On 17 December 2010, in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, 26-year-old fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the governor's office after a municipal officer had confiscated his scales and slapped him, and his complaints went unheard. Bouazizi died in hospital on 4 January 2011. The protests that grew out of his funeral spread across the whole country within four weeks; on 14 January Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, in power for 23 years, fled to Saudi Arabia. The Tunisian spark ignited the rest of the region: on 25 January crowds gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and after 18 days of resistance brought down Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule (11 February 2011). The same year, Muammar Gaddafi was killed at the end of a NATO-backed civil war in Libya, Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in Yemen, and protests by Bahrain's Shia majority were crushed by a Saudi–UAE military intervention.

Social media was not the cause of these uprisings but their accelerator. The "We are all Khaled Said" Facebook page — commemorating an Egyptian young man beaten to death by police in 2010 — reached millions of followers and played a central role in organising the Tahrir protests. Al Jazeera's broadcasts made events visible across the region and the world in real time. But underneath the wave were structural causes built up over years: youth unemployment above 30%, corruption, food inflation, police brutality, and political repression.

The hope of 2011 dissipated quickly. In Syria, peaceful protests that began in Daraa in March 2011 turned into civil war after Bashar al-Assad's armed crackdown; over the following thirteen years more than 350,000 people died and roughly 13 million Syrians were displaced (some 6 million as refugees abroad, mostly in Turkey). In 2013 General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew Egypt's elected Morsi government in a coup; within a decade a more rigid authoritarianism was in place than under Mubarak. In 2014 ISIS rose in the power vacuum of Iraq and Syria, taking Mosul and Raqqa and launching a war that, with attacks in Paris (2015), Istanbul (2016), and elsewhere, extended until 2017. Libya became a divided war zone, Yemen the stage of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Between 2015 and 2020 the Syrian refugee crisis shook European politics: Germany's admission of a million Syrians in 2015, the 2016 EU–Turkey migration deal, the migration-heavy rhetoric of the Brexit campaign, the rise of right-wing populist parties — all are links in the same chain. For Turkey the Arab Spring was a layered shock: early talk of a "Turkish model" gave way to the socio-economic effects of hosting 3.5 million Syrian refugees, long-running military operations on the southern border, and a foreign-policy equation entangled with ISIS, Russia, the U.S., and Iran. Only Tunisia, where the first spark had flown, managed to sustain a fragile democratic constitutional order for a while — but in 2021 President Kais Saied's suspension of parliament largely ended even that exception. The largest democratic hope of the 21st century became one of its generation's longest tragedies.