For a moment in early 2011, it looked like demonstrators across the Arab World would overturn regimes and the scholarship investigating them. But political systems and political science proved more robust than initially expected. As the dust settled, nondemocracies still pervaded the region and the clubs of state repression still trumped the courage of young activists. This paper situates the uprisings of 2011 in comparative perspective. I argue that the movements which sought to emulate Tunisia's example fell short of political or social revolution and, unless they were bolstered by external military intervention (as in Libya) also failed to change regimes. Moreover, the longer the protests took to reach a conclusion, the more modest was their yield. While Egyptians accomplished a leadership change in February--ousting President Hosni Mubarak through a mass sit-in and a military coup--nine months later their Yemeni counterparts were unsuccessful at decisively breaking President Ali Abdullah Saleh's authority, much less shattering his political and security apparatus. It follows that to date the clearest answer to the question, "What is the Arab Spring a case of?" would be: a set of crises, brought about by popular unrest, in which nondemocratic regimes violently reasserted their hold on power.