Tunisia and Egypt: Revolutionary moments in health promotion practice

The first few weeks of 2011 witnessed two revolutionary moments in Tunisia and Egypt with clear socialist undertones and demands for the redistribution of national resources. In this paper, I reflect on the two recent experiences in Tunisia and Egypt through juxtaposing concepts and language from health promotion practice. First, I examine the root or fundamental social causes that led to health-demoting structural conditions which the masses could no longer accept. Following, I discuss the specific events that sparked each revolution through the lens of behavior change theories. Specifically, I employ constructs such as cue to action, self-efficacy, and stages of change to describe how masses broke the fear barrier, became more self-efficacious, and moved from pre-contemplation to action. The paper then moves to describing how the community concept of collective efficacy translated into the spontaneous formation of popular committees that took charge of neighborhood security, clean-up, and caring for the injured. An important element in both moments was the creative use of social media and the building of virtual communities, and in the paper I examine the diffusion of the revolution-as-innovation process. Finally, I examine the two revolutions as exemplary structural interventions in which ordinary citizens employed their bodies, voices, and hand-written signs to break the cycles of marginalization and inequity. Whereas the sustainability of the two interventions remains to be seen, events leading to their climax deserve attention from progressive health promotion professionals. In this paper, I present a modest reflection and evaluation.