Ten Years Since the “Arab Spring”: Despair Has Not Become More Comfortable

Michael Milshtein writes for "Fikra Forum" of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy about two wide-ranging Arab public opinion polls which were released recently, marking the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring.
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"Two new, wide-ranging Arab public opinion polls were released recently, designed to measure underlying regional trends and, in part, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring. The first is the 2019-20 Arab Opinion Index, the seventh in a series of annual public opinion surveys conducted by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar. The second is the 12th Annual Arab Youth Survey, administered by the Dubai-based ASDA’A BCW communications agency. Both research reports are based on the analysis of survey responses collected in the past year from tens of thousands of people across 15 Arab countries...

Their sad consensus is this: a decade after the optimistic eruption of the Arab Spring, most inhabitants of these Arab states—especially among the younger generation—sense a combination of material privation, apprehension, or even despair about their future. They also express a total lack of confidence in the ability or will of their regimes to solve the basic problems they face in either the social or the economic sphere".

 

External reference: Fikra Forum, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 27.10.2020.

This article available also in Arabic.