Policy Brief No.7 | September 2025
By: By Rachel Ainsworth and Daniel Hoyer
The Arab Spring revolutions can be viewed as an outcome and convergence of various interrelated crises, namely, a polycrisis. In a world of entangled systems, the fallout from the 2007-2008 financial crisis had major socio-political consequences for MENA countries. Merging with the global recession, climate change increased the frequency and severity of droughts in the region (and elsewhere), causing disruptions in food production, internal displacements, and reinforced ongoing socio-political stressors in each country; these included high rates of youth unemployment, wealth-inequality, corruption, repression and crony-capitalism1. Crucially, in the lead up to the Arab Spring, ‘structural scarcity’ in terms of unequal divisions in class, politics and social relations was reinforced by ‘environmental scarcity’ and vice versa leading to civil unrest and revolution2. As each force grew into crisis in one system, it spurred dysfunction in other systems leading to the domino effect of mass protests from Tunisia all the way to Bahrain.
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