Over the last years, politics in the Middle East and North Africa have been shaped by impressive reversals of fortune. Month after month, journalists and analysts have all at some point depicted liberals, Islamists, soldiers, women, jihadis, and youth as the great winners of the "Arab spring", before being later considered as likely losers. The root causes of the Muslim Brotherhood’s inability, since the fall of Muhammad Mursi in Egypt, during the second “round” of the Arab Spring, to cash in on the political capital originally accumulated thanks to their leading role in the opposition to authoritarian regimes and subsequently during post-revolutionary elections, still calls for substantial research. In parallel, the emergence of the so-called Islamic State has been a game changer, introducing new dynamics that need to be made explicit and analysed by academics.
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