A series of popular protests broke out across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) a decade ago. The uprisings were quickly hailed a game changer for MENA politics and dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’, but the vision of authoritarian regimes collapsing in rapid succession proved a mirage. If the uprisings’ effect on intrastate politics has been overestimated, their impact on the region's interstate politics is still considered deeply transformative. Raymond Hinnebusch asserted that the uprisings have ‘wrought major change in the … regional order’. Louise Fawcett observed that ‘the entire fabric of the regional system has been rocked by the consequences of the popular uprisings’, throwing MENA's fragile order into sharp relief. Marc Lynch argued that regional politics were reshaped to the point that ‘the new order is fundamentally one of disorder.’

Observers tend to agree on the downhill direction of change, but opinions diverge over its extent: are we witnessing major change within regional order, or a change of the order itself? A consortium of fourteen research institutes from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa collaborated between 2016 and 2019 under the framework of the MENARA project to answer this question. They concluded that shifts in the region's geopolitical dynamics amount to changes within order, and suggested that researchers tend to overestimate order change because they focus on regional and global levels of analysis while ‘ignoring important changes at the intersection between domestic and regional politics’.

MENARA's project is unprecedented for its comprehensive approach, but I find this explanation overstates the case and misses the point. Disagreement over the extent of order change is better explained, in the first place, by the cross-wired nature of the conversation. Assessments vary primarily because scholars diverge in conceiving the object of inquiry: ‘international order’. Fundamental as the concept of ‘order’ is to social inquiry, it is inher-ently diffuse, and scholars’ tendency to employ it intuitively and offhandedly goes a long way to explain their differences over order change. My argument goes a step further: studies of MENA order tend to misestimate change in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings because they systematically disregard an important actor in regional order-making and a key driver of order change: Israel.