My paper will evaluate rival explanations for what drove the demonstrations in Tunisia. Competing approaches maintain that Tunisians mobilized for one or more of the following reasons: generalized political repression; the particularities of Ben Ali’s dictatorship, including the cult of personality and the regime’s infantilization of its citizens; the regime’s abysmal human rights record; blocked routes to economic prosperity for an increasingly sophisticated and well-educated population; and rich-poor gaps, exacerbated by anger at those whose wealth stemmed from corruption. The paper will begin by making the case for the relevance of these and other grievances in turn, assessing the evidence – both primary and secondary – that each was causally pivotal. Yet the sheer scale of the civic accomplishment of the Tunisian people suggests that no single social, economic, or political vector of grievance is sufficient to explain the outcome. In addition, in part because all of these explanations pertain solely to Tunisia’s domestic context, none of them accounts for the timing of the rupture satisfactorily. The paper therefore will explore the validity of arguments suggesting that two changes to Tunisia’s external political environment in the 2000’s facilitated popular willingness to amass, take risks, and alter the status quo. The first is the rhetorical change in U.S. foreign policy that saw President George W. Bush back away from unconditional support for friendly dictators in the region and call for democratization. President Obama’s speeches on Muslim soil about political pluralization reinforced the shift. While the shift was more rhetorical than actual, to those who were listening it may have been enabling, on the assumption that this rhetoric would function as a limiting factor on the degree to which the U.S. could in practice continue to back dictators in the face of movements demanding political inclusion. The second is a change in the landscape of political Islam. While the 1990s saw radical movements -- some of them violent -- operating on domestic soil in the region, by the 2000s the immediate domestic threat from radical Islam had dissipated. Algeria’s civil war had ended. Egypt had dismantled its Islamic Group. Tunisia’s MTI was in exile. What remained in domestic political arenas or in exile were less threatening, moderate (or moderating) Islamists. Absent the fear that changes demanded of the status quo would lead inexorably either to radical Islamist takeovers or violent regime-Islamist confrontations, citizens had less to fear from their activism.