Fifteen years ago, Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi stood in the middle of traffic, shouted “How do you expect me to make a living?”, and set himself on fire, sparking popular protests in Tunisia and across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This set in motion a series of events that included a second generation of protests in 2019 and that continue to change the region and its people even today.

Too often, observers and analysts refer to these Arab Uprisings as a moment in history—an “Arab Spring” that simply “failed” in its purpose. Yet, political change is a process, and reducing the uprisings to a single event deprives the conversation of nuance and context, while failing to capture what has resulted. A genuine understanding of the Arab Uprisings must detail the reaction of the governments and counterrevolutionary movements that responded with an unprecedented brutality and continue to dread its remembrance even today. It must account for the immense losses, be it the lives lost, the millions displaced, or the thousands sentenced to years behind bars since. And it must also recognize the political, social, and societal imaginations that the uprisings unlocked among the masses, and the generation that they gave birth to, with their complexities, traumas, and impact.

Without the Arab Uprisings, there would be no Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP). And so as we mark 15 years since the Arab Uprisings, join us throughout 2026 as we remember these movements; share the stories of the people whose lives would never be the same; reflect on and analyze how the region has changed politically, economically, and socially; and realign on where this leaves us and what may come next.