The youth and the Arab Spring

Too many youth, too many unemployed, poor education, jobless economic growth: all frequent hypotheses put forward to explain the uprisings that started in Tunisia in December 2010 and then spread across the Arab world.  Of course, the youth were the most visible part of the uprisings. This is to be expected: Older people and those at work, mostly self-employed or small shopkeepers (some 85 percent of those employed in the Arab region are said to be working in family business) do not or cannot take to the streets.   But what is certain is that there are less youth in the region than there were two or three decades ago. In North Africa the ratio of youth-to-adult population peaked in the late 1970s and in the Middle East in the early 1990s.  Why didn’t the youth revolt in those eras, given their numbers and the fact that youth unemployment was