ABSTRACT
Much has been written describing how Middle East experts were blindsided by a pair of successful popular uprisings, first in Tunisia and then in Egypt. Writing in Foreign Affairs, political scientist Gregory Gause (2011) recounts how regional specialists, like himself, overestimated the strength and cohesiveness of North Africa’s regimes and failed to grasp the limited depth of personal allegiances that either Zine El Abidine Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarak could secure from the military’s highest ranks. Another article in the same journal, by Nassim Taleb and Mark Blyth (2011), draws a strikingly dissimilar conclusion, describing North Africa’s dramatic political events as a ‘black swan’ – the unpredictable terminus of a build-up of tensions brought to a head by complexly interacting forces.
