Despite the progress the protests made in MENA republican states, only Yemen, Tunisia, Libya,
Egypt, and Syria faced serious regime destabilizing protests. In this section, I focus on the presidential
states, including Libya, to observe what effects this monumental movement had on these countries. To do
so, I lay out how the protests evolved and spread over time, how the regimes reacted, and finally what
acted as a catalyst for their eventual downfall. Afterwards I analyze what ultimately became of these
Iraq, Algeria, and Lebanon didn’t experience strong political mobilizations and this fact must be rectified with the rest of this paper’s argument as to why.
While the self-immolation of Bouazizi on January 4th, 2011 may have been the spark that
triggered events in Tunisia, the quick exit by President Ben Ali, ten days later, emboldened many of the
protesters in neighboring countries. In Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Libya protestors took to the streets in “Days of Rage” challenging the regime through staged, well organized protests. While protests against
these regimes were nothing new to the region these organized attacks had novel concepts behind them.
For instance, social media played a new and pivotal role in organizing and coordinating demonstrations
and sharing footage of the event with the outside world (Lynch 2014). This organization and a penchant to occupy highly visible spaces, like Tahrir Square in Egypt’s capital of Cairo, brought highly visible
attention to the mobilization. Other instigating features were unique to specific countries and should be
counted here as well. Egypt had experienced a parliamentary election in 2010 which saw the regime lose
considerable number of seats forcing Mubarak to nullify the results. Roger Owen exposes another
important variable in that the presidential regimes were aging considerably bringing to the forefront the
issue of familial succession (Owen 2014).
These now embattled leaders across the MENA reacted in typical fashion: with violence and
aggression. This is especially true in Egypt and Tunisia where gangs of regime loyalists and security
forces would attack protestors in an attempt to break their resolve. In Syria and Libya, wholesale military
action on the part of the regimes was conducted and protests turned into civil war. This split in use of
military security forces would be fortuitous in predicting the outcomes. In Yemen, Tunisia, and Egypt the
military refused to aggress against the protestors and instead sided against the regimes (Brownlee,
Masoud, and Reynolds 2015). In these instances, the long reigned rulers of Saleh of Yemen, and Ben Ali
of Tunisia chose to retreat into exile in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia while Mubarak faced imprisonment
for crimes committed during his reign. In Libya and Syria, conflict degenerated into all out civil war as
The military entrenchment of Libya’s Ghaddafi and Syria’s Al-Bashar culminated into a bloody
civil war. The conflict in Libya came to an apogee via NATO military intervention which led to Ghaddafi’s overthrow, capture and murder. However, Syria’s conflict labored on as pressure from Al-
Bashar’s allies, namely Russia, has kept western armed forces from recreating a Libyan type capitulation
event. The ability to rebuild and transition within the states that experienced political change has also
been asymmetrical. Libya and Yemen followed a similar path in that transitional governments failed to
take hold and tribalistic tensions devolved these states into conflict. Egypt had some early successes in
transitioning to a more democratic state with the election of Mohamed Morsi as the new president.
However this democratic wave was short lived when the Egyptian armed forces shut down the civilian
government and installed Abdel Sisi as the new interim leader. Of all the state to experience the Arab
Spring in its full force, only Tunisia successfully transitioned to a more democratic state and resist
recapture by old regime forces.
Interestingly, not all republican states in the MENA experienced high levels of Arab Spring
protests. The countries of Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon were less impacted than their presidential neighbors.
One argument exists that contends these states had already experienced years of civil war prior to the
Arab Spring events and the regimes that existed at the time were reflective of this fact (Owen 2014). The
civil wars in Lebanon and Iraq were especially violent and predicated on the basis of sectarian lines which
meant the regimes that came after were meant to pacify these grievances. The Algerian civil war of the 1990’s too had repercussions that reverberated in the regime that created a unique inoculation to the
spread of the Arab Spring in its full force. In Iraq, however, spillover from the Syrian civil war created
new levels of conflict instead of a wave of democratization and instigated the formation of a rebel
government in the form of the Islamic State of the Levant. The conflict, just as in Syria, is still being