To many of us, the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa and regime overthrows in Tunisia and Egypt seemed to come out of nowhere. For people like you, who have been watching the region closely, were they not as sudden and surprising as they were to some of the rest of us?

They weren’t that surprising and they certainly didn’t come out of nowhere. For most people who follow the region closely, the previous decade of the 2000s was full of popular mobilisation and political protest. What made 2010 and 2011 a surprise was that by the end of the 2000s it seemed to most of us that the authoritarian regimes had won, that they had managed to defeat most of the protest movements. They seemed to be comfortably in control. The surprise was not that people rose up, but that they were able to win in a couple of countries.

What do you think will happen now?

The popular mobilisation and general shift towards popular protest is going to continue. I don’t think there is any going back to the way Arab politics was before. But you’re not going to see one single outcome across the entire region. There will be change in some countries and regimes surviving in other countries. It’s going to be very interesting, because one of the things about Arab politics over the years is that everything has tended to look the same. Either the entire region was in turmoil or everything was very tightly controlled. In the next few years you’re going to see a lot of variety. Some countries in turmoil, some very stable, some democratic, some still rigidly authoritarian. That’s going to create a very interesting dynamic in regional politics.

What do you think of the term “Arab Spring”? I’ve read articles saying it’s more of an “Arab awakening” in that it’s going to take a long time. There’s been too much emphasis on regime toppling when it’s really about broader societal changes.

I was saving this line for my book, but I guess I’ll use it now. The term “Arab Spring” is about as useful as you’d expect from something that suggests spring begins in December. It’s pretty useless. I prefer to call it the Arab upheaval or the Arab uprising. The reason for that is that it is genuinely Arab. It’s not something that’s happening country by country. It’s happening across the entire region simultaneously, with everybody really intensely conscious of the regional nature of it. Al Jazeera and social media – Facebook, Twitter – have really helped unify political space in a fundamental way, and that means that you’re not seeing a series of parallel political crises. There’s a very strong sense that these are organically and intimately linked to each other. People in Yemen are paying attention to Tunisia, and people in Jordan are paying attention to Morocco. This is something which has been developing over the last decade and a half, but you’re really seeing it powerfully right now.

The reason I like the term “uprising” is that it captures the extent to which this is a popular mobilisation against the authoritarian status quo. The term that many of the activists prefer is “revolution”. I don’t like that because I haven’t seen any revolutions yet. The term I’ve seen more and more frequently in the Arab media is intifada – with the idea that these are Arab intifadas similar to the Palestinian intifadas of the past [against Israel].

This unification of political space is also something you’ve focused on in your own research in the past.

The role of Al Jazeera and new social media in transforming the nature of Arab political activity is something that I wrote about five years ago in my book Voices of the New Arab Public. That book shows that this is something that has been developing for over a decade and is fundamentally changing the nature of politics. Authoritarian regimes have lost the ability to control the flow of information and the way people communicate with each other, and that has major implications across almost all parts of politics.

In China, I keep hearing how cellphones and social media are going to transform the authoritarian regime. But I’ve become so used to the fact that the government always wins that I despair that anything like that is ever going to make enough of a difference. It’s really exciting that in the Middle East, it has.

It’s an important point. People often say that American political scientists didn’t predict the [Arab] revolutions. The fact is that the activists themselves didn’t predict it either. As late as December 2010, in Egypt especially, they didn’t expect to win. They were very demoralised and confused about what the next steps should be. At the beginning you mentioned surprise – there’s surprise and then there’s surprise. Were we all taken by surprise that this happened the way that it did in December 2010? Sure. Nobody predicted that. Who could have predicted Tunisia? But it was more about the timing than the fact. What was not surprising was that there was this growing and powerful popular mobilisation – this new generation of activists and a widespread discontent with authoritarian rule. We were all studying that, and we did see it coming.