What is "arab spring"

n. The pro-democracy movement spreading across North Africa and the Middle East as of 2010.

The Arab Spring was a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both non-violent and violent), riots, and civil wars in the Arab world that began on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution, and spread throughout the countries of the Arab League and its surroundings. Major insurgencies in Syria, Libya, and Yemen resulted along with civil uprisings in Egypt and Bahrain, large street demonstrations in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Oman, and minor protests even in Saudi Arabia.

While the wave of initial revolutions and protests faded by mid-2012, some started to refer to the succeeding and still ongoing large-scale discourse conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa as the Arab Winter. The most radical discourse from Arab Spring into the still ongoing civil wars took place in Syria as early as the second half of 2011.

Many Arab Spring demonstrations were met with violent responses from authorities, as well as from pro-government militias and counter-demonstrators. These attacks were answered with violence from protestors in some cases. A major slogan of the demonstrators in the Arab world is Ash-sha`b yurid isqat an-nizam ("the people want to bring down the regime"). As of July 2016, only the uprising in Tunisia resulted in a transition to constitutional democratic governance.