The Arab Revolts

Its hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a certain revolution more successful than others, as there can be many many different factors at different depths of society that can influence how a revolution unfolds. Looking at why other countries in the region did not experience as successful of a revolution as those in Tunisia and Egypt, we can identify some differences however. One thing that contributed to the success in Tunisia was that, unlike many of its neighbors, society was already fairly unified ethnically, religiously, and linguistically. Egypt, while more diverse than Tunisia, had a fairly robust history of groups that could bridge ideological differences to come to a common ground to form social movements, such as Shorbagy (2007) describes the Kefaya. This ability to compromise on some of the less pressing issues to focus on bettering the lives of the entire population is a key aspect of a successful social movement. Spreading your objectives too thin can lead to fragmentation of the movement. While sectarianism isn't completely to blame or even play necessarily the biggest role, I think it has contributed to the minimal successes enjoyed by the revolutions in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, and the regimes in power tried to play this to their advantage. Without a unified picture of how life will go on and cooperation will take place after the revolution, the revolution itself might fail in mobilizing people.