The Arab Spring - Essay Example

The Arab Spring is the series of events, which happened and is still happening in the Arab world when the people of the various Arab nations started mass protests and open revolts against the autocratic regimes ruling over them. These events started taking place in Tunisia and they spread through Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, and currently, they are happening in Syria. The Arab Spring has seen the fall of several autocratic regimes whose toppling has surprised many in the world. There are several ways through which these revolutions came to be and were organized.

In this paper, we shall discuss some of the events which led to the Arab Spring and how most of the public protests were organized. The Arab Spring came into existence as a response to the lack of political freedom in the various countries in which it has occurred. At first, they were peaceful protests some of which became armed struggles whose aim was to topple the autocratic regimes ruling over these countries. According to Ben-Meir (106), the rebellion against such governments was due to the fact that instead of taking into consideration the calls of their people to allow them to have political freedom.

These autocratic regimes responded with violence against peaceful protesters, a move that may have been spurred by their conception that their authority was being threatened and that there was a need for them to reclaim such authority by using brute force. The use of force against unarmed civilians led to the discrediting of the legitimacy of such governments and calls for the stepping down of these leaders were made from many international organizations and governments. Moreover, in cases such as Libya and Syria, the peaceful protests suddenly became fierce armed rebellions against the government which attacked the unarmed civilians.

Jones (447) states that protesters in the Arab Spring made very good use of modern technology such as social networks in order to organize protests as well as making people outside their countries aware of what was really going on because of the media blackout that had been created by the autocratic regimes. Many of these regimes had banned and continue to ban international journalists from having access to their countries perhaps because they do not wish for their crimes against their own people to be revealed in the international arena.

To counter this, many protesters have devised ingenious ways of getting the information out of their countries including hacking through the heavily censored internet to sites which are most suitable for them to relay their messages. The violent crackdown on civilians by their own governments has also led much military personnel to defect from the government ranks and these have joined the protesters to form the core of the armed rebellion against the government. These military defectors have been very instrumental, through their skills and experience, to bring a semblance of the discipline into the ranks of the rebels.

 It is hoped that the Islamist parties which are currently coming to power in the wake of the Arab Spring will be more democratic than their predecessors.