Tunisia and Beyond Feature: Remembering Mohamed Bouazizi

A year ago last Saturday, Tunisian market-seller Mohamed Bou'azizi doused himself in gasoline and set himself alight. He died 18 days later from the burns.

Mohamed's death has been perceived as the starting point of subsequent uprisings, not only in Tunisia but across North Africa and the Middle East. If the symbolic weight of Mohamed's act has yet to be fully realised, the tangible outcome of his sacrificial act was both the coalescence of anger and despair with the Ben Ali regime and the capacity to spark and inspire multitudes within and beyond national boundaries.

Central to Mohamed's death were his material conditions as father and family breadwinner, a situation which left him feeling bereft of any alternative but a profound public wail of rage through self-immolation. In a post-Ben Ali Tunisia, and a Middle East and North Africa fraught with uncertainties, that must not be lost in the search for narratives to explain the so-called Arab Spring. There are some straightforward causes at its core: the fundamental wish of people to live and work and earn --- and simply be --- with the guarantee of certain basic freedoms and opportunities, rather than to suffer under unelected tyrannies and to endure systems of repression.

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Syria Audio Special: How Does This End?

"What we haven't seen yet is large-scale political defection. But those who have defected have talked about the fact that there are many others who are willing to defect, who are beginning to question whether or not Assad can survive this. And, you know, the economic impact is just incredible on the country. And it's really only a matter of time before the defectors or before more leaders decide to jump ship on Assad."

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Tunisia Analysis: 4 Lessons for the Arab World (Khouri)

The dramatic developments in Tunisia in the past weeks that have seen street demonstrators send former President Zein el-Abedeen Ben Ali fleeing the country may prove to be the historic turning point that many in the Arab world have been predicting and anticipating for decades: the point at which disgruntled and often humiliated Arab citizens shed their fear and confront their leaders with demands for serious changes in how their countries are governed. The overthrow of Ben Ali by fearless citizens who were no longer intimidated by their police and army is historically significant because of four main reasons:

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