“Upheaval in the Arab World: Back to the Drawing Board for Political Scientists” The surprising demise of authoritarian rulers in Tunisia and Egypt requires political scientists to reexamine some of the conventional wisdom about Arab and Middle East politics. (1) The “durability of authoritarianism”. How valid now is the argument that mukhabarat states can keep several steps ahead of societal opposition through better access to and use of new technologies of information and repression? (2) Democratization is an inappropriate goal and impossible to achieve in the Arab world. Were the so-called “demo-crazy” analysts really so blinded by their presumed liberal preferences? (3); Populations are passive—anaesthetized by the opium of the rentier state or bowed down by the burdens of daily life or cowed by fear of the mukhabarat. How then to explain the extraordinary massive popular protests? (4) Arab nationalism is dead; people are reverting to their primordial affiliations. But how then to explain the so-called “contagion effect” of the Tunisian and Egyptian upheavals? Facebook alone did not cause them. And (5) the Middle East regional system is essentially stable; states still are the prime units; the regional balance of power is stable; and the system is still encased in American hegemony. But how then to explain the stunning strategic setback suffered by the United States and Washington’s apparent inability to manipulate the new situation. The paper will critically review some of the academic and policy-oriented analyses supporting these propositions and propose that a combination of factors--group-think, theoretical tunnel vision, ideological agendas, insufficient attention to the work of Arab intellectuals, and a lack of multidisciplinary approaches —help account for the difficulties. It will call for a rethinking of categories such as state (failed or otherwise), regime (rogue or otherwise), nation, society (civil or otherwise) and leadership. And it will emphasize the importance of new media and information technologies in clarifying (and energizing) the Arab “imagined community.”