Economic Dissatisfaction and Middle East Contemporary Movements Based on Relative Deprivation Theory

Adopting open economic policies and political limitations coincided with development of international communication networks paved the road for Arab young generation who feel relative political, social and economic deprivation to show their anger through revolutionary movements. Such movements gradually moved to the other Arab countries and made Arab authorities worried with regards to their non-democratic structures as they started to try to remove unemployment, corruption, and poverty. This paper surveys economic causes of revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. The main question is that what are the causes of recent movements in these two countries? Assuming that economic factors such as poverty and unemployment among the middle class were the causes of revolutions in the mentioned countries, this paper uses Robert Gurr’s relative deprivation theory to study the role of Ben Ali and Mubarak’s governments economic policies in creation of new middle class and raise of relative deprivation leading to the revolutions in 2011 and 2012.