INTERNATIONAL
VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW
Spring is in the air
How the Arab Spring has sparked civilian protests across the globe
by ZACHARY GREENE ‘15
A
s most know, the Arab Spring
refers to a wave of political uprisings in the Middle East during the early part of 2011. What is less
commonly known, however, is that this
slew of protests was largely ignited by
a young Tunisian fruit and vegetable
merchant named Mohamed Bouaziz
who lit himself on fire in front of a municipal building in response to his feelings regarding government inefficacy.
This individual act of protest triggered
sustained action on a massive scale in
Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt
and Yemen that would eventually reach
nearly every continent in efforts to
change the status quo in government and
society. In pushing established military dictators from power and demanding fairer treatment, protestors gathered
en masse as a show of their displeasure
for the existing regimes and their desire
for change. These displays have more
recently triggered a series of violent
clashes between civilian protestors and
military forces under the power of incumbent regimes. While the international reception to this series of uprisings
has been by no means uniform, much of
the Western world, including the United
States, supported the developments in
the Middle East as a crucial step toward
global democracy. What many failed to
recognize at the time was the scope of
unintended consequences that resulted
from the demonstrations. After the dust
settled in gathering points such as Tahrir Square, populations around the world
have chosen to emulate this method
of protest. As a result, the seemingly
isolated Arab Spring of 2011 has set
off a domino effect of political protest
that has spread to the squares of Kiev,
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streets of Caracas, and cities of Brazil.
Similar to displays in Egypt, hundreds of thousands of disgruntled Ukrainian civilians took to the street in protest
of former President Viktor Yanukovych
and his regime early this year. While
many have pointed to a rejected European trade deal as the immediate source
of this dissatisfaction, the underlying
cause of the unrest seems to be attributable to a much broader trend of aligning the nation with their Russian neighbors rather than with Western Europe.
In recent months, Venezuela has seen
a string of protests organized throughout
the nation’s provincial cities. Similar to
the effect of Bouazizi’s self-immolation,
Venezuelan demonstrations were triggered by the arrest of four students on
February 6th, 2014, and gained popularity through social media. According to
John Paul Rathbone of The Financial
Times, these demonstrations – which
have grown during the first year of President Nicolás Maduro’s term – are rooted
in recent presidential turnover and economic turmoil. While the socialist nation
controls vast supplies of oil and other
nationalized industries, Rathbone mentions that “inflation is over fifty percent;
one in four basic goods are missing from
supermarket shelves as shortages increase; and foreign reserves are falling.”
Though these protests have yet to yield
tangible outcomes, as in the Ukraine and
many Middle Eastern nations, they too
took the form of mass civilian gatherings
aimed at instituting checks on the power
of an unstable yet heavy-handed regime.
Brazilian protestors also coordinated
efforts in opposition to the country’s astronomical spending on the 2014 World
Cup and 2016 Olympics in the face of
perceived corruption, high taxes, and
Photo Credit: Mstyslav Chernov