For more than a decade, the Arab Spring has been widely dismissed as a failure, often portrayed as a brief eruption of idealism that collapsed into repression, war and authoritarian restoration. Tunisia’s uprising, which started on December 17, 2010, with the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid, is often remembered in this register: as a tragic prelude to dashed hopes rather than a transformative political moment.This reading is incomplete and, in important ways, misleading.Bouazizi’s act was not merely a reaction to police brutality, corruption or economic exclusion, although all three were real. It was a moral rupture that shattered the quiet normalisation of humiliation and laid bare the ethical foundations of authoritarian rule. What followed in Tunisia, and soon across much of the Arab world, was not simply protest, but an awakening: a collective realisation about dignity, belonging and the limits of obedience.The Arab Spring should therefore be understood less as a failed transition than as a lasting transformation of political consciousness. Its most consequential effects were not institutional but experiential, reshaping how people understood citizenship, legitimacy and their own capacity to act. Even where regimes survived or reasserted control, that shift did not disappear. It altered the terrain on which power is contested to this day.For this reason, the uprisings cannot be understood as isolated nat …
