Syria in the Arab Spring: The integration of Syria’s conflict with the Arab uprisings, 2011–2013

Abstract

Between December 2010 and March 2011 a local Tunisian protest against an aging dictator spread to Egypt and then to Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria and at a lower intensity to several other countries (Lynch, 2012). These protests involved a remarkable number of commonalities in slogans, timing, and methods, and self-conscious framing of events as a common "Arab" narrative. Yemeni protestors, for instance, quickly adopted Egyptian slogans or took heart from Libyan opposition advances. This Arab uprising represents a critical case for theories of the international diffusion of protest movements and regime change (Bunce and Wolchik 2011; Hale, 2013; Solingen, 2012; Zhukov and Stewart, 2013). The early Syrian uprising modeled itself after counterparts across the region, employing similar rhetorical frames, attempting to seize public places without arms, presenting a civic, non-sectarian and non-Islamist face at home and abroad, and in some cases hoping to attract a NATO intervention like Libya's. Many likely expected Bashar al-Asad's regime to succumb to a similar fate as those of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia's Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali (Anden-Papadopolous and Pantti, 2013; Leenders, 2012; Leenders and Heydemann, 2012). As Syria's conflict evolved towards a mixture of protest and civil war, while uprisings in Arab Spring leaders such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen themselves struggled, Syria became far more of a polarizing issue with a higher degree of sectarian rather than pan-Arab identity narratives. How did Syria's popular uprising of 2011 fit within the broader regional wave of Arab uprisings in early 2011, commonly termed the "Arab Spring"? Existing theories of protest diffusion and regime change cascades emphasize the importance of geographic proximity. The pattern of uprisings in Arab countries in early 2011 only partially fits

Learning and the diffusion of regime contention in the Arab Spring

“…Not even geographic proximity seems to matter: protesters were not more likely to imitate events that occurred in neighboring countries. This finding is consistent with Lynch et al (2014), which shows that social media discussions of the Syrian conflict referenced Egypt and Tunisia rather than Syria’s neighbors, and with the argument that the emergence of a new Arab public sphere played a key role in creating a shared narrative across the region (Lynch, 2013, 2014b).…”

“…There is a consensus that the successful protests in Tunisia and then Egypt set in motion a process of regime change by sending a powerful signal to protesters in other countries, who were inspired by what their Tunisian and Egyptian peers achieved (Hale, 2013; Herb, 2014; Lynch, 2013; Saideman, 2012). That is, the diffusion of regime contention in the Arab Spring seems to have been driven by “demonstration effects” (Hale, 2013; Lynch et al, 2014; Patel et al, 2014; Saideman, 2012) or, in other words, learning (Weyland, 2012). In this respect, the Arab Spring is similar to other revolutionary waves (Hale, 2013; Patel et al, 2014; Weyland, 2009, 2010).…”

“…This article offers one of the few statistical analyses of the Arab Spring and the first quantitative analysis of demonstration effects in this context. Lynch et al (2014) use Twitter data to show how Syrian protests were at first directly inspired by prominent counterparts in the region, not just by their neighbors, but how the protests later lost this focus. Brancati (2014) includes the Arab Spring in a broader sample of protests and focuses on their economic determinants instead of diffusion.…”

Online reactions to the 2017 ‘Unite the right’ rally in Charlottesville: measuring polarization in Twitter networks using media followership

“…It is common to analyze them individually as retweet (e.g., see [8,9]), follower (e.g., see [10]), mention (e.g., see [8]) networks, and others. An extensive literature is concerned with Twitter network data, and the myriad topics that have been studied using them include political protest and social movements [11][12][13][14][15][16][17], epidemiological surveillance and monitoring of health behaviors [18][19][20][21][22][23][24], contagion and online content propagation [25,26], identification of extremist groups [27], ideological polarization [8,28,29], and much more. Indeed, the combination of significance for public discourse, data accessibility, and amenability to network analysis is appealing.…”

Navigating the ‘dark waters of globalisation’: Global markets, inequalities and the spatial dynamics of risk

“…The flow of ideas and information also played a major role in the Arab Spring, as local groups utilised social media to share information and concerns about the established order in a number of Middle Eastern countries (Eltantawy and Wiest, 2011;Khondker, 2011). Out of this disruption, there also emerged a set of drivers that coalesced around revolutionary change (Joffé, 2011;Kamrava, 2012;Bayat, 2013;Lynch et al, 2014) and these may well have served to help sustain the growth in the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), and especially its use of social media (Bradley, 2012;Farwell, 2014;Klausen, 2014;Stansfield, 2014). ISIS have effectively used social media to attract recruits from across Europe and the Middle East to their cause, and to promote their particular message of fundamentalist Islam (Atran et al, 2014;Stansfield, 2014).…”