The Arab revolutions , and the weak ties between nations.

Writers and intellectuals are still and will continue for year to come to debate the exact nature of what triggered the first spark in Tunisia allowing a domino effect to take place throughout the entire Arab world. It’s hard to understand why did it take place exactly now, and not one year or two years ago. Tunisia, and most of the Arab world did not become much worse in the last few years. According to many sources such as the UN report on Arab development, the Arab world indeed has been taking many steps backwards at all levels (social, economic, political,..). But the decrease has been small and steady, but maybe it reached a critical mass phase, or a threshold some time ago and it has been just waiting for the right trigger to explode. It’s hard as we said to understand how the first spark started, but maybe it’s easer to understand the diffusion which goes through the weak ties as Granovetter argued. For the sake of simplification, we can view entire nations of the Arab world as one social networks, highly clustered through strong ties with weak ties connecting it to the globe, brining in new ideas and perspectives. From this angle, the social movements or revolutions that took place sequentially in Georgia then in Ukraine between 2003-2004 should be fairly enough triggers for the Arab world to follow their steps. But they weren’t. So maybe ideas and innovations can flow through weak ties, but there is a distinction between merely receiving the idea/innovation and accepting and acting upon it. We know that to diffuse behavior we need reinforcement from strong ties in the network, but I think that in order to diffuse the idea that caused that behavior you need a certain threshold of homphily in the weak ties that brings it to you. In other words, we can hear X a hundred times and not act upon it. But when we hear it from a certain source (with a threshold of homophily as in Arab country to an Arab country), then it’s much easier accepted and the reinforcement by strong ties is much more immediate and profound as we saw in the case of Egypt, Libya and other Arab countries that will follow.