In the last decade, political science scholarship in Middle Eastern, especially Arab, politics has focused primarily on the phenomenon of robust authoritarianism, with particular focus on the strategies and tactics used by incumbent political leaders to consolidate power and ensure political survival. Research on civil society or non-state political activity, in this context, has been reduced to the relationship between centralized authoritarian state structures and society-level organizational actors, many of which remain closely linked if not dependent on the state. These scholarly trends are rooted in two distinctive theoretical traditions: (1) the civil society literature following Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work, which is concerned with the presence or absence of autonomous organizational activity; and (2) the dissatisfaction with the democratization literature in explaining the reversal to authoritarian rule, one in which the cooptation of actors, institutions, rules, and political processes have assumed a distinctive, neoliberal character. As recent critical scholarship shows, the fetishizing of organizational activity and state-level cooptation has clouded the more complex effects of increasingly authoritarian state practices on the involvement of ordinary citizens, in participatory, if not civic, practices outside state-directed venues. My paper seeks to address these studies and contribute to research that examines the relationship between authoritarian state practices and the development of alternative and deliberate spaces of political expression. Specifically, I am exploring the effects of informal political practices and alternative spaces of expression on the political conceptions and motivations of every-day Tunisians. I will draw on evidence from participant-observation conducted in the capital’s soccer stadiums, which serve as locales of entertainment, contestation, identity formation, political expression, and in some cases resistance. Soccer stadiums, unlike other public spaces in Tunis, have become venues for competing athletic spectacles representing intra-urban, regional, political as well as socio-economic differences, while likewise utilizing song and slogan to subversively mock governance. My paper will draw on political ethnographic research conducted in Tunisia between September 2008 and June 2009, and conceptually rely on recent critical research in political science, anthropology, urban studies, architectural theory and sociology to hypothesize about the every-day civic activities of ordinary citizens and their intended and unintended effects on political structures and processes. The goal is to present an alternative image of Tunisian political space by locating relevant political activities outside the scope of state-controlled institutional channels.