The self-immolation of a fruit and vegetable vendor in a central Tunisian town in December 2010 seemed an unlikely spark for revolutions across three continents. Tunisia’s populist uprising initially began as local affairs—workers and youth congregating in the town square to express years of pent-up frustration against petty bureaucrats considered corrupt and abusive. The demonstrations began in towns far removed from Tunisia’s coastal elite—in Sidi Bouzid, Menzel Bouzaiene, al-Ragab, and Miknassi—with protestors demanding economic opportunity as well as greater dignity, justice, and political freedom. The protestors were united in opposing the cronyism and repression that had characterized...

Over the course of the 1990s, in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa, authorities began to relax the previously strict media censorship laws, often informally, allowing the emergence and broader dissemination of independent print media. The slightly more permissive environment inspired individuals and journalists to test the limits, probing the regimes’ tolerance for dissent. By the mid-2000s, the limited opening in some countries began to expand public debate among a cross section of elites and middle-class citizens, including independent journalists, activists, and non-governmental organizations. Journalists published daring articles about nepotism in ministerial appointments or the siphoning off...

Tunis’s main thoroughfare, Avenue Bourguiba, is a broad avenue lined with ficus trees, where men and women in business suits walk briskly across the grassy divide, navigating the lively open-air cafes and stately embassies. Until January 2011, twin billboards flanked each end of the avenue, each with a picture of the country’s president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, smiling imperiously into the distance. These looming pictures of the president had been a fixture of the landscape for so long that most of the city’s denizens had ceased to notice them. To a visitor, however, the portraits stood out as a...

Chapter 2 addressed a political change born of the deliberate, top-down contraction of political rights and civil liberties. This chapter argues that some rulers of the Middle East and North Africa over the past two decades introduced limited liberalizing reforms that advanced educational, economic, and social rights. In a few cases, these reforms expanded political participation and representation. Many of these liberalizing reforms, like the de-democratizing measures discussed in the previous chapter, were codified in the legal system.¹ While throughout the twentieth century and even earlier, Middle Eastern and North African rulers had intermittently experimented with liberalizing reforms, the fifteen...

This book has argued that three macro-level drivers of change transformed domestic politics in the Middle East and North Africa over the past two decades, changing the interaction between regime authorities and the public. None of these political changes alone independently “caused” any one particular Arab Spring revolution, and in many countries some, but not all, of these drivers were resonant. However, the combination of these factors explained the willingness of such large numbers of the region’s citizens to take to the streets in protest. In some cases, such as Egypt and Bahrain, a combination of these three drivers converged,...