Please if you do not have a theoretical framework put your answers in bullets.
Yes, there was the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia, it happened and succeed. But I think there was no Arab spring. Although events in Tunisia were expected and could have triggered a domino effect in other Arab countries, the conditions were necessary but not sufficient for a revolution. This brings us to the issues around uneven and combined development that Trotsky highlighted. While the conditions of despair looked the same in MENA (middle east and north Africa), the conditions that would allow a revolution to take place and manifest were different in these Arab countries. Whilst the event in Tunisia was a black swan event, the events elsewhere were entrepreneurial projects by discontented groups, probably even more undemocratic than the regimes they were trying to replace. However, this entrepreneurship was not limited to these discontented group but external forces as well.
Nothwithstanding, the Arab Spring we are still to learn the real chain of events that happened in Libya whether this "man" dubbed the mad man who build a river across the land and was daring to challenge Western hegemony by introducing the golden currency in Africa. Yes Gaddafi was a dictator but he was not the only dictator but in hindsight the opportunity could have been perfect for his detractors. To do this, some western countries would have to sacrifice their own bogey man in Egypt in what has turned to centred around an individual and not the system, which unfortunately seemed to have made a mysterious comeback. My opinion.
Dear Hassan, personally, I find the analytical framework on institutions and development by Acemoglou and Robinson (Acemoglu, D. and J. A. Robinson (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Crown, New York) very interesting to approach social movements like Egypt´s Arab Spring. Actually they apply the framework for that particular case in this paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20665.pdf
I hope this is helpful. Best regards,
The Jasmine revolution would perfectly fit into Moosa's assumption.
Howwever, Tunisia prevoius functioning economy and high literacy rates played a more dominant role. This serves as an aspirational basis. The theory of satisficing behavoiur by March (1955) could be imported from organisational studies to support this.
The dictator ship in Tunisia was not as brutal as the dictactorship other countries and therefore not as embedded. Whereas in others it became entrenched.
Its not poverty but rather perceived ineqaulity that plays a role- there is work and theory to this effect.
The crisis of rising expectations and the failure of the new, young leadership to bring any changes sparked events, but despite the fact that each country suffered from the same problems, their situations brought different results. Gamal Mubarak was promising, but then disappointed. Saif Ghaddafi, Bashir Assad and King Abdullah II are also in those molds. However, the make up of society in Egypt is not that in Tunisia, or Libya, or Syria or Jordan.
Hence, while we can easily categorize and generalize about the causes (Iran included), the results cannot be so easily put into a theoretical model.
وجدت كتاب جلبيرالأشقر بعنوان: "الشعب يريد: بحث جذري في الانتفاضة العربية" غنياً بالمداخل النظرية، وتحديداً نقاشه حول التنمية والرأسالمية والقوى الفاعلة داخل المجتمع
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