In the study of social protest, mobilization and contestation in the MENA, historians focusing on social change, the economy, state formation and imperialism convincingly rejected (decades ago) Orientalist exceptionalism and cultural essentialism (Abrahamian 1982; Baer 1969; Batatu 1978; Beinin and Lockman 1987; Halliday 1974; Hanna; Quataert 1993; Raymond 1973; Tucker 1985). Conventional social movements theory (McAdam et al 1996) has also been appropriated to reject (neo)Orientalist accounts of Islamic activism in the region (Wiktorowicz 2004). More recently, however, cultural historians and those influenced by revisionist social movements theory (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001) have done much to refute the sometime objectivism, rationalism, materialism and determinism of conventional SMT and historical sociology alike (Abu-Lughod 1990, 1998; Afary 1996; Beinin and Vairel 2011; Clancy-Smith 1994; Cronin 2008; Johnson 2001; Khalili 2007; Lockman 1994a, 1994b; Paidar 1995; Provence 2005; Thompson 2000). Revisionism stresses social constructionism and the role of (re)interpretation in contentious politics – against the hydraulics of modernization or capitalism on the one hand, or the objectivism and rationalism of conventional SMT on the other. This paper, drawing mainly on examples of political contention in the recent uprisings, aims to interrogate the new constructionism, accepting much of its critique of older approaches, embracing its strengths, while arguing that its key weakness lies in its dissolution of material domination, structural forms, and historical context. The paper argues that the remedy lies not in a return to the old, but in a reformulated notion of hegemonic contestation – where hegemony refers to historically-situated, always contested and unfinished, and multi-scalar attempts to unite material domination with projects of moral/religious, political, and intellectual leadership. Hegemonic contestation stems from the very fact that domination is indeed always (re)interpreted – and it is this (re)articulation to which we must attend in order to understand collective action. This paper aims to situate recent protests within this intepretive framework, paying special attention to the importance of the (unruly and border-crossing) political imagination. The paper summarizes the conceptual thrust of a funded book-project on contentious politics and consent in the MENA since the eighteenth century. I have been working on this project on a full-time basis for three out of the last five years using Arabic, French and English sources in archives, libraries and through fieldwork in the UK, the US, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf.