Continuity and change before and after the Arab uprisings

The Arab uprisings, starting in 2011, have generated a significant amount of scholarly literature and academic attention and interest, revolving around the politics, democratisation, authoritarian rule, mass mobilization, youth participation, role of social media, and other inter-related dimension, and issues in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). However, a crucial but understudied aspect related to these uprisings is the interplay between continuity and change in the socio-political and economic relations of the societies that had witnessed massive upheavals. The present edited volume, originally published as a special issue of British Journal of Middle East Studies (BJMES) in January 2015, fulfils this gap by exposing the overlapping and identifying the patterns of both continuity and change in the three North African countries of Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt; and by explaining the ‘problematic nature of notions of “regime change” and “regime stability”’ (p. 2).