Knowledge production cannot be seen outside the larger power relations that inform the geopolitical interactions between the MENA-region and influential centers of learning. The hegemony of Western, mostly Anglo-Saxon, academia in building theories, setting research agendas and conceptualizing political life in the MENA-region creates in a sense the object of study called the Middle East and North Africa. Nugent (2010) already established how in the US the state and corporation have had an unusual interest in the knowledge produced by social scientists showing the collusion between geopolitical interest and social science production. The development of a global regime of knowledge production and the circulation of that knowledge within the social sciences – while clearly meant as a de-colonizing experiment – are actually sustaining and reproducing power hierarchies within the construction and dissemination of knowledge. While there has been ample research on how modernization studies or area-studies have been linked to Western political agendas, this paper wants to address the issue of knowledge production from a more relational and geographical viewpoint. More specifically the paper raises the question to what extent the Arab Uprisings have entailed alternative modes of knowledge production in and about the Arab region and whether these alternative approaches potentially signal an epistemological decolonization of the region. This paper is focused on the way academic publications have perceived the Arab uprisings and the ways in which they are portrayed in scientific discourse. We will address both the content of academic journal articles on the Arab uprisings, as well as analyze (through network and citation analysis) who produces the knowledge and who frames the scholarly debate.