How Tunisia's revolution began

The Tunisian revolution — the first of what would come to be called the Arab Spring — had a proximate cause that became one of the defining images of 2011: a twenty-six-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, unable to afford the bribe demanded by a municipal inspector who had confiscated his vegetable cart, set himself on fire in front of a government building in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010.

Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. By January 14, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali — who had ruled Tunisia for twenty-three years through a combination of economic modernization and political repression — had fled to Saudi Arabia. The speed of the collapse shocked observers who had considered Arab authoritarianism durable.

What Bouazizi's act ignited had been building for years. Tunisia had high youth unemployment despite relatively high education levels — a volatile combination. The Ben Ali regime's corruption was pervasive and personalized around the president's family, especially his wife's Trabelsi clan, whose business interests colonized large portions of the Tunisian economy. Social media — Facebook in particular, whose penetration in Tunisia was among the highest in the Arab world — provided organizational infrastructure that previous protest movements had lacked.

The international community's rapid accommodation of Ben Ali's fall, including the United States' notably muted response to an authoritarian ally's ouster, signaled that Washington had read the direction of change correctly and chosen not to stand in its way.

What followed was not a straightforward democratic transition — Tunisian democracy would struggle through years of fragility — but the fact of the revolution itself, accomplished without foreign intervention and at remarkable speed, sent a signal that reverberated from Cairo to Damascus.