Social Movements in Non-Western World and False Promise of Neoliberalism: Cases of Arab Spring and Latin American Spring

This undergraduate thesis aims to assess the similarities within the wave of Social Movements in the 2010s known as the 4th wave of democratization. The paper will focus on the cases of Arab Spring: Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia and protests in Latin America: Brazil and Venezuela. The work features the functionalist approach to the Social Movements arguing that the main cause of the protests is Social change and inability of the government to accommodate it. Through the statistical data and intertextual analysis, the paper singled out the common trends (demographical, economic, and cultural) that have led to the social change in these regions. Later on, it became observable that in each case the economic growth caused the rapid growth of population and formed certain expectations that could not be facilitated after the economic crisis of 2008-2009. What is more, they were not recognized by the governments due to the negative effects of neoliberal economic policies such as inequality or corruption. Hence, the paper assumes that common socio-economic experience may contribute to the contagious effect of the Social Movements. Thus, in the end I assessed the media coverage of Arab Spring in Brazilian newspapers to see whether such influence existed. It established that Arab Spring may have indeed facilitated the mobilization of Brazilians via media framing via (1) comparing, (2) emphasizing the similarities of the experiences and (3) sympathizing