  The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2011 in the small
Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid, set off a sequence of events culminating in the
revolutions of the Arab Spring. It is widely believed that the Internet and
social media played a critical role in the growth and success of protests that
led to the downfall of the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. However, the precise
mechanisms by which these new media affected the course of events remain
unclear. We introduce a simple compartmental model for the dynamics of a
revolution in a dictatorial regime such as Tunisia or Egypt which takes into
account the role of the Internet and social media. An elementary mathematical
analysis of the model identifies four main parameter regions: stable police
state, meta-stable police state, unstable police state, and failed state. We
illustrate how these regions capture, at least qualitatively, a wide range of
scenarios observed in the context of revolutionary movements by considering the
revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the situation in Iran, China, and
Somalia, as case studies. We pose four questions about the dynamics of the Arab
Spring revolutions and formulate answers informed by the model. We conclude
with some possible directions for future work.
