You Say You Want a Revolution: The Arab Spring and the Role of the Human Rights Regime
19 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2013
Date Written: 2013
Abstract
The Arab Spring has fundamentally reshaped how the world thinks about human rights and democratization. We explore how the human rights regime affects the democratic revolutionary movements of the Arab Spring and subsequently how the Arab Spring changes the nature of the human rights regime. We find that the demands for better human rights, combined with international pressure from the human rights regime, led initially to a promise of improved human rights in general, and women’s rights in particular in most countries. However, the promise of expanded rights followed by their suppression created a climate where there is a discrepancy between the expectation and the realization of rights. In previous cases where this cycle of rights expansion and contraction has occurred (Northern Ireland and the Basque Region), we argue that there is a strengthening of resolve on the part of the individual participants and the human rights regime as whole. The case of the Arab Spring provides robust support for our conclusion that the repression of human rights only increases the resiliency of the human rights regime, a regime that has traditionally be deemed as weak.
Keywords: human rights regime, Arab Spring
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