Behind the Arab Awakening: Dynamics of Civil Resistance

In some countries of the Arab Awakening, pockets of the population had awareness of basic theories and methods of sustained action in civil resistance. For example, in Egypt, works by the scholar Gene Sharp had circulated in Arabic since 2003. The Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement, launched in 2008, had online tutorials from organisers of Otpor (Resistance), the Serbian youth movement that in 2000 brought down Milošević. Egyptian women bloggers popularised theory. In diffused hubs of political thinking about how to free themselves, Egyptians had organised themselves before their 18 days in Tahrir Square, and enough in dispersed centers of society had knowledge and a level of preparedness to lay the foundation for a national mobilisation of noncooperation.