The Jasmine Revolution, Arab Spring, increasing civil disobedience, and pluralism in social media, are manifestations of peaceful evolution. Unusually public campaigns for political office appear to be fundamentally about a referendum on the direction of reforms. But many state-owned enterprises, which indirectly means the central government, are the special interests that would prefer to stall reform rather than facilitate it.

The new Arab world created by the people power movements of 2012 is not suddenly Sweden. No one should have expected it to be. The Arab world had been stuck in a stagnating rut, of dictatorship, family cartels, embezzlement, corruption, and stagnation. Where economic growth of 5% a year began being reported, as in Tunisia or Egypt, it was either a lie or was mostly captured by a small economic elite. What began in some of these countries in 2011 was a transition, a transition that activists hoped would be toward regular, free and fair parliamentary elections.

No revolutionary can precisely determine or accurately predict which last straw will be the one to break the back of any given despot. Many differing and sometimes divergent tactics and strategies and organizational forms may ultimately have to converge before effective actions build into movements which successfully challenge power. The Nigerian movement, which has had more than its share of both, is now poised for something greater than merely minor reforms.

Protests in Hungary and Romania are the first signs of anti-systemic mobilisation in the Eastern half of the continent. While protests in both countries indicate dissatisfaction with their governments’ authoritarian turn, their origins differ, as does the European Union’s reaction to them. Romania, EU member since 2007 and Hungary, which joined in 2004, have both been badly hit by the economic crisis.

Fifteen respected academics from different Turkish universities signed a declaration in Ankara last week protesting recent state regulations restricting access to a variety of websites on 'moral' and 'national integrity' grounds. Simultaneously, thousands of angry netizens held street demonstrations in several major cities, brandishing banners proclaiming, "Hands off my Internet."