As both the 20th century and the Cold War drew to a close, the world became witness to a radical reshaping of world politics. Where power was previously balanced in a bipolar system, between the capitalist United States and the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the clash between the two resulted in the US rising to its current hegemonic position. In seeking to explain the post-Cold War world, Francis Fukuyama described this result, and what the world was bearing witness to, as "an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism  (1989, pg.3). Fukuyama extended his description of victory to claim that there "is no ideology with pretensions or universality that is in a position to challenge liberal-democracy, and no universal principle of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the people  (1992, pg.45); that there can be no progression from liberal democracy to an alternative system. To this extent, he argues that Western liberal democracy “representative democracy in which elected representatives are limited by constitution for the protection of individual liberties and equality (Baylis, Smith, and Owens, 2007) “is the end point of mankind's ideological evolution  and the "final form of human government" (1989, pg.1). While even those commentators who support Fukuyama's thesis, such as Herscovitch, recognize his claim as "bold and confrontational  (2011, pg.40), and in spite of arguments from detractors such as Dahrendorf (1990, pp.37-39), the Arab Spring provides a contemporary reason to sustain agreement, now more than twenty years since its writing. One of the primary arguments which can be used in favor of Fukuyama's thesis is the democratic peace theory, which argues that mature democracies rarely or never go to war with one another (Baylis, Smith, and Owens, 2007). Following the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, there was a positive correlation between the increase of liberal democratic states and a decline in total warfare. The Center for Systemic Peace's report on Global Conflict Trends shows a dramatic decline in both interstate and societal armed conflict (at its peak in 1991, one in three countries was experiencing some form of serious armed conflict - at the time of the report, in 2005, this figure had dropped to less than 15%), as well as in the annual numbers of transnational refugees and displaced populations (2005). In particular, one can observe the elimination of inter-state warfare within Eastern Europe, South America, and South East Asia between those countries which transitioned from militant dictatorships to liberal democracies (Human Security Centre, 2005). This correlation, and the statistics provided, can be used to support Fukuyama's thesis in regard to his reference of the "struggle for recognition  - a notion rooted in Hegel's philosophical "The Phenomenology of Spirit" (1807). Williams describes the way in which Fukuyama uses this notion “that there is inevitable conflict between two ind