The past few years have been a period of unprecedented political upheaval for the Maghreb. While each country had, of course, experienced dramatic moments before – Ben Ali's ousting of Bourguiba, Algeria's Black October riots, the Casablanca bombings and Mauritania's 2005 and 2008 coups d’état to name but some – nothing of the breadth, depth or duration of the Arab Spring, a protest that began in a provincial city in one of North Africa's quieter corners and quickly engulfed the entire region. Presidents of decades’ standing – latter-day imperators – were swept from office on waves of public discontent while their counterparts elsewhere nervously and hurriedly tried to calm the mob.

In several places, these protests are still being played out: in the law courts of Egypt; on the bloody battlefields of Libya; and in the leaking tubs carrying migrants to Europe. And, even where the winds of change seem to have died down, the political and social landscape is different from before, sometimes markedly so. Algeria has dispensed with its nineteen-year-long state of emergency. King Mohammed VI is now obliged – constitutionally, at least – to consult his prime minister more frequently and widely. Mauritania has a new youth movement. Tunisia has become a democracy.

And herein lies one of the defining paradoxes of the Arab Spring; its ubiquity and singularity. Nearly all of the region's countries have been directly affected, have experienced some domestic manifestation of this transnational phenomenon. Anti-government rallies were staged everywhere throughout early 2011. Umbrella bodies mushroomed better to co-ordinate, direct and motivate protestors. Public squares were occupied, government buildings targeted, symbols of the regime attacked, yet, despite making similar demands in largely the same ways over much the same period, the outcomes of these protests varied hugely. These transnational forces were given local faces. Domestic factors and concerns helped generate unique results.

Regional specialists were repeatedly confounded – initially at least – by this interplay of generalities and specificities. They compounded their collective failure to anticipate the start of the Arab Spring first by being too conservative and then too ambitious. They misdiagnosed what would become of Ben Ali's regime and the speed of its collapse. They then overcompensated and predicted sweeping changes everywhere all at once: Algeria was to be next, Bouteflika's days were definitely numbered.