Joshua Kurlantzick lists what Egypt and Tunisia should learn from Asia's revolutions in the 1980s and 1990s:
Much of the future of Asia's emerging democracies was determined within a year after popular protest appeared to end authoritarian rule. In the Philippines, the inability to erase the influence of the country's handful of massive landowners--including the Aquino clan--meant that the country remained mired in a kind of oligarchic politics--and today, without a popular revolution, it will be hard to change that trend. In Thailand, the refusal in the early democratic period of the 1990s to use constitutional change to reexamine the role of the monarchy and its institutions led to the continuation of undemocratic power wielded by the trinity of bureaucracy, military, and palace.