The recent wave of protests in the Middle East have raised questions about the prospects for meaningful political reform throughout the region. In Jordan, thousands of protesters have taken to the street over the past few years, though their demands often vary and coordination between opposition groups has been irregular. The protests in Jordan during January and February 2011 have presented a more united front, calling not for regime change but for substantive reforms that would include a revised elections law and a more representative parliament. King Abdullah has responded cautiously, seeking to "get ahead" of the protests by dismissing the cabinet and tasking the new prime minister with drafting reforms in the next months. But what do these changes mean? One might be eager to see these moves as part of a wave of reform sweeping the region, in which popular mobilizations and organized social movements pressure regimes to undertake reforms they would otherwise shun. In Jordan, however, the regime's response feels more like business as usual: dismissing cabinets in response to economic crises or other political dissent has become almost sport, and it changes little. At the same time, the context of potential reforms elsewhere in the region do make this historical moment different; the question is how and why. This paper seeks to examine these protests in Jordan from a perspective that moves beyond social movement theory. That is, rather than focusing on how mobilizations emerge, what resources groups have, and whether they are successful at pressuring the Hashemite kingdom for substantive political reforms, this paper will examine protests and governance as part of a pattern of performative politics that has emerged in Jordan since King Abdullah took the throne in 1999. I am currently writing a book on protests in Jordan from 1946 to the present, so I seek to bring an historical and richly contextual perspective that allows for a nuanced understanding of the recent protests by examining patterns of political dissent and repression and how they have (or have not) shifted in recent years. I draw on several years of archival and original field research, including interviews with government officials, all major (and many minor) opposition groups, security agencies (including the army and the Public Security Directorate), and human rights actors.