Top Ten Facts About the Arab Spring

The Top Ten
1 The Arab Spring prompts biggest migrant wave since World War II

Wars in Syria, Libya and Iraq, severe repression in Eritrea, and spiralling instability across much of the Arab world have all contributed to the displacement of around 16.7 million refugees worldwide.

2 More than 10 countries in North Africa and the Middle East have had large public protests in the past years. Among the more prominent are Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria and Yemen.
3 It Started on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution
4 The rulers of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have been forced from office. Cumulatively, they had been in power for a total of 95 years.
5 Many consider the real beginning of the “Arab spring” to be April 6, 2008, when a textile-worker strike in the Egyptian city of Mahalla al-Kobra was organized through by means of the then-fledgling Facebook platform.
6 The most radical discourse from Arab Spring into the still ongoing civil wars took place in Syria as early as the second half of 2011.
7 While the wave of initial revolutions and protests faded by mid-2012, some started to refer to the succeeding and still ongoing large-scale discourse conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa as the Arab Winter.
8 Some observers have drawn comparisons between the Arab Spring movements and the Revolutions of 1989 that swept through Eastern Europe and the Second World.
9 The influence of social media on political activism during the Arab Uprisings has been much debated.
10 Protests in many countries affected by the Arab Spring have attracted widespread support from the international community, while harsh government responses have generally met condemnation.

In the case of the Moroccan and Syrian protests, the international response has been considerably more nuanced

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