In this paper I raise doubts about modernist interpretations of what a successful social movement would look like: i.e., that liberation will come about only if we have a clear agenda that is agreed on by all; only if we are unified; and only if we mobilize, make demands, and deny failure. In many ways, this has thwarted hope. However, along the way I have been given “the gift of doubt” (Gladwell 2013), and the contemporary insurrections give me a whole new way to look at the Middle East, Africa, gender politics, and the world. Using ideas from postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist thought, I analyze recent global insurrections, e.g., the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, but also including Sudan’s modest insurrection of 2013, in order to demonstrate their departure from modernist frameworks and the new possibilities. Participants in the new uprisings, which are mainly comprised of youth and populated by great numbers of women, seek new language, modes of organizing, and formations. I discuss the anarcho-tendencies and direct democracy actions that we are seeing in the anti-statism, anti-authoritarian, and non-hierarchal, but also fragmentary, uncertain, incomplete, and ongoing insurrections. I ground my ideas with examples from interviews with various insurrectionists and end with my research on the 2013 Sudan uprising in an attempt to challenge the concept of failure and exemplify the unintended consequences of the insurrections. Some of the collective and public actions of the last decade or so are significant in giving us reason to anticipate that, even if the “larger goal” is not immediately reached, other positive and hopeful aspects of human life emerge. Using the ideas of Malcolm Gladwell (2013), Judith Halberstam (2011), Manual Castells (2012), Hamid Dabashi (2012), Barbara Ehrenreich(2009), and James Scott(1999), I delve into the hopeful terrain of the current insurrections characterized by “false starts” and incompleteness, grounding my ideas in the messy September 2013 uprisings in Sudan. Dabashi asks to what extent these uprisings “posit…a new language…that accords to them the primacy of authoring their own meaning…” (2012: 59). Halberstam, in describing the queer art of failure e, says that the new insurrectionists have “a basic desire to live life otherwise…” (2011: 2). I end with this question: Will the fluid, contingent, irregular, open, unpredictable, and uncertain path of these new actions lead us to greater creativity and to hopeful possibilities?