How are some authoritarian regimes able to maintain themselves despite being challenged by protests? How can some revolutions be successful but not others? The literatures on democratization and contentious politics in comparative politics often struggle with these questions. Some authors focus on structural factors to explain the stability or resilience of (authoritarian, democratic, or hybrid) regimes. Opposed to these structuralist narratives, other authors explore political changes through “actor-centric narratives stressing the contingency of protest episodes and their outcomes” (p. 1). These agency-focused narratives are used in some branches of the sociology of social movements inspired notably by French authors, such as Michel Dobry or Daniel Cefaï. In his book, Frédéric Volpi builds a theoretical framework that goes beyond this tension between structure and agency. He tests it on the social protests of the “Arab Spring” in North Africa that erupted in December 2010 in Tunisia. In his four case studies—Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia—Volpi analyzes the different outcomes of uprisings.

Volpi investigates the “patterns of interactions” (p. 17) between protesters and ruling elites before, during, and after the uprisings to understand the different trajectories observed in these four countries. The second chapter describes his explanatory model, which comprises three elements: acts, arenas, and actors. In a relational way, he considers discursive and strategic realities as components of these three elements. Indeed, a successful protest needs to create, emulate, spread, and legitimize a narrative of contestation to challenge the ruling elites. At the same time, repertoires of contention used by the protesters can be unsuccessful, because they were unproductive in the past or, for example, because the regime was able to adapt to maintain authoritarian routines. Discursive and strategic dimensions are explored through the dialectical process between the social movements and the rulers. As developed by Lorenzo Bosi, Niall Ó Dochartaigh, and Daniela Pisoiu in their 2015 edited volume, Political Violence in Context: Time, Space and Milieu, contexts are often undertheorized or summarized as a “political opportunity structure.” Volpi suggests considering more diligently the multiple coexisting and sometimes overlapping temporalities, such as long-term relations between political elites and the opposition and short-term interactions during the transition and transformative events.

In the third chapter, the author presents briefly the long-term factors that structure patterns of interactions between ruling elites and protesters and how authoritarian regimes maintained themselves in these four countries before the “Arab Spring.” In the context of democratization happening after the Cold War, the economic failures of North African countries, and the growing Islamist movements as new forms of political power, Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian political elites not only repressed protesters, but also co-opted components of the opposition and adopted some political measures to reform their regimes. The fear of Islamism in the West and of seeing any iteration of the Iranian Revolution in MENA countries helped discursively to legitimize authoritarian regimes as better options. These different factors weakened the potentiality of uprisings. Although the chapter gives an accurate description of the period before the “Arab Spring,” its main utility is to guide readers to understand the behavior and routinized types of reactions of the ruling elites to social protests.

The heart of Volpi’s analysis is developed in the fourth through sixth chapters. Chapter 4 explores the “transformative events” and how they can only be considered retrospectively as such when they lead to successful outcomes. For Volpi, transformative events occur when a “sequence of events” is shaping “behavioural changes” and causing new configurations in the arenas and in the dynamics of contestation (p. 71). In this time frame, Volpi stresses the contingency of the political context during this sequence of events.

From the early days of the uprisings in Tunisia, he observed the counternarrative of the opposition spreading in the streets in the peripheral cities first and later through social media. Tunisian officials, who were used to silencing counternarratives of the opposition, were forced to answer through official channels and media because of the rapid spreading of the protests’ narrative. They never understood the scope of the grassroots opposition. In Algeria, the unrest of 1988 was severely repressed by military forces. After that, the country experienced the “black decade” when Islamist armed groups and security forces clashed during the 1990s. These conflicts led the regime to be very cautious whenever uprisings started in the country. Because they controlled oil revenues, the ruling elites in Algeria implemented policies to redistribute economic resources. Furthermore, they avoided creating “martyrs”: contrary to previous revolts, more policemen were injured than rioters (p. 86).

In Morocco, the regime maintained its strategy of announcing some reforms and co-opting components of the social protests. The protest movement, because it was divided among those favoring different political projects, was unable to sustain its unity and ended relatively rapidly. Finally, in Libya, the narrative of the violence perpetrated by Libyan security forces spread rapidly throughout the country. It helped significantly increase the number of followers in opposition movements that were very fragmented among different local interests, but nevertheless united at that time to fight the Gaddafi regime. The government reacted very late, after localities were already under the control of the rebels. Ideational and strategic factors not only led to the collapse of the regime but also to the “militarization” of the Libyan transition. In all these countries, and especially in Tunisia and Libya, the routines of the authoritarian regimes were challenged. This led to a positive outcome in Tunisia and a negative one for Libya. After discussing these periods of revolts and deinstitutionalization (chapters 4 and 5), Volpi describes the process of reinstitutionalization of the new regimes (chapter 6). He details, for instance, how some ex-ruling elites redefined themselves to stay in power and how some elements of the protesters were able to be part of the new arenas.

On the whole, Volpi’s analysis is convincing and rigorous. However, a major concern is that he did not include a clear methodological section in his book. In addition, he only used sources (newspapers articles and scientific sources) in French and in English, but not in Arabic. This choice certainly led to some biases or at least limitations in the interpretation of events that need to be recognized, particularly when the author is aware of the importance of discourses. Furthermore, Volpi did not seem to do fieldwork in North Africa or interview local actors. This can lead to ignoring numerous key “acts, arenas, and actors” in the chronology who were important for local actors but were not detailed in the media. Thus, readers ought to recognize the limits of process tracing based on secondary sources in the presentation of the argument. As Volpi notes, structuralist or actor-centric narratives shape our understanding of politics. Thus, it is also important for scholars to acknowledge the potential biases and limits of their own “narratives.” Despite this caveat, the book deserves to be considered one of the most compelling and elegant works on the political events of the “Arab Spring.”