In 1953 French ethnographer Jacques Berque wrote a famous article criticizing the vagueness with which the world “tribe” was used in discussing North Africa—-a criticism still true today to a great extent. Tunisia’s first president Habib Bourguiba viewed tribalism as a cause of underdevelopment and took explicit measures to eradicate it. In the late 1960s, Tunisian nationalist Laroussi Methoui suggested that Tunisia had once been “many tribes” but had become “a single tribe” at independence. By the 1980s (and even more by the early 2000s) Tunisia had become predominantly urban and many thought that tribalism had disappeared or been reduced to a rural remnant. Then came the Tunisian Revolution of 2010-2011. It began in the Interior, where tribal sentiments have been historically strong. There had been protests in other areas of the country before the unfortunate Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in Sidi Bouzid, but they had lacked the Interior’s effective network of tribal ties to facilitate the spread of a protest movement. Further South, where the uprising spread next, tribal sentiments were the main factor in a long-simmering labor dispute in the mines of the Gafsa region which contributed strongly to the uprising. Some suggest that tribalism in Tunisia never went away but was simply latent and has now re-emerged—-not only in the Interior, South and Northwest, but also among the tribal diaspora in Tunis and other large cities. During the early days of the 2010-2011 Revolution, when the national forces of order disappeared from the scene and Tunisia fell temporarily into chaos, tribal ties became important for grassroots social organization to maintain security. During and since the election of October 2011 Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki has offered a good example of how to use tribalism to mobilize support. Marzouki emphasizes his Mrazig tribal origins in the Pre-Saharan area around Douz—-even though he was born in the Cap Bon and has lived almost all his life in Sousse, Tunis and abroad, not in the South. This paper analyzes the meanings of tribe and tribalism in contemporary Tunisia, addressing especially the relationship between tribalism and regionalism and the extent to which tribal ties have come to play a role in political and social mobilization.