Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
Cairo had bread riots when wheat prices spiked in 2008, but the time wasn't yet ripe for expansion to full revolt. This time around it was different. Wheat prices spiked in 2008 and 2011; Cairo had rioting in the streets in 2008 and threw out a government in 2011... no relationship?
Bread "scuffles" would be a more accurate description of what happened in 2008--riots implies far more substantial and widespread protests than actually occurred.

Certainly the increase in food prices played a role, although in Egypt those prices increases were typically smaller than in many other countries because of subsidies. Youth unemployment was important too too, although again Egypt was not the worst country for this, nor had it grown much worse lately. Years of authoritarian regime played a role--although as you correctly note, that in itself is an inadequate explanation for revolt. In the Egyptian case, however, the deliberalization of parliamentary politics and a sense of an impending engineered hand-off to power to Gamal Mubarak exacerbated this, heightening discontent with the regime in general and (in the latter case) creating cracks within the Army. The creative use of ICTs certainly played a role.

Critically, Tunisia played a vital role by entirely changing people's perceptions of political opportunity structures. A very similar regime had just been overthrown through popular protest. The mukhabarat and other organs of state power had been shown to be less fearsome than had been previously believed.

I was just finishing up a book on the prospects for Arab democratization in December, when all of this started to unfold. While much needs to be rewritten (grrrrr), I'm quite pleased with what was a central argument of that manuscript: that what the Arab world needed was a "catalytic event" that would alter perceptions of authoritarian power and set in motion democratic demonstration effects... precisely of the sort we now see.