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Freedom in the World 2012 - The
Arab Uprisings and Their Global Repercussions
The political uprisings that swept
across the Arab world over the past year represent the most significant
challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet communism. In a
region that had seemed immune to democratic change, coalitions of activist
reformers and ordinary citizens succeeded in removing dictators who had spent
decades entrenching themselves in power. In some cases, protest and upheaval
was followed by the beginnings of democratic institution building. At year’s
end, two countries with unbroken histories of fraudulent polling, Tunisia and
Egypt, had conducted elections that observers deemed competitive and credible,
and freedom of expression had gained momentum in many Middle Eastern societies.
Unfortunately, the gains that were
recorded in Tunisia, and to a considerably lesser extent in Egypt and Libya,
were offset by more dubious trends elsewhere in the region. Indeed, the
overthrow of autocrats in these countries provoked determined and often violent
responses in many others, most notably in Syria, where by year’s end the Assad
dictatorship had killed over 5,000 people in its efforts to crush widespread
antigovernment protests. Similar if less bloody crackdowns took place in
Bahrain and Yemen.
This pattern of protest and
repression—with an emphasis on the latter—was echoed elsewhere in the world as
news of the Arab uprisings spread beyond the Middle East and North Africa. In
China, the authorities responded to events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square with a
near-hysterical campaign of arrests, incommunicado detentions, press
censorship, and stepped-up control over the internet. The Chinese Communist
Party’s pushback, which aimed to quash potential prodemocracy demonstrations
before they even emerged, reached a crescendo in December with the sentencing
of a number of dissident writers to long terms in prison. In Russia, the
state-controlled media bombarded domestic audiences with predictions of chaos
and instability as a consequence of the Arab protests, with a clear message
that demands for political reform in Russia would have similarly catastrophic
results. In other Eurasian countries and in parts of Africa, the authorities
went to considerable lengths to suppress demonstrations and isolate the
democratic opposition.
The authoritarian response to change
in the Middle East had a significant impact on the state of global freedom at
year’s end. The findings of Freedom in the World 2012, the latest
edition of Freedom House’s annual report on political rights and civil
liberties, showed that slightly more countries registered declines than
exhibited gains over the course of 2011. This marks the sixth consecutive year
in which countries with declines outnumbered those with improvements.