To a certain extent, the Arab-Middle East experts, and politicians are truly aware of popular Arab uprisings and circumstances in making new interpretations analysis. After the “Arab Spring ”, now holds the term “Arab-trap”. The International society acknowledges that Arab public protestations have extended source of social changes in current days to several Arab states like Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, mostly ten months after they broke out in Sudan and Algeria.
Currently, Iran, which has a strong implication of the convergence of inner and external political factors. When the invoke of public uprisings diffuses to sixty percent of cities, the Iranian government expedient to use force, coercion, and imprisonment, restricting internet accesses, and distending the conspiracy theory. The Iranian government appears to be in a state of intensive upheaval and anxiety after groups of police forces seized the University of Tehran and captured fifty students without any reason. Yet, Amnesty International convicted the killing of at least 100 protesters due to the irresponsible behavior of the police forces. The paradox is that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls demonstrators to provide video recordings as evidence of the crackdown from Iranian forces, and promises that the United States will “reveal those illegal violations and punish those responsible.”
In this case, the spokesman for the Revolutionary Guards states that several leaders of the demonstrations have “dual citizenship”. Rather, the semi-official Fars News Agency went to mention that whoever flamed to some shops in the purlieus of Tehran gains $ 60 for every firing place. Contrarily, President Rouhani is trying to drop the scope of maintaining order and stability to an upheaval situation, and he declares that the Iranian government eradicated what he analyzed as instigating overseas countries. Thought, this is a reaction that simulates what the Mubarak regime did during the demonstration of the situation in Tahrir Square in January 2011, but there are significant implications of the solidity of the Iranian demonstrations, as the spokesman of Shiraz districts pointed out that conflicts between the Iranian forces and demonstrators were fuming, and that the main access transportation infrastructure was stopped in four important provinces.
At the conclusion of their boiling and societal dissatisfaction over the political elite of its conservatives and liberalistic in Tehran, more than it was during the uprisings of summer 2009, and also the crisis’s of 2018; and if the discontent implications continue to increase between the high cost of fuel and other daily life materials, the increase in the unemployment rate, the failure of public governmental policies, and the fall in the performance of the religious speech, in widening the gap between the state and society, additionally the state of promise over Iran’s reopening to the West after President Trump’s decentralization from the nuclear agreement, the failure of French mediation and the Japanese accepted it.
Accordingly, the situation in Iraq and Lebanon is not very different from the Iranian scenario. We may say that the motives behind the crisis are political and financial corruption for most Iraqi government officials, such as some of them receiving monthly salaries from Tehran, and others were involved in contacts with Washington. During five weeks, more than 200,000 Iraqis took public demonstration against the government in Baghdad, and people of Sadr City, which are more prestigious, joined the uprisings and clashes that knocked off more than 320 citizens, and ended in the injury of more than 15,000 others, according to the statistics of the United Nations Office in Baghdad.
True, The hot circumstances in Lebanon is also the outcome of accumulations of the political, financial irresponsibility and societal mismanagement of politics, whether the public disrepute of Saad Hariri, the prime minister, who dedicated 16 million dollars to one of the fashion foundations of South Africa, or the decline of Hezbollah image because of its support for the Assad regime, the dilemma of sectarianism or the dissimilarities between Shiites and Sunnis orientation and other ideological identity in Lebanon and Iraq.
There is a cliché that existed among Arab Middle East Scholars that the Iranian smuggled the revolution to Iraq within forty years and that Iraq reacted into it in less than forty days. Simply speaking. In such articulated changes in the process of state development, the blaze of demonstrations and uprisings always starts with the depreciation of the cost of living at home when the protesters reach discontent and frustration with the state’s failures socially, economically and politically for its lack of effective social development.
Recently, Some scholars of Security and Middle East issues acknowledged that we observe a changeable interval of state and intrastate conflicts versus the departure of external armed conflicts between states and therefore these conflicts related to the existence and role of the state, in governance, and in social groups and their status within states.
In short, they are societal conflicts against the central government in Iran, as in Iraq and Lebanon, and before them in Algeria and Sudan this year. For instance, there are other states in the Middle East or Maghreb region that coexist with an accumulation of ineffective development policies and an enhance in citizens’ dissatisfaction, and similar events will appear at the beginning of 2020. The internal social and political predictions in these states no longer work according to the logic of exception of each country separately, or security containment strategy, or moving over the will of the extravagant demonstrations.
Due to what we are seeing in the entire Arab region, with some special case in the Middle East, is the fall of the central state’s efficiency and the susceptibilities of its political capital and legitimacy in the peoples due to its entrenchment within the box of security “solutions”, imprisonment, and punishment of activists like Egypt. These failed policies and inadequate effective solutions of demonstration that struck the governments of power when it was found to be an existential struggle after being challenged by the youth of the demonstrations during the events of 2011. In one word, it is a societal discontent that creates outrageous action in the street on a political elite that stumbled into the square of reaction.
Now the question is why Arab Spring is going to act a “responsible role” in the Arab state’s issue?
Actually, much of the debate on “Arab-trap” or Arab Spring to the third world countries have been misplaced or even wrongly implemented, simply because little or no specific attention has been given to the origin and purpose of Arab people demand regionally.
Some scholars like Mohammed Cherkaoui Professor of International Conflict and Arab Middle East Issue at George Mason University in Washington pointed out that Arab Spring does not consider it as the second wave for three reasons that revolve around the dual context and the outcome of these protest outcomes. First, during 2011 Arab people were calling for reform and change, as its protests covered around the phrase “Leave”, and this “transit” phenomenon became a concept that reflected in 982 cities that seen similar protests across the globe, but main demands did not determine the level of this movement. Most of the protesters interpreted the phrase “The Army and the People… One Hand …!”, And some demonstrators involved in the uprisings not for social change but just to server other politician’s agenda or swift out the Arab Spring rationality of evaluation and planning into proxy conflicts, like the scene of Mubarak’s removal, or the burning of Ali Saleh, and the killing of Qaddafi, and before them Ben Ali fled from Tunisia. And behind all these “Arab Trap” incidences, Arabs are going to heal for this historic moment, which is a symbolic wave for meaningful change in Arab countries’ context.
Thus, the problem here is about two basic dilemmas, the first of which is that the Arab street showed activists of heavy committed to change the old regimes and reform political status. Secondly, there were no Arab intellectuals predicting carefully the future of new generation capabilities in changing political status under the so-called ” Smart revolution”, and also are able to hear their voices not regionally but internationally with the help of new technologies such as world web and social media.
This is one of the indications of the historical movement in weaving the supposed linkage between the true relationship between politics and society and the intersection of the path in the intellectual context between society and politics. In a short term, most of the intellectuals were absent-minded in participating for a better change . Frankly speaking, let’s see the scene of Qais Saeed’s victory, carrying hopes of change and reform to the presidential deck in Carthage. Many sought the way towards a Tunisian Enlightenment movement as a model that could be best achieved in whole Arab Maghreb, as well as more than two hundred revolutions that took place during the past two decades invigorated the thought of the lights that carried the torch of Emmanuel Kant and other philosophers of modernity in Germany, before its sound spread to the rest of Europe and the world.
Secondly, this year’s demonstrations are not a continuation of the 2011 world as much as a reformatory movement, and it initiates on overcoming strategic mistakes and traps that 2011 activists did not notice. More than this, the demonstrators in Algeria were keen not to swift along the line that Egypt’s developments followed, both in terms of commitment and consistency for more than forty weeks in the conduct of weekly demonstrations in Algiers, or tactics of negotiating with the Algerian forces or adhering to the formation of a pure civilian government.
Third, the so-called political science writing is no longer the meeting point of “transitology “that several academics have adapted and adjusts a theoretical framework for what happened between 2011 and 2019. As Mohammed Cherkaoui noted, for instance, Stephen Heinemann’s conviction of a new concept “transformation” as a process of change without focusing on a feature or a form of contextual-democracy. therefore, We are facing an Arab setting in which there is a great deal of political flexibility and an inability to anticipate the outcome of this transformation.
Conclusion. The extension of Arab Spring or “Arab Trap” it appears that Arab youth no longer accept the continued dominance of the corrupted mind and the unchanged of authoritarianism in a variety of contexts, but rather demand reform, and establishing the dignity of social citizenship based on democratic principles, whether at the level of daily living or moral consideration. Yet, Arab people their demands that are in accordance with the passion of all European revolutions from the French Revolution in 1789 until the integration of the civil transformation with the spring of European peoples in 1848 and on the same line in many of the outbreaks and revolts that took place in the past two decades.
