The 2019 uprisings in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq, in addition to resurgent protests in Morocco and Jordan—all countries that did not experience revolutionary uprisings in 2011—extend the previous wave of revolt to the rest of the region. Protestors are no longer content with merely toppling their unelected dictators as we saw in 2011: They are demanding a fundamental change of the entire political and economic system. In Iraq and Lebanon they are also rejecting the entire political class and their use of sectarianism to maintain their wealth and rule, chanting “All of them means all of them!”

MERIP devotes this double issue Return to Revolution to assessing the nature of the challenges confronting this new wave of uprisings through the interrelated themes of continuity, entanglement and counterrevolution.