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On Dec. 17, 2010 a 26-year-old Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, who had been harassed by the authorities for years, set himself on fire after a policewoman slapped him. This single act triggered the collapse of one of the most corrupt regimes in the Arab world. By Feb. 1 1 the unthinkable had happened in the most populous Arab country: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was swept from power. Though remarkable in and of themselves, what is astonishing about these monumental events is that so few Middle Eastern Studies scholars anticipated them. In fact, even in the midst of the upheaval in Egypt, experts were still writing about how Egypt was not undergoing regime breakdown, and about how the uprising would not seriously threaten Mubarak's government.
There are two main reasons that so many experts failed to anticipate the Arab Spring. The first has to do with the still ongoing debate over the value of "area studies." The field of comparative democratization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) prides itself on establishing the veracity of broad generalizations that cover the region as a whole. Area studies, which involve the investigation of particular political, social and economic dynamics in distinct locales through labor-intensive field work, while not completely marginalized, do not have as much disciplinary cache as do grand theorizing and research designs that analyze large data sets. One result of this disciplinary reward mechanism has been that the lion's share of research on politics in the MENA has been devoted to assessing the region's "democratic deficit" and the tenacious entrenchment of authoritarianism. Rather than focus on the specific features of each country and the processes (and people!) that might spark successful revolution, scholars have tended to emphasize large-scale political and social forces at the expense of individuals (see, for example, Posusney and Angrist 2005; and Schlumberger 2007). This made it difficult for scholars to capture tenuous (but real) tides of change, including the emergence of a savvy group of young Egyptian activists who were becoming increasingly adept at using social media to spread the message of nonviolent political change, or the impact that particular key individuals were making - including Wael Ghonim in Egypt and Tawakkul Karman in Yemen.1
The second reason is the...