While few scholars question the importance of the public sphere to democracy and democratization, there is continued debate over how to best conceptualize it, where to locate it and who inhabits it. Much of the discourse on youth in general and youth in the MENA region in particular treat the public presence of young men, often the result of unemployment and precariousness, as a threat. In this paper I investigate the potentially productive ways that youth from marginalized regions negotiate their dispossession, and I treat their activities in cafés as important steps in developing a public sphere in postrevolutionary Tunisia. The study is the result of fourteen months of fieldwork in Tunisia. I have focused on the everyday practices of youth in the marginalized interior and southern regions of Tunisia. This has entailed in-depth interviews, both formal and informal, with a variety of actors as well as participant observation. This paper argues that cafés form important parts of an emerging public sphere in Tunisia. Coffeehouses can be conceived of both as marginal spaces where young men and their coffee drinking habits are expressions of their exclusion from employment and respectability as well as important part of the public sphere where the young meet, discuss issues of both public and private importance, develop networks and a common discourse. I argue that these should be understood as separate discursive spaces where marginalized groups can develop, express and communicate alternative, even oppositional, ideas and interests. The paper explores new kinds of spaces, what I term youth activist cafés, that are opening up in across interior Tunisia. These are spaces started by and for young activists, with both cultural and political dimensions. Above all they are spaces in which the waiting of the young is transformed into purposeful and meaningful activities. I argue that the youth come to perform a certain kind of sociability, a way of talking, a way of dressing, of ‘doing’ politics and culture in these spaces which is a rejection of the dominant discourses and formal politics even as it produces possibilities for certain forms of engagement with, and renegotiation of, the political. It is this tension between youth in cafés as expressions of passivity and marginality on the one hand and heightened activism of a growing public sphere on the other, and its implications for Tunisia’s fragile democratization, that will be explored and develop in this paper.