Four years ago this month, demonstrations in Tunisia, following the death of a 26-year-old street vendor who set himself on fire, toppled an authoritarian government in the country, inspiring an "Arab Spring" of people's protest movements and heightening hopes for democratization in various Arab countries. A political backlash has since dampened these hopes, however, and today much of the Arab world is beset by oppression and conflict.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is touring Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Palestine at this time, should seriously consider how Japan can help stabilize this part of the world. The government should make efforts to support the revival of the original ideal of the Arab Spring — leadership by moderate secular parties instead of military or religious forces.

The Financial Times has characterized 2014 as one of the bloodiest years in the Middle East's history, reporting that more than 100,000 people — perhaps a third or more of them civilian — were killed in conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and the Gaza Strip.

The Israel-Gaza conflict, which lasted seven weeks from last July, resulted in the deaths of some 2,200 Palestinians, 66 Israeli soldiers and six Israeli civilians, dashing any hope for immediate progress in the Middle East peace talks.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which is based in Yemen, last week declared that the group planned and paid for the Jan. 7 terrorist attack on the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, which killed 12 people, sending a shock wave throughout the world.

Since Yemen's authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down from power in November 2011 following 33 years of rule, security conditions have deteriorated and the country has become a hotbed of terrorist groups.

At the end of last year, a suicide bomber killed 33 people by blowing himself up at a celebration by Shiite militia supporters in central Yemen. On the same day as the Paris attack, a car bomb went off outside a police academy in the Yemen capital of Sanaa, killing at least 50 people and wounding dozens of others.

After the democracy movement in Egypt reached its peak with the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 and the June 2012 election of Mohamed Morsi as president with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood, the wheels of history there began to shift into reverse. Morsi was toppled from power by the military a year later, and the military designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group and used force to suppress it. Backed by the strong support of the military, former defense minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi became Egypt's new president in June 2014.

In November, the charge of premeditated murder of peaceful demonstrators during the 2011 revolution that had been leveled against Mubarak was dismissed on a technicality. Yet, an Egyptian court in December sentenced 188 Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death.

Libya plunged into civil war in 2011 and conditions there worsened following the killing of its longtime leader, Moammar Gadhafi, in October that year. Chaos continue to this day.

No solutions have been found to end the civil war in Syria, which also began in 2011 and so far claimed the lives of a estimated 191,000 people according to the United Nations, including 76,000 people in 2014 alone. Some 3.3 million Syrians have fled their country as refugees, turning the situation into the worst humanitarian crisis in the past 20 years. The emergence of Islamic State as a potent political and military force has further complicated the situation in Syria and Iraq.

Yet there are signs of hope in the Arab world. In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring democratization movement began, Islamic and secular forces managed to establish a new constitution through persistent talks, thus securing the secular nature of the state. Still, young Tunisians continue to suffer from dire economic conditions and find it difficult to feel very optimistic about their future.

Japan needs to extend steady support in concrete form for peace-building efforts in the Arab world as well as to stress the importance of tolerance of diversified views and opinions, in the realms of culture, politics and religion. Simply extending economic assistance will not be enough to help bring peace and stability to countries rocked by the aftermath of the Arab Spring.