The role that social contracts play for the stability of countries and the well-being of people has emerged as a new field of research. They can be defined as the total set of informal and formal agreements between societal actors and the government on rights and obligations towards each other. Governments can give protection (against internal and external threats), provision (of economic and social services) and (political) participation. Some governments give only one or two of these three “Ps” but citizens do not necessarily accept such limitation forever. Instead, they can withdraw what they should give as a minimum – acceptance of governments – as the upheavals in Arab countries in 2011 and Iran in 2022 have shown. This paper discusses when and why social contracts change. It refers to empirical examples from within and outside the MENA region but it is mainly meant to be a conceptual framework for further research. Social contracts can stabilise state-society relations because they relieve the contracting parties of renegotiating their mutual obligations all too often. However, they can only effectively do so if they are modified every now and then to account for changes in the frameworks conditions. They change constantly in countries with institutionalised mechanisms of renegotiation: parliamentary debates, open public discourse or the lobbying of divergent interest groups. In countries that lack these mechanisms – which includes most MENA countries – social contracts tend to change only little for most of the time. Only sometimes, more significant change takes place – typically only once something unforeseen happens – e.g. a price shock, a pandemic, an earthquake or an invasion by a foreign country. Historical institutionalism argues events of this kind are critical junctures where at least one key actor must react (often but not always the government): It can – but does not have to – change their previous course. If they do, they often change the social contract. Sometimes, the change results from a whole cascade of reactions and reactions to reactions by different actors. Examples include the changes that happened after the revolts in Arab countries in 2010-11, liberalisation in Turkey in 1990 and the Oslo negotiations between Israel and the Arab states in 1993. The explosion in Beirut harbour is also an example. It also opened freedom for the key actors in Lebanon to implement reforms. However, they decided not to change significantly their previous course.