The Silt from a Social Issue, against the Grain of Arab Revolutions: How Paradigms Circulate North and South of the Sahara

The uprisings of 2011 have updated the research agenda. The issues related to the social injustice disparaged by the protesters are now being tackled by political scientists not necessarily to explain the reasons for the protests, but to analyze their form and logic. By opening up these new fields of research, or by reformulating issues related to the exchanges which weave relationships of domination, they provide perspectives for comparison both within the Arab words as well as outside the region. In sharp contrast with the way in which “African transitions” were considered some years ago, various interesting directions are being mapped out, shedding light in various ways on certain blind spots in the research: on one hand, changing the scale of observation of regime change involves taking into account the social battles to which the so-called transitologists in Sub-Saharan Africa had paid scant attention; on the other, considering social protest and its impact on how public action is taken in political economies provides a perspective which has not been well developed up until now in the Arab world.