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By taking the lead from the 'Arab Spring', starting from January 26, 2011, the Syrian people launched peaceful protests against the Bashar-ul-Asad regime's policies, but it quickly turned into a full-scale civil war, causing the death of over half a million people, pushing Syria back into 'Stone Age'. In the presence of external players, including America and Russia in opposite camps; the security state in Syria has become too complex. The US decision to pull out its troops from Syria has helped Assad significantly consolidate his grip over the country. Yet, a sense of durable peace in Syria is still off the map due to the interplay of multiple factors. In this research, Syria's civil war has been analysed as a case study through a combination of historical, descriptive and qualitative research methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arab uprising in Tunisia, dubbed the Jasmine Revolution began in 2010, protesting against unemployment, corruption, injustice and the absence of basic freedoms. The Jasmine Revolution ousted Ben Ali, the then president who was in power for more than three decades in 2011. Post Jasmine Revolution saw Tunisia making commendable strides in its transition towards a new all-inclusive democratic political order. However, the transition process has not been without obstacles which could have had the effect of derailing the transition process, such as the assassination of activists Chokri Belaïd and Mohamed Brami, the role and place of Islam, the inclusion of women in the political transition and the most popular Islamic party Ennahda with its rumours of transforming Tunisia into an Islamic state were cause for great concern for all. However, despite these concerns, Tunisia's new constitutional text is considered to be a radical departure from its previous constitutional texts. After the drafting of various drafts, the 2014 constitutional text has attained the status in the Middle Eastern And North African Region MENA Region as being the most liberal compared to other countries in the Mena Region. The 2014 constitutional provisions protect civil liberties, separates legislative, executive and judicial powers, guaranteeing women parity in political institutions, and declares that Islam is the country's official religion while at the same time protecting religious freedom for all. An important facet is the homogeneity of Tunisian society - which although has some divisions, did not suffer fragmentation along religious, political, cultural or ethnic lines, as is the case in other Muslim states. This was accomplished by including all actors not only political parties, women's groups and activists, religious activists, but also the various unions which represented the working class in Tunisia. The outcome was nothing short of being miraculous, bearing in mind the chaos that engulfed Tunisia during this period. One could argue that Tunisian listened to its people and advice of all, thereby minimising a terrible outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The uprisings started with an individual action in Tunisia as a result of economic difficulties in 2010 and spread to a wider geography; eventually, as a chain of social movements it caused dramatic changes in the socio-political structure of the Arab World. The Arab Spring has brought an end to many existing authoritarian structures in the MENA region and evolved into different outcomes in different geographies. Tunisia, as the origin of events, has progressed better in the democratization process in comparison to other states. In this study, the process of democratization after the uprisings in Tunisia with the name Jasmine Revolution has been examined and within this context, the polarizing effect of the national identity that has been divided into two within the framework of the influence of religion has been focused. The research was carried out with the data collected in Tunis between July 2013 and February 2014 as a field research of the "Social Movements and Mobilisation Typologies in The Arab Spring - Project SpringArab", which was funded by the European Union 7th Framework Programme-Marie Curie Action and conducted between 2013-2016. The analysis of this research has been completed with personal observation regarding the protest meetings and unstructured in-depth interviews with 102 randomly selected interviewees during the seven-month-field-research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This study investigates the impact of terrorist attacks and political violence on the number of tourist arrivals and overnight stays in Tunisia. The dataset employed consists of monthly data that covers the period from January 2000 to September 2016, which includes several political and terrorist attacks in Tunisia and the region. Empirically, we investigate the true data generating process (DGP) of these two proxies of tourism activity by accounting for four statistical properties that characterize these series: (1) seasonality, (2) unit roots, (3) breaks, and (4) long memory behavior. Our empirical findings show strong evidence of stationarity, five breaks in the tourist arrival time series and spurious long memory behavior. By estimating a 3-state Markov switching model consisting of the mean, trend, and variance, we find that the Tunisian Jasmine revolution and two recent terrorist attacks, one at the Bardo National Museum on March 18, 2015 and the other at the tourist resort at Port El Kantaoui, Sousse on June 26, 2015, played an important role in influencing the tourism activity of the country. Our empirical findings show also that local shocks have a more important impact than international shocks in influencing tourism activity. Interestingly, we find that the effects of terrorist shocks have a long duration compared to political violence shocks. Several security, marketing, and economic policies have been proposed and discussed in the paper. Graphical abstract Image 1 Highlights • The study distinguishes between political violence and terrorist attacks shocks in the Tunisian tourism activity. • It examines whether the effect of shocks is transitory, permanent, persistent or transitory with breaks. • The DGP of the tourism activity variables are characterized by short memory with breaks. • The results shows that terrorist attacks shocks have a long impact compared to political violence shocks. • Several security, marketing and economic policies were proposed and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revolts in Tunisia and Egypt have led many observers to speak of the “first digital revolution” in the Arab world. Social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, are now recognised as the important tools that facilitated the “Jasmine Revolution”. In fact, the willingness of the Mubarak government to block all internet connection in Egypt has demonstrated the concern over the power of new technologies in facilitating political change. The tenacity of the social movements that are still on-going in the Arab world continues to demonstrate the important role that networked technologies—such as the internet, satellite channels and social networking sites—play in revolutions. The revolutions demonstrate an effective use of social media and other network technologies as an organisational tool, and as a means of asserting pressure on current rulers and future governments. Accordingly, this article seeks to expose freedom of expression as a fundamental democratic principle and the internet network as a vehicle driving the demonstrations in the Arab countries of Tunisia and Egypt.

This case study examines, Al Bawsala, a nongovernmental organization and a female cyber social activist, Amira Yahyaoui, in the aftermath of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution through the lens of adult education. The theoretical frameworks of conscientization and third space are employed to describe Yahyaoui’s development of the watchdog political organization, Al Bawsala, for the purpose of democratic learning and popular education in Tunisia. Through interviews with Yahyaoui as well as content analysis of social media platforms used by Al Bawsala, the findings suggest popular education praxis of conscientization and third space are operative and central to Tunisia’s relatively nonviolent path toward democratization after the Arab Spring. The authors further suggest that Al Bawsala’s work is one approach for moving forward in a postrevolution context, and that adult education is central to that process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to conceptualise the role of modern communications technologies in revolutionary social movements starting from the jasmine revolution in Tunisia. After pointing to the limited explanatory potential of rationalist models of resource mobilisation and political opportunity structures in the case at hand, the article offers to investigate the extent to which the Internet provided new, immaterial territories over which discontent could prosper. Importing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘territorialisation’ in the study of contentious politics, the article proposes to apprehend social movements on the basis of the inclusiveness and thickness of their territorial foundations and hypothesises that immaterial territories of struggle gave rise to an extremely inclusive but fairly shallow social movement, which was only able to solve basic collective action problems. More complex forms of collective action were conducted in less inclusive communities with thicker territorial foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In pre-Islamic times, Arabic poetry was a potent propaganda weapon among the nomadic Arabian tribes. More than 15 centuries later, not much has changed. In the twenty-first century, Arabic poetry is still used ritualistically to celebrate harvests, weddings, and other happy events, but also to put up a defensive shield against encroachments by outsiders, or to lament the loss of a loved one, the devastation by natural disasters, or the generation gap and loss of a traditional Bedouin lifestyle. The verbal prowess of Arabic nomadic groups led to a flourishing of poetry in bothfuṣḥā/classical anddārija/dialectical Arabic. This essay looks at Tunisian folk poetry – what might be called ‘literature from below’ – as a potent force sustaining political resistance and cultural identity. We focus on two features of folk poetry (malḥūnindārija) in southern Tunisia: poetry as resistance to authoritarian regimes, both before and after the January 14, 2011 revolution; and poetry as resistance to the consumerist onslaught, be itBeldi(urban) or neo-liberal, on traditionalBedouinlifestyles. In the context of the revolution in Tunisia, we also explore the reasons some poets composing infuṣḥāshare a poetics most often associated with folk poets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arab Spring, including the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, displayed a strong female presence and the active involvement of women voicing their dissatisfaction with authoritarian regimes. Even though the contribution of women during the Jasmine Revolution is beyond dispute, the question regarding the role of women in post-authoritarian Tunisia has remained unanswered. It further remains debatable if the active involvement of women in the revolution has been transformed into a stronger societal position and greater influence in political decision-making processes for women in post-revolutionary Tunisia. The article analyses the repercussions of the Jasmine Revolution, and its context, on subsequent discourses regarding the position of women in post-authoritarian Tunisian society and on their involvement in political decision-making processes after Ben Ali's departure. Through the course of the article the outlined theoretical approaches discussing the role of women in post-conflict society and in political decision-making processes are contrasted with the interviews conducted with high-ranking women in Tunisian administration mapping the first year of the transition process after the Jasmine Revolution with a particular focus on the role of women in post-revolutionary Tunisia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of 2011, the world was shaken by an 'earthquake' which struck the Middle East and African regions. Following the Arab Spring or Jasmine Revolution, many pundits stated that North Korea could be the next to be affected by this wind of change, and the North Korean dictatorial leadership could collapse soon. This assumption acquired further validity soon after Kim Jong-il's death. This paper draws on the democratic transition and consolidation literature that has grown considerably in the last decades. According to this literature, a few factors facilitate and promote democratization - most prominently, an elite split between hardliners and softliners; the emergence of civil society and its pro-democracy movement; and a certain degree of international pressure. Through an analysis of these factors, this paper shows why North Korea is 'resistant to change' and will not follow in the Middle East's footsteps. We argue that the main reason for the non-transition in North Korea is the absence of the conditions that have been identified in the democratization literature as critical factors promoting democratic transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arab Uprising has risen to the academic arena recently in several aspects. What is happening in that territory calls attention to the structure of the uprising. Tunisia, the first cycle in the Arab Spring, witnesses a short but bloody transition. This transition, which is called the Jasmine Revolution, comes to an end with the surrender of power by the incumbent regime to the opposition without any compromise. These events begin with an economic reasoning but then continue with liberal-democratic demands. In this study, we will first cover Tunisia's political background in search of its democratic heritage. We will then consider such democratic institutions before and during the transitions as elections, freedom of expression, freedom of association and other issues regarding human rights. Finally we will discuss the possibility of democratic consolidation in Tunisia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aftermath of the Amanat rape tragedy (December, 16, 2012) evoked a plethora of activism against and debates on the continuing crime scale and rape horror in India. A daring call to change the contemporary system (mainly perceived as the failed system) became a public slogan. People and media after the heart wrenching tragedy treated the poor victim the hero, brave heart and daughter of the nation who practically awakened and mobilized a virtually dead, deeply self-seeking and narcissistic Indian masses. Anti-Rape laws will definitely improve but will the security measures for women improve and shall the crime against women be controlled and show expected decline is a curious question. Also it is being observed that mass anger, protest and activism has been historically selective and more specific so far. Is such a rape horror the outcome of the moral degeneration as put by Dalai Lama? How China reacted to and manipulated the incident? Do we need a rethink on our current educational content, Is moral policing valid? Do we need to pay heed to moral brigade perspective? Is rape a crime only against women? etc, are certain questions, which need to be answered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent and dramatic changes in Tunisia since the Jasmine Revolution have brought new challenges for its citizens and for its women in particular. Tunisian women, long considered the most liberated in the Arab-Muslim world, are now seeing a growing conservative mind-set spreading across the country. The more frequent appearance of women wearing headscarves and men sporting beards in public, if only an outward symbol of Islam, is unusual behaviour in the traditionally secular, post-independent Tunisia. This more conservative phenomenon, although not the primary driver of the recent revolution, has secured a legitimate place in Tunisian society since January 2011. Many Tunisian feminists and NGOs fear that this legitimacy will eventually threaten women's active participation in public and private life, legally guaranteed through the 1956 Code of Personal Status (CPS). In this paper, we examine pre- and post-revolutionary Tunisia to understand the importance and influence of the rising tide of conservatism and its potential impact on women's rights. Two principle questions frame this study: (1) what factors have prompted the re-emergence of the more religiously based conservatism in secular Tunisia in recent years? and (2) will the new Tunisia safeguard the CPS through its transitional period and thereafter? The authors use an interdisciplinary approach in their study, integrating Tunisia's unique past – grounded in historical, political, and socio-economic events and conditions – with the interviews of 33 citizens prior to January 2011, and then evaluate the post-revolutionary events in light of the former. The analyses reveal that before January 2011, the more conservative behaviour was linked to the present-day challenges and global developments, and not necessarily to a deep-rooted Islamic practice and/or religiosity. Since the revolution, however, the legitimate acknowledgement of certain Islamic practices and movements, previously banned over a period of 50 years, has created an audible voice in the public arena which, in turn, has created a renewed and heightened concern about the possible deterioration of women's rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of the impact of social media on societal stability can begin with various cybermovement organizations (CMO) as well as their formation, structure, development, and internal and external dynamics. We have witnessed several CMOs emerging from Facebook and Twitter that they have played significant roles in social change, serving as grassroots campaigns in political elections and as an organizational tool in the recent Middle East revolution. To deal with the huge amount of Web data involved, many AI methods and tools addressed by this magazine, such as social networking, data mining, machine learning, language processing, and text and content analysis, are essential for the success of such a study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]