Revolutions and mobilisations in the region showed that mainstream civil society actors such as human rights NGOs and other liberal-minded organisations, which had been dubbed the 'usual suspects' and charged with democratizing potential, have not been at the forefront of the upheavals. Consequently, attention has been devoted to the examination of informal networks of activists, everyday forms of resistance, 'de-centralised' activism and marginal groups of (non)citizens. Empirical innovations focused on the politicisation of what, previously, had wrongly been perceived as a-political or non-political. As a consequence, the issue of civil society and the 'usual suspects' have somehow been set aside as not relevant to the bouleversement taking place in the region. On the contrary, this paper argues that a return on civil society is necessary. It remains a relevant issue not because it can explain revolts or regime change - an assumption that informed the study of democratic transition in the past - but because it highlights the significant transformations that national states have been going under as a result of neo-liberal reforms, which have reached the Middle East since 1980s. Central to such transformations are the shrinking role of the state in the welfare sector and the rise of civil society as the provider of social services in neo-liberal economies. Dismissing civil society as non-relevant to the politics in the Middle East, mainly looking at it through the prism of regime change/democratization, means ignoring the fact that civil society actors are resilient and that they are institutionalising as a hub of power. In fact, civil society's self-representation, its foundational myths and its presence in the field of social policies have remained crucial to the functioning of nation-states. This paper builds on neo-institutionalism and Gidden's theory of structuration as frameworks of analysis, and examines the presence of civil society actors in Iran's governance system by focusing on the sector of children and women's protection. Through the analysis of self-representations and self-definitions, the emergence of inter-organisational structures of domination and patterns of coalition, increase in the information-load among organisations, and the development of awareness around a common enterprise, the paper contends that NGOs are growingly isomorphic and professionalised with significant consequences in terms of i) claims they can make to the state ii) internal employers-employees relations and iii) change in the mission of their assistance. A concluding section will reflect on the possibilities for comparative analysis.