41 - Arab Uprisings: Tunisia

On December 17th, 2010, at approximately 11:30 AM, a 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi approached the governor’s office in his town, Sidi Bouzid. Standing in the middle of traffic, he shouted, “How do you expect me to make a living?” before dousing himself in gasoline and lighting a match.

Bouazizi never recovered from a coma and died in a Tunisian hospital several weeks later. But his self-immolation would literally ignite protests across Tunisia against state corruption and a lack of opportunities for young people. These demonstrations then spread across the region — most famously to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria — in a series of uprisings now collectively known as the Arab Spring.

But while Bouazizi’s suicide may have been the immediate catalyst of the protests in Tunisia, we have to understand why he felt driven to such extreme measures if we are to discern the causes of the Arab Spring. In addition to exploring these reasons and the timeline of the protests themselves, we want to delve into the consequences of the demonstrations and the state of the region ten years later.

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Sources: https://bit.ly/3bhoMVw