Debora Del Piano

In 2011 a wave of mass mobilizations in several countries in the SWANA/MENA region toppled long-standing dictators and came to be known as ‘Arab Spring’. Mass protests began in Tunisia in December 2010 and then spread like fire to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and in a more limited way to almost every other country in the region. Despite the uprisings representing such an unbelievable event, already a few months after the wave of mass mobilization that had resonated across the globe, a diverse array of actors and institutions, discourses, policies and practices, emerged with the aim of containing the revolutionary fire. Counter-revolutionary practices as well as calls for stability by Western actors were mirrored by the spread of an ‘Arab winter’ paradigm which contributed to normalize a return to the status quo ante.
International and domestic resistance notwithstanding, protests have continued, and this resilience is at the core of this research, whose aim is to trace some of the underlying demands driving the Uprisings and critically situate them in a broader debate concerning liberal democracy.