The Arab countries and, to a lesser extent, Central Asian states have been faced with a challenge of a growing social protest. In the Middle East it has revolutionary swept through several countries, causing political changes, and when combined with external intervention, even the degradation of a statehood. The protest movement in Central Asia has not gone beyond local clashes. In both regions, there were similar reasons that provoked the growth of discontent: corruption, weak institutions, poor governance, economic problems, enclave modernization, but the forms of protest, methods of mobilization and its scale were fundamentally different. The article attempts to consider the features of modem revolutions and social protest, the possibility of evolutionary changes and the reasons for the stability of regimes using the Middle East and Central Asia as case studies.