A widespread sense of ‘suspension’ and ‘impasse’ seem to overwhelm the activists in the Middle East today—a sense that whatever they do to alter the political status-quo does not yield. Why is that? In this talk, I take this quandary as a starting point to understand the current state of affair in the region marked by a mix of political stagnation mixed and profound change that is shaped by the spectacular revolutions of the 2010s and the subsequent counter-revolutionary counter-movements.