The 20th century was a century of revolutions. The process of decolonization, despite its imperfections, was undoubtedly one of the most significant turning points in recent history. The tide of peoples across the globe rising up to sweep away the structures of domination and subjugation to which they had been subjected for centuries constituted an unquestionably world altering force. This dynamic unlocked a wide range of new horizons and unleashed a plethora of emancipatory energies and liberatory political projects. Ranging from Pan-Africanism to Afro-Asianism, Third Worldism to Muslim Internationalism, Pan-Arabism to Tricontinentalism; peoples in the Global South rediscovered their voices and power and were not afraid to use them. A widespread conception of this history regards decolonization more as a point in time rather than a process. This misconception of historical time imagines categories such as colonial and postcolonial, colonized and independent, subjugated and sovereign as clear-cut categories, and mistakes their analytical function for their actual empirical distinctiveness. An a priori commitment to thinking about history and historical time in terms of brakes, ruptures and discontinuities may do more to distort than to clarify. Approaching institutions, systems and structures of power that have been developed over centuries as phenomena that have lives as well as afterlives may help us to demystify the seeming incomprehensibility of the contemporary human condition. It would be naive to think that the sovereignty of postcolonial states became absolute on the official day of their independence or to believe that former colonial powers simply dragged their tails of defeat back to Europe and forever closed the colonial chapter of their history and opened a new page in which their former colonial subjects are now both perceived and treated as equals. Using the Algerian revolutionary movement (Hirak) as a case study, this paper seeks to read the revolutionary movements that WANA region has witnessed over the last decade as the latest installment of a struggle between global anti-colonial forces, and a colonial counter-revolution. It examines the latest division of the counter-revolutionary labor, needed to reproduce the status quo, between Global, regional, and local actors, as well as the ways in which the popular movement’s analysis and strategy to countering them. The paper argues that such a framing sheds light on fields of power and resistance previously out of view and renders intelligible dynamics and attitudes whose seeming incomprehensibility has tended to keep them out of the story.