Introduction

Most western social scientists, Arab academics and secular intellectuals alike utterly failed to predict the powerful social and political explosion that led to a change of regime in several Arab countries, including Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. Among Arab Nations, this phenomenon has been referred to as an ‘Arab Awakening’, while in the west it has been called an ‘Arab Spring’. Tariq Ramadan explains that there is a lack of consensus on how to refer to this historical turning point for the Arab world; ‘some call it the “Arab Spring”, others, the “Arab Revolutions”; still others more cautious, use the neutral term “Arab uprisings”. It remains difficult to ascertain, and to assess, what has happened, and what is happening, in the Middle East’. He goes on to say, ‘An irreversible shift is clearly underway but no one is able to pinpoint exactly what is going on in these mass protests or to predict their ultimate outcome’ (Ramadan, 2011). No matter what name we give it, the phenomenon was a result of a combination of both socioeconomic and political grievances. Amid this complexity, our aim is to understand if the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) provided a concrete background to illuminate the preludes to the Arab Spring.

The countries used for this study include Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Yemen, and they were chosen based on their ability to illustrate the wide range of outcomes for the MDGs, as well as the broad range of processes in the dynamics of the Arab Spring. Additionally, these represent various states according to Arab regional groupings: Egypt and Syria form part of the Mashreq countries, Tunisia represents the Maghreb states, while Yemen is part of the Arab least developed countries (LDCs) grouping. The only group not represented here is the core Gulf Cooperation Council States, several of which have indirectly experienced the Arab Spring. Although they have a role to play in outcomes and international civil society engagement in the MDG process regionally, they are more or less ‘on-track’ to achieve the MDGs compared to the other state groups (UN, 2010).

On 14 January 2011, Tunisia's president, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, and as of mid-March 2013, Tunisia's new Islamist-led broadened government had set a timeframe for the completion of a draft constitution by April of 2013, with elections expected to take place by December 2013 at the latest.