Yemen’s Youth Revolution of 2011 was the most peaceful and sustained of the mass anti-government protests that took place in the Arab region and was applauded worldwide. But the outcome would not be the radical transformation the Yemeni protestors had sought, nor even durable progressive change. Despite its dire poverty and lagging social equality and development, the country was unique in the Arabian Peninsula for its adoption in 1990 of constitutional democracy and unprecedented social and political liberalization. The forces of the global political economy and Yemen’s structural crisis were critical in this regard, as was the fallout of the rapid disintegration of the ‘populist social contract’ in the Arab world during the 1980s. Bayat’s account of neoliberalism as the overdetermining factor of Yemen’s movement that ended in reformism instead of radical change is discussed in relation to the features of Yemen’s protest movement and the activists’ capacity to confront state power. Also addressed are certain regimes of knowledge and ideology in academic and political circles outside the region that shaped experts’ discourses of Middle Eastern/West Asian and orientalist sociology, politics, history, and religion and, specifically, the idea of radical change and democracy in the Arab world.