Introduction

The Arab Spring revolutions have caught the global elites flat footed as they have watched Arab peoples challenge and pierce the thin veneer of the structures of inequality and repression in place in the Arab world. The Arab uprisings also signaled to the rest of the world's peoples that the relations and institutions of political and economic control and domination are far from being permanent; they can be rattled to the core, pushed into a crisis, and be transformed in radical-democratic ways. Arab revolutionaries have shown that it is possible to organize non-hierarchically and effect change without engendering authoritarianism. Their struggles have already inspired others around the world including the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in the US. All this might yet be a new beginning. We argue that undercurrents of discontent, in the Middle East and North African region, about the unfinished national liberation struggles, the military regimes, and the neoliberal elites propelled the rocking of the Kasbah, or of the familiar order in the regions and beyond. We end the piece by describing in short the authors' contribution to the whole forum.