ABSTRACT
This study has covered the general period up to 2010. However, as mentioned throughout, sudden new developments took place at the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011 that require some clarification and discussion. Referred to variously as the demonstrations in the Arab world, the “Arab spring,” or the Arab uprising, these have been a series of protests and civil disobedience campaigns by populations in many Arab states against their regimes. Together they have contributed to what Marc Lynch has called “structural” changes in the Arab populations that, whatever the final outcome, have changed the pattern of state-society interactions in the Arab world forever.
