Post Spring Outpouring

The spread of non-violent strategies will provide a model for future empowerment of civil societies in the middle east.

- Ramin Jahanbegloo

WHEN THE east European youth of the 1980s were struggling against communist authoritarian regimes, they valorised the idea of a democratic space as a horizontal self-organised public sphere that could limit the power of the state. The democratic awakenings of the youth around the Middle East from 2009 to 2012 demonstrated once again that new social movements could help provide the independent space that is needed. What united Tunisian and Egyptian youth in their democratic uprisings, as was also the case with the Iranian youth, was freedom from interference and a struggle against the concentration of arbitrary power. For those young Egyptians, Tunisians and Iranians who gathered for several months on the streets of Cairo, Tunis and Tehran, freedom meant putting an end to the unjust accumulation of power and to demand their governments to be based on public accountability and popular sovereignty.