What explains sudden and sweeping mobilization of protest in the Arab world? Emphasizing rationality, mainstream social movement theory holds that people participate in revolutionary protest when structural and strategic conditions lead them to expect it to yield greater rewards than costs. Yet this leaves us to wonder why people will ever risk life or limb to engage in dissent, why they are ready to do so at some times more than others, or why they are sometimes surprised by their own will to sacrifice. I explore these questions in a paper on the Syrian uprising, based on original ethnographic fieldwork and interviews that I conducted with more than 60 Syrian refugees in Jordan in September-October 2012 (and plan to reinforce with another round of fieldwork in summer, 2013). I critique the conceptualization of participation in high-risk protest as a choice, and instead make the case that it be understood as a process of personal transformation. Transformation directs attention to change in the actor making decisions, and not simply change in the inputs that produce one decision or another. It encourages us to trace participation to an inner debate about what it means to live a life of honor and moral commitment, a struggle to muster the courage to act, and a discovery of new aspects of the self. Most academic explanations of the Arab uprisings examine “objective” variables, such as transnational diffusion of revolutionary innovations, socio-economic trends, a demographic youth bulge, or developments in regime institutions, opposition organization, or technology. I complement that focus with analysis of the subjective processes involved in the choice to partake in high-risk dissent. I therefore engage with the Conference’s thematic emphasis on social action by situating it in analysis of the affective dimensions of politics. For decades, Arab authoritarian regimes maintained power not only because they brought citizens to comply in behavior, but also because they cultivated feelings that encouraged submission. Elites took mass societal acquiescence for granted and most citizens regarded mass protest as unimaginable. In the course of 2011, the affects that cemented those assumptions, and likewise the rules of the political game constructed upon them, were unsettled. This change is not irreversible and the new rules of politics may prove no less friendly to democracy. Nonetheless, transformation in citizens’ personal experience of and relationship to politics is one of the most profound markers of the Arab revolts.