Professor dissects significance of historical political uprisings

Blog headlines from 2011 flashed on the screen.

“Tunisia Domino? No, but a U.S. Democracy Dilemma” and “Why the Tunisian Revolution won’t spread,” they read.  

It is now evident that the Tunisian Revolution influenced and is still affecting the political and social climate in the Middle East, said John Owen, professor of political science at the University of Virginia.

Owen spoke Friday in Wylie Hall.

The title of his talk was “Springs and Their Offsprings: The International Consequences of Domestic Uprisings” and was sponsored by the Center on American and Global Security and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

A spring is a coordinated effort, successful in at least the short term, to liberate from oppressive rule, Owen said.

Owen started the talk by recounting initial skepticism about an Arab Spring.

“The skepticism is partly, I think, a function in part of the way political scientists divide up the intellectual terrain,” Owen said.

“On the international relations side there are people who think of the Arab Spring as a comparative politics phenomenon.”

Owen went on to describe how the Arab Spring occurred in terms of political study.

“The simplest way to interpret what happened is that there was a contagion of some sort,” Owen said.

Owen said history often repeats itself in these “springs.”

He brought forth a number of examples of such movements throughout history, particularly the Scottish spring of 1560 and the Springtime of Nations in 1848, that mirrored the Arab Spring.

“Both are clusters of events,” Owen said. “It is important to note that they cluster in time and space.”

“When does a ‘spring’ create ‘offspring?’” was the talk’s central question, and Owen outlined how and why this occurs.

“When a massacre takes place in one country, it polarizes people in other states as pro- or anti-regime,” Owen said.

“Polarization of this sort puts pressure on a ruling regime, endangers its hold on power and gives them new incentives to save their power.”

Owen said cheap communication, pre-existing group boundaries and transitional networks must exist for a spring to have a widespread reach.

“There are a number of social boundaries in any given population — gender, race, religion, class,” Owen said. “In some cases, boundaries that have been dormant for a while can reactivate.”

Owen said he would like to go deeper into why springs don’t occur.

“For future research we have to ask why catalytic events don’t yield offspring,” Owen said. “The Iranian Green Movement of 2009, for example. The Arab world is in fact, linguistically and culturally, a unit.”

Owen said he would also like to look at more current offshoots of the Arab Spring, such as the overthrow of Mohammed Morsi, former president of Egypt.

“We want to see what happened with Morsi — see if it had those polarizing effects,” Owen said.

SPEA professor Susan Siena attended the event and said she felt it was important to help students and others understand the subject.

“For someone interested in going further in political science, these are very useful to get an understanding about where scholarship is moving in this subfield of political science,” Siena said.

Follow reporter Rashmika Nedungadi on Twitter @rashmika_n.