The Arab Revolution and the Crisis of Governance

Abstract

The Arab revolution started on December 18, 2010 in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria among others. The revolution is an ideological struggle that arises from the crisis of governance resulting from political enclosures in the Arab states. Explanatory notes within the context of the internal conspiracy theory reveals that the revolutionary uprising is a consequence of the conflict between patriarchal democracy and its leadership intransigence and democratic modernism with rising expectation from the civil society for broad participation in the process of governance. The paper also place in context the external conspiracy theory arising from the shift in American foreign policy under the Secret Presidential Study Directives II that has influenced American foreign policy in North Africa and the Middle East in favour of Israel. The clamour for political change is justified by remote consensual factors like human right abuses, corruption, unemployment, poverty, growing rate of inequality and social exclusion orchestrated by religion and this is juxtaposed with the immediate causes for objective analysis. The paper tries to examine the challenges these countries would face in her efforts at building a sustainable and virile democratic nation and how this will generate favourable foreign policy outcome for western nations. Under rational consideration and away from any ideological deception, the paper argued that there is no universal pattern of governance and tends to question the consideration that western democracy is the only pathway to achieving sustainable development. On this note, the paper concludes that countries governance by patriarchal democracy should be encouraged to broaden the scope of governance rather than the use of subversive means to effect regime change at the expense of national, regional and world peace.