North African collective action before, during, and after the “Arab spring” exhibits both cross-cutting characteristics and national and local variations. Central to these contestations—and what may be called an “Arab spring ethos”—are an explicit rejection of traditional identity-based politics (in part as a result of state manipulation) in favor of inclusive notions of citizenship that both reject and attempt to reconcile extant contestations with state power (whether secular/left/labor-oriented, Islamist, feminist, Amazighist, etc.). These previous contestations to a large degree came of age in the 1980s and competed both with the state and with each other, often aggravated by divide and rule strategies. New notions of identity and citizenship that surfaced in the late 1980s and 1990s and emerged with the Arab spring rejected Western/colonialist, nationalist, and existing contestatory identitarian rhetorics and political formulations and attempted to reconcile and reinvent national identity and citizenship. This often provoked confusion (poor assessment/analysis), frustration, dismissal, or even "disciplining" both at the state and at the organizational level (by parties, organizations, unions), as the flipped-scripts of youth protest challenged existing notions of both protest and citizenship. This has contributed, for example, to low voter turnouts and new forms of anti-establishment and populist politics. The quest for newly defined citizenship—that, among other things, attempts to embrace subalterneity (with varying degrees of success)—is central to contemporary collective action. These cross-cutting ideas often transcend local contestations and national boundaries and have fueled successive regional protest waves. Based on interviews and conversations with over 5000 young Libyans, Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans in over 20 countries since the 1990s, primarily in Arabic and French, gathered in the form of qualitative and quantitative data in addition to secondary sources analyzed by the author, this paper attempts to synthesize and theorize what the emerging ethos is, has been, and might become. Among a variety of features of these new inclusive, category-busting conceptions of citizenship and identity are 1) increasingly plural conceptions of what women can be both with in protest movements and more widely in society (including across the spectrum from Islamist to anti-Islamist), 2) the increasing acceptance, and sometimes embrace, of LGBT identities, including by some young Islamists, and 3) other category-busting identities and ideas. With varying degrees of success, young people are challenging and redefining both citizenship and contestation, and analysis of youth contestation needs to reflect these reformulations and also re-theorize identity and citizenship.