In that spirit, my colleague Peter Rudegeair and I have done a back-of-the-envelope calculation to identify countries with a high latent potential for uprisings. We considered four factors – political freedom (on the grounds that democracies don’t usually require popular rebellions to achieve regime change), corruption, vulnerability to food price shocks and Internet penetration. We used publicly available measures of the four factors and came up with a list of 25 most vulnerable countries. Libya, Algeria and Egypt made it into the top 10. Perhaps more surprisingly, so did Russia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Venezuela.