In April of 2019, protest movements in Sudan and Algeria prompted the departure of Presidents al-Bashir and Bouteflika—centerpiece moments of a “second wave” of 21st-century contentious politics in the region since 2018. This trend undermines “Arab Winter” narratives that have focused on the robustness of counterrevolutions and authoritarian adaptability in Northern Africa post-2013. In contrast to 2011-2013, these recent uprisings are defined by movements that hold a deep skepticism of transitional military authority, robust linkages among networks of contentious actors, and an unprecedented level of “stamina” that has seen mobilizational strength persist for nearly a year after the departures of both Presidents. Why have these oppositional movements resisted the cooptation of the Egyptian case or the conflict of the Libyan case? Why did two heads of state that navigated the 2011 uprisings and its aftermath through a combination of feigned reform, rents, and institutional arrangements lose the loyalty of the security apparatus so quickly less than a decade later? This paper addresses these questions by beginning with how these cases complicate existing frameworks of authoritarian resilience in the region, and then draws on concepts from contentious politics to explain outcome convergence in Algeria and Sudan. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and primary source documents in Arabic, French, and English, I use process tracing to illustrate how both cases confirm elements of Eva Bellin’s (2004; 2012) thesis while complicating the nexus between professionalization and military defection. In Algeria, Bouteflika’s ouster aligns with existing paradigms of professionalized militaries jettisoning regime loyalty in the face of mass protests. In contrast, the fact that the fractured and patrimonial Sudanese security forces acted, at least briefly, in coordination to side with protestors over al-Bashir confounds resilience paradigms and existing analyses of civil-military relations in Sudan. My causal process observations then turn to an analysis of contentious politics to reveal how similar outcomes in both cases reflect a mobilizational mechanism I call “iterative resilience.” I use this concept to describe how the contentious repertoires and networks of 2011-2013 in both countries, only partially subdued with more cooptation and less repression than regional counterparts, reemerged with enhanced capacities in 2018 due to shifts in political opportunity structures. Situated at the border between civil-military relations and collective action studies, this work provides a preliminary framework to assess the role of shifting social pacts and resource distribution and their impact on contentious politics in Northern Africa post-2013.