"The 2011 uprisings that swept across North Africa and the Middle East inspired a wave of global mass protests that continues to structure world politics. The uprisings also spawned a revival of scholarship on revolutions. Historians, social scientists, and journalists analyzed not only the contemporary uprisings, but revisited the ‘classic’ revolutions armed with new conceptual frames. This seminar delves into this rich literature, tracing how the study of revolution changes in lockstep with its transformation as a form of political change. We will organize our inquiry by considering three influential approaches in the sociohistorical study of revolution. Structural perspectives stress the slow-moving, deep-rooted forces that generate regime change. Experiential accounts reconstruct how participants make meaning out of overwhelming events. Configurational arguments center neither structure nor agency, but explain revolution as the outcome of altered relations between state agents and myriad social groups and communities. These three ‘keys’ of revolution may be seen as competing answers to an unspoken but overarching philosophical question that has dominated revolution studies since 1789: are revolutions radical ruptures in political time and space, new beginnings that call for new vocabularies and mental models? Or are they outgrowths of existing political interactions, the continuation of politics by other means?"