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Unlike other commodities, global food prices have followed a different trajectory. Although down from near-historic highs in 2007-2008 and 2011, they are still higher than at any point in the previous three decades.

The economic effects of higher food prices are clear: Since 2007, higher prices have put a brake on two decades of steady process in reducing world hunger. But the spikes in food prices over the past decade have also thrust food issues back onto the security agenda, particularly after the events of the Arab Spring. High food prices were one of the factors pushing people into the streets during the regionwide political turmoil that began in late 2010. Similar dynamics were at play in 2007-2008, when near-record prices led to food-related protests and riots in 48 countries.

Unlike energy and electronics, demand for basic foodstuffs is income-inelastic: Whether I have adequate income has no effect on my need for sustenance. Not surprisingly, 97 percent of the post-2007 ‘food riots’ identified by a team at the New England Complex Systems Institute occurred in Africa and Asia, which are home to more than 92 percent of the world’s poor and chronically food-insecure. Careful empirical work bears out this conventional wisdom: High global food prices are more destabilizing in low-income countries, where per capita incomes are lower.

Reporting of these events has been sparse, to say the least. The Tunisian press, of course, is strictly controlled and international news organisations have shown little interest: the "not many dead" syndrome, perhaps. But in the context of Tunisia they are momentous events. It's a police state, after all, where riots and demonstrations don't normally happen – and certainly not simultaneously in towns and cities up and down the country.So, what we are seeing, firstly, is the failure of a system constructed by the regime over many years to prevent people from organising, communicating and agitating.Secondly, we are seeing relatively large numbers of people casting off their fear of the regime. Despite the very real risk of arrest and torture, they are refusing to be intimidated.

Ben Ali may try to cling on, but his regime now has a fin de siècle air about it. He came to power in 1987 by declaring President Bourguiba unfit for office. It's probably just a matter of time before someone else delivers that same message to Ben Ali.

international news organisations have shown little interest: the "not many dead" syndrome, No, that's not the reason. The reason is that this SOB is one of our SOBs. We must be absolutely sure that we don't risk letting let any nasty Islamists or not-compliant folk near the levers of power before we start to fan the flames of democracy.

Sunday's violence will likely prompt the military to further tighten its grip on power.

"The army incites sedition to remain in power," said Mariam Ayoub, a relative of a slain Christian protester, Michael Mosaad, as she stood outside the Coptic hospital. "They tell all of us that this is what happens without emergency laws."

State TV, which has been growing increasingly loyal to the military, appealed on "honorable" Egyptians to protect the army against attacks as news spread of clashes between the Christian protesters and the troops outside the TV building. Soon afterward, bands of young men armed with sticks, rocks, swords and firebombs began to roam central Cairo, attacking Christians. Troops and riot police did not intervene to stop the attacks on Christians.

At the height of the Arab Spring in February 2011, a mass protest movement took to the streets in Bahrain calling for democratic reforms, human rights protections, and an end to corruption. Nine years ago this month, the Bahraini government, backed by a contingent of Saudi and Emirati security forces, declared a state of emergency and launched a violent crackdown, destroying the site of the main protest encampment and the symbol of the movement at Manama’s Pearl Roundabout (The Guardian, 18 March 2011). The authorities killed dozens of protesters and arrested hundreds of activists, critics, and religious leaders, dissolving opposition political groups and closing all independent media outlets

Nearly a decade later, new data confirm that despite severe restrictions on free press, expression, and assembly (Human Rights Watch, 14 January 2020), hundreds of protests and riots continue across the country every year

Peaceful protests account for the vast majority of the newly added events, with over 4,400 recorded since 2016. More than 140 of these events faced some form of intervention, such as police firing teargas or detaining activists. Nearly 2,600 new events are riots, with more than 1,800 violent demonstration events and over 700 cases of mob violence

The bread riots are symptoms of a crisis tracing back to last November, when the International Monetary Fund approved a loan of $12 billion to Sisi’s regime. The loan agreement requires Egypt to fix its chronic budget deficit through substantial cuts in subsidies and other forms of public spending. The agreement also necessitates steps to encourage the private sector to boost job creation and growth.

the Egyptian army has used the agreement to punish the lower classes while maximizing its commercial gains. The military establishment, which fully controls the economic reform plan, has selectively implemented the loan’s conditions. While it enthusiastically reduces subsidies to impoverished civilians, it has expanded its domination of many economic sectors and reaped huge profits at the expense of the private sector.

generals in uniform manage monopolistic conglomerates of unaudited, untaxed enterprises, such as commercial farms, food packaging mills, construction companies, pharmaceutical plants, gas stations, fisheries, and cement and steel factories

Al Hirak al Chaabi, or the Popular Movement, is an independent, popular movement that was started in the northern Moroccan city of Al Hoceima in October 2016 by local inhabitants who were fed up with the status quo. The protests have grown significantly in the last months, despite numerous attempts by authorities to quell the movement, which has now spread throughout the country. Although it is not associated with any political party or organization, a number of political and civil society groups have expressed their solidarity with the movement. Between October 2016 and May 2017, the protesters’ demands evolved from mainly socioeconomic grievances into a more potent political message; slogans used in the protests virulently denouncing the Makhzen’s rampant corruption, poor governance, and outright appropriation of the nation’s resources

Demonstrations were initially confined to the Rif, which is an Amazigh-majority region that has been marked by persistent social marginalization and economic deprivation ever since the establishment of Morocco’s territorial borders. Yet, they have now boiled over. The country is now witnessing a spate of violence in Al Hoceima and the Rif region, as well as in the country’s largest cities of Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech, Meknes and others

the Makhzen’s bare, yet sophisticated, politics of repression throughout the kingdom, and more specifically in the Rif

If the unofficial reports of dead and wounded are anywhere near accurate, this might be the most deadly uprising since the 1979 revolution.

Iran’s turmoil is not driven by U.S. policies, nor is it merely some circumstantial spasm. The protests are the latest salvo in the Iranian struggle for accountable government that stretches back more than a century. And the fury and desperation of the Iranians on the streets this week strikes at the heart of the legitimacy of the revolutionary system.

After the monarchy was ousted, collective action — both spontaneous and opportunistic — was a primary mechanism for gaining advantage in the chaotic struggle for power.

A protest leader in southern Tunisia was released Wednesday, a lawyer said, four days after his arrest amid angry protests over unemployment in the marginalised region. Tarek Haddad is the spokesman for a growing popular mobilisation underway in Tataouine, a town where protesters are demanding authorities make good on a 2017 promise to provide jobs. He had been arrested overnight on Saturday and charged with “participating in a gathering likely to disturb the peace”.

For weeks, demonstrators have blocked roads and sought to prevent trucks from delivering supplies to the remote El-Kamour pumping station, a key site for Tunisia’s small oil industry. They are demanding the government honour a deal reached after a months-long 2017 sit-in, under which it pledged to hire thousands of unemployed workers and invest millions in the region’s development.

On Tuesday night, youths clashed with police in another town in the deprived south, the interior ministry said Wednesday. “Several hundred people” gathered in front of a local security forces facility in Douz, 475 kilometres (295 miles) south of the capital Tunis, to protest disrupted water supplies

Meanwhile, protesting riot police officers accused Mr. Morsi’s government of refusing to equip them with the weapons they need to defend themselves, forcing them to rely only on nonlethal weapons like water hoses and tear gas. “We don’t want the weapons to use against protesters or revolutionaries — we want them to fight the armed outlaws who shoot live ammunition at us,” said Mr. Al-Helbawi, the union leader, repeating the government’s refrain that criminals had infiltrated the protests. On the streets, some protesting officers borrowed the slogans of the opposition protesters they often clash with. “The ministry is the same, thugs and thieves,” chanted a crowd of nearly 500 officers outside an Alexandria police headquarters.

today's autocrats are not idiots. They have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Putin is not Stalin, and Hu Jintao is not Mao Zedong. In many cases, Dobson writes, modern dictators understand that it's in their interest to observe the appearance of democratic norms even while they're subverting them

"The Chinese Communist Party understands what its vulnerabilities are," Dobson told me recently. "No one needs to lecture that government on what they need to worry about at night." (Hint: Corruption and inequality lead the list.)

Putin understands that completely isolating his citizens from the world at large is a game with rapidly diminishing returns. Instead, like Chávez, he's focused on controlling the media that matter (like national TV) and carefully manipulating laws to tilt the political playing field in favor of the state. And so far, at least, he's managed to pull the whole thing off without putting large numbers of opponents into concentration camps.

In a more democratic Middle East, these predicaments are only going to become more common.

As soon as the counting kicked off at the ballot boxes, Turkey’s Twitter timeline was swarming with reports of fraud, power outages, and paper ballots found in trash bins. Calls for people to go to local polling stations to watch the counting were circulating. And the mainstream media, with reports coming in from two news agencies, were reporting totally conflicting results. Journos asked its followers to tweet the results from ballot boxes. Citizens who were already at polling stations started taking pictures of the ballot box results and sent them to Journos, using the hashtag #SandıkTutanağı. Engin says they have never experienced such voluminous response from citizens on one day (bear in mind that they were actively reporting during the Gezi Protests). Thousands of reports reached Journos via Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, and SMS messaging only in a couple of hours.

As Journos kept on receiving and documenting those results through the early hours of 31 March, people in front of their television and computer screens witnessed this: in Ankara, where the votes had been swaying between the AKP candidate Melih Gökçek and the CHP’s Mansur Yavaş, vote-count pages stopped refreshing. At the time, a sizeable portion of votes were left to be counted in two neighborhoods that are CHP strongholds, and Gökçek was leading by only three thousand votes. For almost an hour, there was no incoming data. In the meantime, citizens reported that the Interior Minister, Efkan Ala, arrived at a polling station with riot police, while Melih Gökçek went to the building that houses the Supreme Electoral Board (YSK). When the data page was finally refreshed, people saw that all the results were uploaded at once, and Gökçek was leading by twenty thousand votes. Whether or not that pause meant fraud, people’s concerns with the process skyrocketed, and reports of ballot box results soared on Twitter.

On the morning of 1 April, when official complaints about elections were due, they documented nearly two hundred and fifty irregularities. “This is the first time citizens counted their own votes in Turkey,” says Engin. “We made a call on social media, and in a couple of hours we have received more than six thousand responses. With software finalized in two hours and a team of two hundred volunteers, we reported the irregularities and challenged results in Istanbul and Ankara,”

Mediene and other generals were behind the cancellation of elections and the military coup of 1992. His replacement fits into a large-scale restructuring of the DRS, aiming to strip away its powers over domestic politics and foreign policy, and refocus it on espionage and counterespionage.

Many Algerians fear, however, that the fall in oil prices means that their country is barrelling straight into an economic crisis like that of the late 1980s. Officials estimate that the country can keep subsidies and social spending at current levels for at most another two years, risking riots and intense social unrest

New security leaders are not only younger; they are also being promoted on the basis of expertise in fighting violent extremism

The tacit contract that has defined the North African country since its independence in 1956 is the ‘bread’ provision - mostly subsidies - in return for political deference. With modest resources, Tunisia has historically funded subsidies of strategic commodities - bread, sugar, tea, coffee, kerosene - and education, health, housing in some cases, and even recreational activities, such as sport. The National Solidarity Fund and the National Employment Fund, still under centralised control, have had some successes. They have partly shifted the burden of providence from the state to society. Tunisians dug into their pockets to volunteer what little of their non-disposable income they have to the cause of poverty alleviation, and improvements of the so-called ‘shadow zones’ (bidon-villes), the misery belt suffocating the rich towns and suburbs. But even this system of quid pro quo bread and political deference has failed many Tunisians, leaving many hopeless and jobless.

The state is a control-freak to the point that it disallows the existence of any hint of an informal economy. There is one in Italy - even in America - but not in Tunisia. If the state is partly failing in its provision of jobs, then it is unwise to ban informal trade and work. A youth empowered by education but disempowered by marginalization can be the spark that ignites social upheaval and social tension. In Tunisia, marginalization is today being translated into irrational and tragic suicides.

the notion of ‘total state’ and ‘total politics’ may not be apt for successful social engineering and re-distribution. Total control can translate into loss of control.