Echo of the Arab Spring in Asia: A Quantitative Analysis

Abstract

There is no doubt that the Arab Spring triggered a global wave of social and political destabilization which significantly exceeded the scale of the Arab Spring itself and affected all the world-system zones, including Asian countries.2 The analysis suggests that in the Asian region there were two waves of destabilization caused by the Arab Spring. The first started in 2011 and included a series of mostly peaceful protests, which had some features similar to the Middle Eastern revolutions in their organizational forms and communication methods. The second wave, in turn, took place in 2012–2014, when protest movements in Asia began to follow their own path, adding local discontent to their agenda. It was also connected with a sharp increase in terrorist activity in the Middle East, due to the weakening of several authoritarian governments and the emergence of consolidated terrorist organizations. Some Islamist groups in some Muslim-majority Asian countries, in their turn, pledged allegiance to these organizations (first of all, to ISIS/Daesh). Terrorist activity spread from the Arab world to Asia through various channels: the internationalization of jihadist ideas by militarized groups; ISIS propaganda on the Internet; refugees and jihadists returning to the region from the battlefields of the Arab World.