The Arab Spring: Challenges, Obstacles and Dilemmas

Abstract

Food and energy price hikes, high youth unemployment (35 percent illiteracy, two-thirds of the Egyptian population are under thirty years of age, and 25 percent are unemployed), corruption, nepotism, and dignity deficits (with 40 percent of the population living on less than USD 2 a day) all served to highlight the gaps and disparities between elite regime-performance-legitimacy rhetoric and the daily realities of life in Egyptian society.3 Egypt aside, more generally the MENA region is characterized by relative deprivation - the gap between high expectations and diminishing opportunities - and uneven resource distribution (when examined through religious, ethnic, gender, or tribal prisms). A succinct list of common factors is offered by the Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mikhail Bogdanov: The lack of change in the leadership and the political elite in general, a low level of political mobility, the belatedness or complete absence of reforms that have ripened, a high level of unemployment, corruption and other social diseases - all of these conflict-generating factors have been accumulating for many years and exploded at the beginning of this year. [.]one must not forget that young people prevail in the Arab countries.