Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: The Origins of Regime Fragility in Egypt and Syria and the Arab Spring's Implications for Future Operating Environment – Role of Radical Islamism, Social Mobilization

This excellent report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. The Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and Syria were significant disruptions to the Middle East and North Africa region. Their continually evolving consequences present the United States with immense challenges to regional and international stability. Responses to the Arab Spring demand a nuanced appreciation of the sources of fragility and causes of revolution that toppled the Mubarak regime and continue to embattle the Assad regime. Crucially, the individual histories of Egypt and Syria indicate that repressive authoritarian regimes were unresponsive to and disconnected from the broad mass of their populations and failed to meet the basic expectations of their citizenry. Several stressors amplified the regimes' fragility, namely: increasing radical Islamism, the capacity for social mobilization through Internet and communication technologies, long-term demographic pressures, and—crucially—climate-driven pressures. The fact that the US military is likely to deepen its response to the Arab Spring and similar instability indicates that studying the origins of these crises is indispensable.

The Arab Spring, however, was more than just another strategic surprise. The Arab Spring is arguably emblematic of the US military's future operating environment in which unpredictability and the potential for rapid sociopolitical change will be constant. The speed and scope of these disruptions are products of the ever-advancing communication technologies that democratize information and accelerate cascading social movements. As unpredictable as those cascades will be, they will not appear de novo. Regardless of how "disruptive technologies" enable social action, these disruptions will still spring from the sociopolitical contexts within a given society. Consequently, the US Army should devote serious study to the Arab Spring revolutions as phenomena long in the making. The Arab Spring demonstrates that no matter how sudden or dynamic a situation appears, its emergent qualities are tethered tightly to the sociopolitical and ecological contexts and history that undergird them.

This monograph is neither an explication of the causes of the Arab Spring nor an attempt to blame the US foreign policy community for "failing" to predict it. Instead, it is an argument for drawing realistic lessons from the Arab Spring that consider the pre-existing sources of volatility and the catalytic pressures that pushed the countries over the brink. The two most visible, and arguably most important, byproducts of the Arab Spring have been the Egyptian revolution and the ongoing Syrian civil war. These two cases share substantial similarities and differences in terms of their origins, progression, and outcomes. As such, this monograph traces the processes by which each state grew increasingly fragile to provide a richer understanding of the origins of the current environment. It argues that that the key features of both Egypt and Syria left them without the sufficient resiliency to absorb the "shock" of the Arab Spring.