be catastrophic," he predicted. "We're talking about starvation, we're talking about state collapse, we're talking about civil strife."

Claire Parker in Tunis contributed to this report.

A protester keeps watch from a roof at the edge of Cairo's Tahrir Square on Feb. 4, 2011, as clashes with security forces subsided. (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Liz Sly is The Washington Post's Beirut bureau chief, covering Lebanon, Syria and the wider region. She has spent more than 17 years covering the Middle East, including the first and second Iraq wars. Other postings include Washington, Africa, China, Afghanistan and Italy.
Press Enter to skip to end of carousel

Lost Decade: Exploring the lessons and legacy of the Arab Spring

Carousel - $Lost Decade: Exploring the lessons and legacy of the Arab Spring: use tab or arrows to navigate

arrow-left arrow-right

The unfinished business of the Arab Spring

Egypt

Democracy versus stability

Coming next

Tunisia

Braving its own course

Coming soon

Libya

Into the foreigners' hands

Coming soon

Syria

The dividends of brutality

Coming soon

End of carousel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
On the face of it, the Arab Spring was a spectacular failure. But is it really over?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ten years after the anti-government uprisings, anger over economic and political setbacks continues to roil the Middle East.

# data[].attributes.body
After listening to the NPR report about the Arab Spring after 1 year. Create a post using the following 3-2-1 format:

3 Things that stood out to you about the report

2 Questions you still have about the Arab Spring

1 Summary of what you could conclude about the Arab Spring's success 1 year later.

# data[].attributes.body
Choose one of the following countries to research that were considered a major part of the Arab Spring: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen

Then, create a digital storyboard that breaks the uprising in that specific country into 6 different stages. Each stage should include a brief summary of what took place, an image to represent what took place, and an original title that connects with what happened in that specific part of the story.

Once completed, post your storyboard to this section of the padlet.

See the example above.

# data[].attributes.body
After reading the article about the roots of the Arab Spring, complete the graphic organizer. Each section should summarize what the article says about the conditions for each area indicated.

# data[].attributes.body
Read the attached article and complete the graphic organizer below.