On 18 February, an estimated 30,000 Dijiboutians protested in central Djibouti City against the president, maintaining that the constitutional change of the previous year, which allowed him a third term, was illegal.

[15] Oil production in Libya is seen as a more strategic commodity than cocoa in the Ivory Coast, [16] which influenced the international response to the turmoil facing both countries.

[17] On 29 January, riot police in Gabon fired tear gas to break up a protest by around 5,000 opposition supporters, where according to witnesses, up to 20 people were wounded.

It was the second such protest since opposition leader Andre Mba Obame declared himself president on January 25 and urged people to take inspiration from the Tunisian Revolution.

[18] Obame subsequently hid out in the local United Nations Development Programme office, while President Ali Bongo Ondimba shut down TV stations and allegedly kidnapped members of the opposition.

[26] The protesters failed to amass in large numbers because, as the Christian Science Monitor suggested, a failure to tally its own results through its own SMS system was disrupted by the government, who also arrested hundreds of opposition field agents.

[27] With unrest growing at the rising prices of food and fuel, the arrest of Kizza Besigye on 28 April was the catalyst for protests and riots across the Ugandan capital, Kampala, in which two were killed.

In March 2012 Sergei Mironov, running in the 2012 Russian presidential election, said that: "Whoever wins the presidency, if he does not immediately begin deep political and social reforms [...] Russia will be shaken by a kind of Arab Spring within two years."

The Telegraph pointed out that since Mironov is a former ally of Vladimir Putin, he could have been trying to scaremonger "as a subtle way of endorsing a crackdown on street demonstrations that are expected in the days after the vote".

[34] He told the Guardian newspaper, "We have only to reflect on the events in countries swept up in the Arab Spring to recognise the transformation taking place in the compact between the rulers and the ruled.

[35][36] Regional unrest reached Armenia in January as merchants protested a ban on street trading in Yerevan, the former Soviet socialist republic's capital.

[37] Seizing on this rising discontent in the capital city,[38] the Armenian National Congress, led by former President Levon Ter-Petrosian, started organizing larger, more sharply politicized rallies in Yerevan in February.

Protesters demand the release of political prisoners, socio-economic reforms, full access to Yerevan's Freedom Square, and that perpetrators of violence against opposition supporters in the wake of the 2008 presidential election be brought to justice.

[48][49] China unintentionally played a role in the Arab Spring due to the effects of a winter wheat crop failure and a massive Chinese drought that occurred in January 2011.

Chinese authorities arrested activists,[51] increased the normal police presence, disabled some cell phone text messaging services and deleted Internet postings about protests planned for 14:00 on 20 February in Beijing, Shanghai and 11 other cities.

[54] Small crowds, including a large number of foreign journalists, gathered at the planned site in Beijing and Shanghai but did not chant slogans or hold signs.

[55][56][57][58] CPC General Secretary and President Hu Jintao responded by calling top Chinese Communist Party leaders into a "study session" to root out and tackle social issues before they "become threats to stability".

"[63] In March 2011, the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso announced that he would step down from his political office as the leader of the Tibetan government-in-exile, making way for the election of a prime minister.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps promised to forcefully confront protesters,[67] and opposition activists and aides to Mousavi and Karroubi were arrested in the days leading up to the demonstrations.

[87] North Korea responded internally by censoring all news of the Arab Spring, banning all public demonstrations, and stationing Korean People's Army tanks in Kim Il-sung Square, Pyongyang.

[96][97] A series of demonstrations took place in the United States, starting on 14 February 2011 and continuing as of 12 March 2011[update],[99] involving tens of thousands of protestors including union members, students, and other citizens.

[101] The protests were considered to be inspired by the 2011 Egyptian revolution by the chairman of the United States House Committee on the Budget, Paul Ryan and the Late-2000s recession.

The New Zealand branch of human rights group Amnesty International reported that soldiers in the archipelago state of Fiji, under military rule since the 2006 Fijian coup d'état, were increasingly resorting to beatings, abuse, and even torture to enforce order, allegedly detaining and abusing opposition members, unionists, and youth activists for planning a protest against the junta in late February.

[107] On 7 March, The Australian reported that a former government minister declared his intent to seek asylum in Australia, claiming Fiji soldiers had detained and tortured him.

[111] The Fiji Human Rights Commission said that while it hasn't received any recent complaints directly, it is monitoring the situation and trying to check up on published allegations.

[113] The media in Nigeria speculated that similar events could take place there as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta in the south or Boko Haram in the north could exploit the "distortions within the Nigerian system, and the anger of an aggrieved segment of the populace.

"[119] At least one well-regarded political analyst (published by Foreign Policy and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) said that conditions in the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan were similar enough to those in countries currently experiencing protests and revolts that the autocratic government of President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov appears worried by the precedent of revolutions in North Africa and major political concessions in several Western Asian states.

[120] The Uzbekistani government embraced a set of parliamentary reforms in late March that will grant the Legislative Chamber of the Supreme Assembly, a democratically elected body, a stronger ability to check the power of the prime minister by allowing it to call a motion of no confidence, as well as empowering both houses of the Supreme Assembly to "demand information" from the executive branch, according to one Uzbekistani senator involved with the reform initiative.

At least one prominent political analyst at an Interior Ministry-affiliated university in Tashkent said the reforms were inspired by recent revolutionary events in the Middle East and Kyrgyzstan, asserting that democratization and government accountability and not violence are the means to forestalling popular upheaval.

[122] As the protests in Egypt began, Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Chief Aviv Kochavi stated the Egyptian government was not in danger of collapsing.