The question of democratization has dominated the study of political change in the Arab world over the last 20 years. Despite, the wide range of different explanations, a bulk of the analyses can be divided into two broader branches. First, transitologists believed that the Arab World was, just as elsewhere, subject to a linear transition to (liberal) democracy. Secondly, and opposed to the first branch, a growing group of sceptics began to criticize this ‘transition paradigm’ and argued that we should rather pay attention to “what in fact is going on” in the Arab World (Valbjørn&Bank, 2010). According to these scholars of “post-democratization studies”, Arab authoritarianism had proven again and again its renewal, resilience, persistence, robustness, etc… Yet, none of these perspectives seem to provide a satisfying answer to understand the current social upheavals with the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions as mains events. In this paper, I want to formulate a critique these mainstream debates, stating that these accounts are subject to an ideological blindness (i.e. seeing change always in relation to this one possible narrative: a transition to liberal democracy). Secondly, I want to outline some new critical perspectives on political change and take into account the dialectical relation between local politics and global capitalism. In doing so, I want to explain how transition cannot be understood in terms of mainstream assumptions linking economic liberalization to democratization. Neither can it be understood as just a form of crony capitalism, in the course of which a small minority of domestic corrupt elites skim off all the capital surpluses. I want to emphasize (1) how neoliberal reform reflects a profound shift towards market-oriented modalities of authoritarian government; (2) how it leads to differentiated forms of “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner&Theodore, 2002) that characterize the localization of wider political interests that involve local, regional, national and global actors who are assembled through and within new political configurations (Smith, 1998); (3) how, neoliberalism is not some political rationality immune to change itself. As such, I want to explore the transformative and contingent character of neoliberal government. The socio-economic crises and social protests of the neoliberal austerity programs in the 1980s are some of the political dynamics that have set into motion new perspectives on government, new modalities of state intervention and new ways of market-support which may have radically changed the ways of neoliberal government but not necessarily the balances of (class) power.