The dramatic transformations that occurred in Tunisia and Egypt in the winter of 2010-2011 have caused an immense surprise among Western publics, including in the academic communities. The protests for human dignity and against authoritarianism belied most of the predictions, and paradigms through which political change in the Middle East and North Africa was analyzed. The claims that were made during the protests also challenged traditional binaries (between secularism and Islamism, male and female, younger and older generations). As a response to these unexpected events, social scientists and Middle East experts resorted to different analytical strategies. This paper will examine Western scholarly attempts at making sense of the “Arab spring” with a particular attention to the following three points. -The labeling battle. As soon as the protests began, a debate emerged among experts and analysts, in order to know how to best label the events. Different competing labels were proposed: spring, revolts, revolution, uprisings, social movements etc. To what extent does this definitional battle express a deeper disagreement about the meaning, legitimacy and prospect of the current Arab political transformations? -The search for models. An essential corollary of this definitional endeavor was the debate about the models and paradigms that would best permit the understanding and explanation of the unexpected Arab changes. A battle for models soon erupted whereby the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were compared to the French revolution, the Prague Spring, the Eastern European revolutions, the “third wave” of democratization etc. How did each national intellectual tradition influence the understanding of Arab transformations, and to what extent do these interpretations reveal an attempt at mastering the unknown –reinterpreted mostly in terms of threat/menace- rather than at understanding? -The formation of a new, soft orientalism. In an article published in September 2011 (Al Ahram), Mona Abaza, a sociologist from the American University of Cairo (“Academic Tourists Sightseeing the Arab Spring”) provocatively denounced the problematic “ internal division of labor” that is taking place among the academic community. “Local” scholars are mainly “service providers” for Western scholars who keep a monopoly over the production of theories and models and remain the sole legitimate “knowing subjects”. This provocative article has indeed emphasized an important and under-studied issue regarding the conditions of formation of knowledge about the Arab revolutions. To what extent have the political changes permitted a transformation of the conditions of production of knowledge about the region?