Why was the Arab World Poised for Revolution? Schooling, Economic Opportunities, and the Arab Spring

Abstract

What underlying long-term conditions set the stage for the Arab Spring? In recent decades, the Arab region has been characterized by an expansion in schooling coupled with weak labor market conditions. This pattern is especially pronounced in those countries that saw significant upheaval during the first year of the Arab Spring uprisings. We argue that the lack of adequate economic opportunities for an increasingly educated populace can help us understand episodes of regime instability such as the Arab Spring.

Morocco: Modelling Stability in Turbulent Waters

“…These conflicts not only continued into the twenty-first century, but have intensified as the Islamic State (IS or ISIS) and its imitators take advantage of political upheaval in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring to carve out their own fiefdoms of radicalism. With rich empirical proof to justify Hudson's pessimism, academics flock to study the causes of instability with the mindset that social, political, and cultural characteristics of instability are endemic to the region (Waterbury, 2001;Joffe 2011;Campante and Chor, 2012). This is not to say that the literature on North African regimes is monolithic.…”

“…This literature has sought the causes of conflict and instability in the hopes of preventing future outbreaks, or of remedying current conflicts by evaluating economic, demographic and other quantitative markers within unstable political societies (Joffe, 2011;Campante & Chor, 2012;Chalard, 2015). However, little has been said of those countries that have avoided the regional instability altogether, and, in the case of Morocco, remain critical (Molina, 2011).…”

Volume 9 (2013) | Issue 1

“…The failure to bring about development (legitimacy by means of performance) has been pointed to by several scholars [3][4][5][6][7][8]. Filipe Campante and Davin Chor and Katerina Dalacoura specify the argument by showing that grievances, especially that of unemployment, held by well-educated people foreshadow problems for autocrats [9,10]. According to Samuel Huntington "The higher the level of education of the unemployed,…the more extreme the destabilizing behavior which results" [11].…”

“…This article will focus exactly on the modalities of democratic revolt. People are able to topple autocratic regimes, only when the autocrat fails to keep his/her order intact [13] and this condition is partly dependent on whether or not the opposition has the resources, the education and the time for mounting such a challenge [9,14]. The availability of new communication media with Facebook, text messaging etc.…”

“…their isolation, cultural dissatisfaction, and predisposition for violent tendencies) and as such are susceptible to radicalisation extremists [8]. The 2009 World Prison Population List estimates that more than 9.8 million people are held in penal institutions around the world and almost a third of these are in the United States (USA, 2.29 million [9]). Even more interesting, is that around 300 federal prisoners in the US are serving sentences on terrorism-related charges [8].…”