The debate on the nature of political rule and change in the Arab World has, over the last decades, mainly focused on ‘the regime’ with its analyses of (liberal) institutions such as elections, parliaments, political parties or civil society. This has led to a myriad of studies trying to unearth the ‘internal obstacles’ for political reform. Culturalist explanations (Islamic unadaptedness to capitalism or its authoritarian political culture), institutional accounts of regime survival strategies or the everlasting pragmatism of international relations (‘it is better to have our known dictators…’) all vied for causal explanation. This, in turn, led to a work of ‘labeling’ the nature of the persisting authoritarian regimes in the region: hybrid state, semi-authoritarian state, liberalized autocracy, de-liberalized state… With the ousting of President Ben Ali from Tunisia, academics had trouble situating the failure of what until recently was seen as a particularly entrenched authoritarian systems. What emerged was the idea that the corrupt ruler and his family had harvested all the generated benefits of the economic reforms and, in their greed, forget to spread the wealth to the population. Reducing the Tunisian revolution to a binary opposition between Ben Ali and the Tunisian people is too simplistic to apprehend what happened. In my presentation I will argue that the Tunisian revolution was made possible by the internal contradictions that the Tunisian economic policies of the last two decades have created. The neoliberal growth strategies have, for more than a decade, resulted in a complex compliance of most social classes and groups. When the internal contradictions of the economic organization became too difficult to manage for the government, social groups started to question the status quo thus making visible a tension between the political formula and the social structure of the country. Using a political economy and political sociology of the revolution, I will reframe the Tunisian Revolution in a narrative that analyses how the policies of economic reform have induced the uprising and how the social groups have defined their agency and how they have developed new forms of struggle and political alliances.