The key countries at the heart of the Arab Spring: Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Image adapted from Wikimedia Commons User:Danalm000.
What are the chances that the revolutions of the Arab Spring succeed at creating democracies? According to a regression model created Jay Ulfelder: maybe.
[T]he probability that each of those new democracies would make it to their sixth birthday…:
Tunisia: 82%
Egypt: 48%
Libya: 89%
Ulfelder’s blog post is worth the read. It’s an excellent (if somewhat technical) example of how to do (and write up) some quick research, and how the ability to blog is changing the way scientists share ideas, and get feedback (check out the comments section).
With the different outcomes of the protests in Tunisia and Egypt compared to Libya and Syria (and Bahrain), it’s important to recognize the courage of the protesters out there on the streets. It’s not really courage if there is nothing to risk. These men and women are risking everything.
Just like the lonely man who stood in front of a line of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. No one knows what happened to him.
About midday, as a column of tanks slowly moves along Chang’an Boulevard toward Tiananmen Square, an unarmed young man carrying shopping bags suddenly steps out in front of the tanks. Instead of running over him, the first tank tries to go around, but the young man steps in front of it again. They repeat this maneuver several more times before the tank stops and turns off its motor. The young man climbs on top of the tank and speaks to the driver before jumping back down again. Soon, the young man is whisked to the side of the road by an unidentified group of people and disappears into the crowd.
To this day, who he was and what became of him remains a mystery.
What does it take to show such courage? We’ve talked about how your situation in life, like poverty, can affect the ethical choices you make. We’ve also seen how different social and demographic conditions can force countries toward revolutions.
So it’s worth taking a moment to think about the protesters. And about ourselves. What do we value so much that it would overcome our fear to risk our lives?
The Economist has come up with a neat little flash app that combines all the ingredients to see which Arab countries are ripest for revolution. They call it their “Shoe Thrower’s Index”.
We’ve seen how a combination of demographics (lots of young people), an educated middle class, and protests might lead to revolutions (which still often come as a surprise). With The Economist’s table you get to choose which factors you think are most important.
Move the slider bars on the right to set the “weight” of each indicator of revolution to what you think is most important, and the chart on the left will adjust itself to show which countries are more likely to have a revolution based on your parameters.
Poster by Brian Moore (2009) (click image for his Flickr page).
Next year we’ll be looking at (and creating) propaganda posters when we study 20th century conflicts. Brian Moore has a wonderful set of adaptations of WWII posters for WWIII.
Inspired by the 2009 Iran election protest and activism and censorship therein, the WWIII Propaganda Posters were conceived as a mostly playful statement on wartime, citizen journalism, censorship, and how they all play with the advent of the Internet.
After going through the free-market part of the economic system simulation, the least wealthy people –the students who ended up with the least kilobucks— staged a socialist revolution.
Cell phone used to incite the counter-revolution.
Well the most wealthy students were not too happy with that, because the revolutionaries confiscated all their wealth, assigned them all jobs (to simulate a command socialist economy), and started paying everyone equally. One student, assigned to produce food, produced a chicken, a cookie, and a dead socialist. She got sent to jail.
Fortunately, for her at least, she was able to get hold of a phone that had been left lying around from the market part of the simulation, so she sent a simulated text to her fellow former oligarch to try to start the counter revolution. She got a return text:
The return text.
It’s nice to see that our time spent talking about Egypt has not been wasted.
The Economist has a wonderful graphic of the countries in the Arab World. Click on the countries for information about the country, including things related to civil rights.
A successful democratic revolution may well need a relatively wealthy and educated population, however, one of the main things that seem to drive revolutions themselves is just how many young adults there are in a country.
… countries in which 60 percent or more of the population is under the age of 30 are more likely to experience outbreaks of civil conflict than those where age structures are more balanced.
— Madsen (2011): The Demographics of Revolt
When there are lots of young people getting to the age when they are just trying to find jobs and start families, but the country’s economy can’t grow fast enough to provide all the jobs they need, then you have a lot of dissatisfied, disaffected people with time on their hands; it’s a tinderbox ready for any spark.
I recently attended a talk by Jennifer Scuibba where she laid out the case. Scuibba’s blog, also has a
a very good set of links that look at the age demographics of the current revolutions in the Arab world.
One of the links goes to a report by Richard Cincotta and others (Cincotta et al., 2003) that used this type of demographic analysis to figure out which countries were most likely to end up in conflict.
They talk about the demographic transition, “a population’s shift from high to low rates of birth and death,” as being a key factor in reducing the likelihood of conflicts. Therefore, they suggest:
If civil conflict leads to a successful democratic transition, then political stability is probably not a net benefit.
However, once there is a democratic revolution, the same large cohort of young people still exists, which could make a country like Egypt unstable for quite a while, until it goes through the demographic transition. After all:
…countries do not become mature democracies overnight. They usually go through a rocky transition, where mass politics mixes with authoritarian elete politics in a volatile way. Statistical evidence covering the past two centuries shows that in this transitional phase of democratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less …
— Mansfield and Snyder (1995): Democratization and War
Arasmus is mapping all the events that are happening in Libya. A lot of it’s confusing, things are changing very fast, and who knows where it will end up.
