At 11:30 in the morning of December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a produce vendor in the city of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, set himself on fire in front of the local government headquarters in order to protest governmental corruption and in so doing provoked a historic wave of demonstrations and uprisings across the entire Arab world.
Did the Arab Uprisings succeed? While they overthrew dictatorships in four countries, they did little to replace them with democracies. Only one country, Tunisia—the one where it all started—now resembles a stable democracy. This wintry result explains much about why the media no longer refers to the uprisings as the "Arab Spring."
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