The Arab Spring has been misunderstood

A decade after the Arab Spring, Westerners’ perceptions of events and Arabs’ perceptions of themselves remain muddled.

Ten years ago, anti-government protests in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain fostered hope, within the region and without, that a pro-democratic, pan-Arab movement was finally in bloom. But with the exception of Tunisia, the Arab Spring uprisings failed. And even Tunisia’s success is a qualified one: The nation’s economy is in a shambles and its democratic experiment is fragile. In 2011, many Western observers misunderstood the nature of the protests. Ten years later, sadly, too many still do. The principal myth to be dispelled is the notion that the Arab Spring was a unified, sweeping protest movement when in fact it was a collection of discrete uprisings. Economic and political grievances overlapped across borders, but these were organic, local protests against local regimes.