The Arab Spring: Insights for Political Risk Analysis

Therese Feng

In a new century already marked by major political turmoil, the Arab Spring was an unprecedented wave of indigenous popular uprisings and regime challenges in a region of states long regarded as trapped in static authoritarian regimes. Beginning with Tunisia in December 2010 and then rapidly spreading across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Arab Spring uprisings were unparalleled in their scale, cross-sector participation and unpredictability, posing an extraordinary challenge to legitimacy and containment for existing regimes.

The causes and course of these events has been much discussed. In many MENA countries, a lack of economic opportunity and political access fuelled potent dissatisfaction. Their populaces had endured more than a decade of stagnant real per capita income growth, high and rising unemployment rates particularly among the youth, especially the educated, and an increasingly tenuous position for the non-professional middle class and rural poor (UNDP, 2011; Breisinger et al., 2011). Protests pointed to dysfunctional governments unable to provide basic social services, widening income disparities and increasingly egregious corruption.¹¹For instance