Africa: Why the Arab Spring Never Engulfed Sub-Saharan Africa allafrica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from allafrica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For example, in Burkina Faso, in 2014, thousands of people protested against another term of office for long-term President Blaise Compaore, who had ruled for 27 years.
In Senegal, the youth movement Y en a marre successfully fought against the constitutional court s decision in 2012 to allow President Abdoulaye Wade to run for a third time. And in Sudan, President Omar al-Bashir was ousted from office in 2019 after months of civil unrest.
Weeks of mass protests finally ended the reign of Sudan s President Omar-al Bashir I believe that many African movements that advocate for democracy and more openness were emboldened by what had happened in North African countries and the Middle East, German-Africa analyst Robert Kappel told DW. The Arab Spring had a learning effect for African countries away from decades of authoritarian regimes towards more freedom.
Pardee School Students Awarded CAS Research Internships
Two students at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University – Cristina Morrison (Pardee BA ’22) and Ariana Thorpe (Pardee BA ’22) – were recently awarded 2020-21 Social Science Research Internships in Social Justice and Sustainability from the College of Arts and Sciences.
Morrison and Thorpe will work on the project entitled, “Race and Radioactivity in New Mexico and Namibia,” under the supervision of Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School. The research project will examine how infrastructures of nuclear technologies have systematically disenfranchised communities of color in New Mexico, where the first atomic weapon was tested in July 1945, and in uranium-rich Namibia, one of the last countries to become decolonized in Africa.
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Dec. 13, 2020
It wasn’t long ago that Gulf states were actively promoting ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam, and didn’t shy away from cultivating political Islam either. The U.S. National Intelligence Assessment from April 1970 judged Riyadh as likely to support conservative non-governmental groups in the Arab world, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
But times are changing. Gulf states are being forced into a comprehensive rethink of their religious, political and economic systems, triggered by, most immediately, the prospect of drastically declining oil revenues as global demand shifts away from dependence on hydrocarbons.
How COVID – and Israel’s Trump-brokered lovefest with Arab states – are affecting Palestinians