This article pursues two main objectives. First, mainly drawing on empirical evidences
rather than journalistic impressions and reports on the Arap Spring, it aims to provide
an in-depth analysis of the sets of socio-economic and socio-political factors that have
been deeply rooted in the region for more than half a century and which have driven
(and continue to drive) a wave of uprisings across the region commonly labelled as the
‘Arab Spring’. Thus, this study expects to present a slightly different reading of the Arap
Spring by placing the issue into the socio-economic and socio-political context of the
recent past. Secondly, by considering a range of factors such as the responses of the
regimes, the role of security forces, the ethnic and sectarian makeup of the societies and
the politico-institutional feature of states, it explains how the unfolding of events has
differed from country to country and why some uprisings have succeeded in toppling
regimes and others have not.