The chapter focuses on the role of civil society as a determining factor in the Arab Spring uprisings and their outcomes in the seven country case studies. It begins by revisiting the literature on, and debates over, civil society and its relationship to the state and political change, distilling two approaches. In one, civil society is a separate and autonomous sphere essential to democracy; it protects individuals and groups and gives them voice vis-à-vis the power of the state and, in some interpretations, the market. The other more skeptical approach posits that civil society is either an extension of the state apparatus or a sphere that provides legitimacy to the status quo and thus helps to reproduce it; civil society may be able to compel the ruling elite to enact some reforms, but it has neither the capacity nor the will to produce large-scale systemic change. We argue that both have merit and that each is context-specific, and we distinguish civil society in advanced capitalist democracies from that in authoritarian settings. We examine the strength and capacity of civil society prior to, during, and after the uprisings in each of our cases, showing that the strongest were present in Tunisia and Morocco.