Scholarly interest in bottom up political change has revived after a chain of non-violent revolutions that have swept across Eurasia in 2000-2005. Bulldozer Revolution in Serbia (2000), Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003), Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004) and Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005) have raised the academic issues of defining, conceptualizing and adequately explaining the success and failure of bottom-up change initiatives.

The emerging scholarly consensus seemed to have been on the vital importance of the anti-regime elites and their coordination, with mass involvement conceptualized as resulting from elite coordination and splits within the regime. This might be the reason one of the scholars referred to this events as “revolutionary coups d’etat”.

However, events in Tunisia and Egypt seem to offer novel insights into how people rebel and also to refute some of the earlier convictions held by the majority of scholars. The proposed paper will identify such insights and suggest some improvements to conceptualizing non-violent political change.