Until 2011, Islamist groups were marginalised and far from posing a serious challenge to the regimes in the Arab countries. And although the revolutions were not the result of Islamist mobilisation, the Islamists became the political beneficiaries of change. In his lecture, Franceso Cavatorta (Université Laval in Québec) attempts to explain this paradox of the 'revolutionary' effect and to capture the transformations that took place after the uprisings.
Francesco Cavatorta's research project "From over-estimation to under-estimation: the trajectory of political Islam in five MENA countries" was funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation as part of the special programme Islam.