The comparisons that have been made between the Arab revolutions and the French Revolution of 1789, the Spring of the Peoples in 1848 or even a new ‘1989’, unsettled the myth of Arab exceptionalism and of Arab cultures or histories in relation to politics. Moreover, for some, the benevolent universalization of the Arab revolutions also entailed the possibility to inscribe the revolts into the teleological narrative of democratization – a narrative in which a specific Western European history has been transformed from a local historical anomaly into an international norm, a universal standard against which other countries are measured. While there are many reasons why the idea of ‘a catching up’ is erroneous and Eurocentric, it brought our attention to the fundamental weaknesses of the authoritarian persistence paradigm. Local subaltern histories tend to be forgotten and even ignored within the current debates on the uprisings. The dominant focus on ‘moments’ of outbursts of social protest tend to underexpose the broader revolutionary processes that built up to these grand risings. In this paper, we would like to trace the longer history of increasing socio-economic struggle in Morocco and Tunisia. We have seen a consistent increase of social protest over the past decade, especially in the smaller towns and villages where misery, despair and inequality among the country’s population are felt much stronger than in the large cities. We argue that the political and democratic protests of the last years (before and after the start of the Arab Revolts) and the history of these protests cannot be viewed as unrelated phenomena but must be understood as part of the same historical process. To understand the Arab revolts and its impact we cannot limit ourselves to the ‘simple grand rising’ itself, but have to take into account the history of the numerous and seemingly insignificant cases of local protest in the years leading up to revolts. Strikes or protests that may have begun over what appear to be small and local socio-economic struggles can rapidly evolve into challenges on a broader political level. At the same time, a rise in political struggles can feed back into local and dispersed sites of struggle and boost their fighting spirits. Focusing on the disturbances in the phosphate mining region of Khouribga (Morocco) in 2011 and the protests in towns such as Gafsa and Siliana (Tunisia), we will show the particular dynamic between political and socio-economic struggle.