In December 2010, the entire Arab world changed when a desperate Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire after local police officers in the suburban rural town of Sidi Bouzid had mistreated him and confiscated his goods. The young man died after a few days but his gesture triggered the Arab revolutions, which swept Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, Morocco, Syria and other Arab countries. Unprecedented popular movements had toppled, albeit in different ways, authoritarian leaders including Zine El Abidine Bin Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, and Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya. factors of the Arab Spring as perceived by scholars who have applied qualitative methods (Weyland, 2013; Travis, 2012) or quantitative methods (García-Rivero, 2013; Archilov, 2013).Qualitative approach to understanding the Arab SpringThis section will summarize two articles that have applied qualitative methods to analyze the causes of the Arab Spring. The first article uses a heuristic case study to explain the parallel between the Arab Spring movement and the 1848 “People's Spring” in Europe, and to demonstrate decision-making among participants in social movements within repressed societies ( Weyland, 2013 ). The second article uses a comparative approach that compares the socioeconomic conditions of different states in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with a wide-ranging focus on security issues and the responsibility of the United Nations in preventing potential genocides (Travis , 2012). ).The Arab Spring: why the striking similarities with the revolutionary wave of 1848?Kurt Weyland (2013) analyzes the causal mechanisms that help demonstrate...... half of the document ......and Hosni Mubarak before the Tunisian Revolution, they failed to achieve their goals. Furthermore, this approach neglects major differences between Arab states, such as the personality of the ruler, the structure of the regime, the army and its position, and the geopolitical importance of the states. Works Cited Achilov, D. (2013). Social capital, Islam and the Arab Spring in the Middle East. Journal of Civil Society, 9(3), 268-286. García-Rivero, C. (2013). Democratization, State and Society in the Middle East and North Africa. Comparative Sociology, 12(4), 477-504.Travis, H. (2012). Wargaming the “Arab Spring”: Predicting likely outcomes and planning UN responses. Cornell International Law Journal, 45, 12-07.Weyland, K. (2012). The Arab Spring: why the striking similarities with the revolutionary wave of 1848? Perspectives on politics, 10(04), 917-934.