Islamic Radicalism and Arab Spring: Tunisia, Egypt, Syria

The main argument of the conclusions drawn in connection with the problem posed in the study, on the basis of the whole paper, as a result of the conducted research, comparative analysis and comparison of materials, is the following – the anti-governmental protests and revolutionary processes, known as Arab Spring, which started in December, 2010, and then spread to almost all Arab countries, were not the “awakening” of the Islamic forces or impetus given to democratic processes, but deals based on common interests between moderate Islamist and secular forces on the example of Tunisia, the combination of the military in Egypt, and the manipulations of the regime and the consequences of the conflict of interests of the regional actors in Syria. The studied factual materials and the results of research based on them, leads to the conclusion that the views found in a number of relevant factual sources, according to which, after the overthrowing of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, allegedly the local population saw the only way for solution of their problems in Islamist forces, have no solid foundation, and the forces following Political Islam in these countries represented the lifeline for the old regimes to stay on the political arena – voluntarily in Tunisia and involuntarily in Egypt and Tunisia, as a model of successful transitional democracy after the Arab Spring, began to fail after ten years from the revolution. In the dissertation the circumstance is also stressed that in the case of Syria the activation of Islamist extremists was a result of the manipulation of the ruling regime, because exactly as a result of the struggle against these forces the regime managed to remain as the ruling power without an alternative in the country, and exactly this was one of the main reasons for bursting out Islamist extremism in this state, rather than the views concerning opposition of the Sunni-Shiite forces, occurring in certain sources and materials.