This paper explores the renegotiation of the social contract between states and their citizenry, and the subsequent contestation of traditional sources of state legitimacy in Morocco and Bahrain, respectively. Each monarchy is wrought with its own crisis of legitimacy, and for varying reasons. As such the authors of this paper seek to examine how the different political forces have respectively contributed to divergent outcomes and trajectories with respect to discourses on state legitimacy, social contracts and constitutionalism. The idea of renegotiating the social contract in the Arab World is not novel. In Toward a New Arab Social Contract, Lebanese scholar and politician Ghassan Salameh (1987) argued that the Arab world needs to draft a new social contract premised on constitutional legitimacy, and the protection of human rights and basic liberties of Arab citizenry. According to Walid Kazziha (2010), “the discourse did not penetrate and capture the imagination of the people, nor was it integrated into the political consciousness of Arab society,” due to the absence of a political constituency (p. 55). This paper argues that with the expansion of the public sphere, and newly politicized citizenry in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, we are seeing the emergence of a new political constituency. The emerging contentious spaces in the Arab public sphere —despite the state’s attempts at manipulations and interference— have become the loci for critical debate facilitating opportunities for the mobilization of popular support for the contestation of official narratives and common causes, such as the demand for structural transformation from dynastic rule to constitutional monarchies. Due to their role in constructing new identities and forging vocal oppositions that question traditional sources of state legitimacy and challenge the state, these new contentious spaces are engendering a shift whereby domestic, formal public spheres are supplanted by new contentious spaces. Inevitably, the discourse on a new social contract has lead to contestation of traditional sources of legitimacy for Arab monarchies — such as Bahrain and Morocco — and heated debate on the nature and parameters of a new social contract. Using original data from personal interviews with stakeholders (from state and opposition groups) and discourse analysis of digital media, this paper examines the appropriation and manipulation of new media by different political actors from across the political spectrum to construct multiple (and alternative) publics, question traditional sources of legitimacy, advocate for new social contracts, and reconfigure notions of citizenship and politics of contention.