Arab Spring In Plain English

The Arab Spring (Arabic: الربيع العربي‎ ar-Rabīʻ al-ʻArabī), also referred to as Arab revolutions (Arabic: الثورات العربية‎ aṯ-'awrāt al-ʻarabiyyah), was a revolutionary wave of both violent and non-violent demonstrations, protests, riots, coups, foreign interventions, and civil wars in North Africa and the Middle East that began on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution.

The Tunisian Revolution effect spread strongly to five other countries: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, where either the regime was toppled or major uprisings and social violence occurred, including riots, civil wars or insurgencies. Sustained street demonstrations took place in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Iranian Khuzestan, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan. Minor protests occurred in Djibouti, Mauritania, the Palestinian National Authority, Saudi Arabia, and the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara.[1] A major slogan of the demonstrators in the Arab world is ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām ("the people want to bring down the regime").[2]

The wave of initial revolutions and protests faded by mid-2012, as many Arab Spring demonstrations were met with violent responses from authorities,[3][4][5] as well as from pro-government militias and counter-demonstrators. These attacks were answered with violence from protestors in some cases.[6][7][8] Large-scale conflicts resulted—the Syrian Civil War,[9][10] Iraqi insurgency and the following civil war,[11] the Egyptian Crisis, coup and subsequent unrest and insurgency,[12] the Libyan Civil War, and the Yemeni Crisis and following civil war.[13]

A power struggle continued after the immediate response to the Arab Spring. While leadership changed and regimes were held accountable, power vacuums opened across the Arab world. Ultimately it came down to a contentious battle between a consolidation of power by religious elites and the growing support for democracy in many Muslim-majority states.[14] The early hopes that these popular movements would end corruption, increase political participation, and bring about greater economic equity quickly collapsed in the wake of the counterrevolutionary moves in Yemen and of the Saudi-linked military deep state in Egypt, the regional and international military interventions in Bahrain and Yemen, and the destructive civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen.[15]

Some have referred to the succeeding and still ongoing conflicts as the Arab Winter.[9][10][11][12][13] As of January 2018, only the uprising in Tunisia has resulted in a transition to constitutional democratic governance.[1]