Untapped Talent: Fuel of Middle East Unrest

Resting in a hotel just across the Nile from Tahrir Square in Egypt, Brian Barber took a short break from his work interviewing Egyptian youth. The phenomenon that was unfolding took the world by surprise, as social media websites became tools of mass organization, helping facilitate revolutions now known as the “Arab Spring.”

As a professor of child and family studies at the University of Tennessee whose studies focus on youth in conflict zones, Barber hopes to produce a documentary film following a small group of Egyptian youth over the next few years, as the country transforms.

“What's most impressive about it is that they've been able to accomplish this in non-violent ways,” Barber said in a phone interview just after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had stepped down. “I think it's a great lesson for the entire world—knowing that major change can happen through civil ways.”

One of Barber’s particular interests of study is how youth leveraged websites, including Twitter and Facebook, in their quest for reform. He noted that in his experience, most youth across all social classes in Cairo have social networking accounts.

A question still hanging in the air has been whether the revolution should be attributed to the technology or to social issues. As events have continued to play out, however, it has become clearer that the use of social media was only a bi-product of the untapped talent of youth with technical skills in countries lacking economies.

Previously unheard calls for a better future from this crop of under-utilized educated youth, frustrated by an economy focused on the oil market, ultimately ignited the revolutions now sweeping through the Arab world.

In Egypt and Tunisia, the pool of talent among the youth has become the beacon of hope for the countries' futures.

“You get a lot of well-educated, yet economically frustrated young men who have become socially adept at Twitter and related technologies, [and] who have a lot of time on their hands and are seething with resentment at their economic status,” said Barney Warf, professor at the University of Kansas who specializes in Internet freedom research, in a phone interview. “That is a significant part of the factors that have fueled the unrest.”

Countries in the Arab world have enjoyed the fortunes of an oil market. However, the narrow scope of who has benefited—the country’s leaders and a small elite circle—led to a dismal state, with corruption accentuating resentment among the masses.

During his May 19 speech on the Middle East and North Africa, President Barack Obama stated: “Throughout the region, many young people have a solid education, but closed economies leave them unable to find a job. Entrepreneurs are brimming with ideas, but corruption leaves them unable to profit from those ideas.”

The plan to help Egypt and Tunisia grow into stable democracies is thus based on developing new economic branches to leverage untapped talent. This includes $1 billion in loans for building financial infrastructure, construction of a regional trade agreement, and a $2-billion Overseas Private Investment Corporation facility to support private investment.

Obama stated that efforts for Tunisia and Egypt will be modeled after funds that helped transition Eastern Europe toward stability after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

According to Max Abrahms, a postdoctoral fellow of the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, what is being offered aligns well with what is being called for amid the unrest.

“I think that on at least a rhetorical level, what Obama says the Middle East wants, and what the vast majority of Arabs claim they want—there is probably more of a convergence than at any time we’ve ever seen,” Abrahms said in an earlier interview with The Epoch Times.