Новая волна революций в регионе Ближнего Востока и Северной Африки в глобальной перспективе

In the late 2010s, the Middle East and North Africa/MENA region was swept by a new revolutionary wave called the Arab Spring 2.0. This article offers a preliminary description and analysis of this revolutionary wave in the MENA region. The scale of protests in the late 2010s approached that of the Arab Spring and led to the fall of regimes in Sudan, Algeria and Mali. Moreover, protests became permanent in Lebanon and Iraq, and in Egypt and Iran they were suppressed at the cost of significant civilian casualties. As in the case of the Arab Spring, the new revolutionary wave was characterized by a domino effect, when the success of revolutionaries in one country of the region gave rise to the increasing protest sentiments in another. An important synchronizing factor was also dissatisfaction with rising food and fuel prices, which caused people to take to the streets in every country of the Arab Spring 2.0. At the same time, the economic agenda quickly gave way to the political one and actualized long-standing unresolved problems in each of the countries, which, as a rule, were of a systemic nature. On the other hand, the events of a new revolutionary wave were distinguished by their pronounced orientation ‘against everyone’, against the political class as a whole, and not just against a specific autocrat, as was mostly observed during the Arab Spring. It is no coincidence that the main slogan of the new revolutionary wave was “All Must Go” (with variations). In other words, faced with situations in which the departure of the dictator does not solve anything, or the political system does not in principle imply his existence, the dissatisfaction of the protesters was directed against the entire political establishment.