The conference paper will present initial findings of my dissertation research on the first interim governments that emerged during the breakdowns of the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in 2011. The paper focuses on the case of Tunisia. In this dissertation, I seek to explain how and why the events in 2011-12 between the collapse of the dictatorship and the first democratic elections, governed by a provisional administration, unfolded differently in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. I will also explore the implications of these differences for later stages of each country’s transition from authoritarian rule. I hypothesize that the extent to which each provisional administration attempted to include all political forces in its decision-making processes, and the extent to which each one helped all stakeholders feel included in the constitution-writing process that followed, explain the major similarities and differences among the cases. I further hypothesize that the key influences that shaped each provisional administration’s inclusiveness were the structure of opposition forces and the nature of their state institutions under authoritarian rule. I aim to describe each first provisional administration in detail and to trace the causal linkages between each one’s attempts at inclusion and the course of events during the period in which it governed. I will also attempt to describe some of the direct effects of those decisions and events on each country’s second phase of transition, in order to formulate some hypotheses about the effects of first provisional administrations for future testing. The conference paper will use research published in the United States and Europe and interviews with researchers and regional experts based in Washington, D.C. It will also draw from interviews conducted in Tunisia in summer 2013 and fall 2014. The information from these sources helps begin to describe the process of the Tunisian provisional government’s formation, its characteristics, and its tasks, and the impact of these features on the post-election period that followed its tenure.

This paper presents a critique of mainstream transitional justice theory, which is built on the underlying assumption that transitions entail a shift from non-liberal to liberal democratic regimes. The complex ways in which criminal prosecutions of former regime members have been used in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen provide new insight that has an important bearing on the classical understanding of transitional justice. This paper builds on Thomas Obel-Hansen’s argument that liberal regimes use transitional justice to consolidate democracy and to strengthen the rule of law, while non-liberal regimes use them to “facilitate restrictions on freedoms and consolidate non-democratic and repressive rule.” (Obel-Hansen 2011) This is in contrast to Ruti Teitel’s argument that criminal justice is a “ritual of liberalizing states.” (Teitel, 2000). This paper offers a critique of transitional justice literature that is overwhelmingly based on the understanding that transitional justice occurs in liberalizing contexts. The critique is largely based on findings from field research on the prosecution of political leaders in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen between 2012 and 2014, and on scholarly texts. This paper draws three interrelated conclusions. First, the experiences of the Arab Spring countries run counter to the mainstream transitional justice theory propagated by Teitel and others. They instead demonstrate that transitional justice mechanisms – and in particular criminal prosecutions – have been used and abused to solidify non-liberal transitions in their varied forms. Second, these four countries are examples of the need to further examine whose interests transitional justice serves and what these interests are, as Obel-Hansen suggests. Such an analysis is important for the deconstruction of the use and abuse of transitional justice in certain political contexts. Third, most criminal prosecutions in the Arab Spring countries have dealt almost exclusively with ‘crimes of the transition’ as opposed to crimes during the decades of repressive rule prior to the political transitions that took place. These practices have profound implications for the study of transitional justice because they weaken long-standing scholarly assumptions of the liberalizing directions of transitional justice.

International election monitoring has spread dramatically since the 1990s, spawning an industry and becoming a near right-of-passage for entry into the global community. It has also become the focus of scholarly debate that considers the impact of monitoring on political protest, incumbent-opposition relations, and democratization. Despite these studies, little is known about whether monitoring evaluations send signals at home. Do the conclusions of monitors affect the domestic legitimacy of elections? This paper uses a survey experiment conducted in Jordan and Tunisia to answer that question. Respondents are randomly placed into three conditions—one group given no international evaluation, another a positive evaluation, and the third a negative evaluation—and asked the extent to which the elections represented the will of the people. The results are intriguing. Statements from monitors are associated with lower evaluations of the elections, suggesting that the mere presence of evaluation makes citizens more critical of the electoral process. Moreover, evaluations have a greater influence on those with less political awareness than other citizens. Taken together, we find that election monitors matter, but in surprising ways.

The Tunisian secret police serves as one of the linkages or legacies between state-building as an historical process and governance as a contemporary practice. The secret police excelled in spying on citizens, infiltrating civil society groups, trolling emails and social media sites for information, and harassing, intimidating and torturing suspected opponents of Ben Ali’s regime. Do the secret police archives pose a challenge for transitional democracy in Tunisia? By neglecting to critically engage the past, the rhetoric of “how to move forward” can sometimes turn into a system where the crimes of the past are simply repacked but allowed to slowly creep back into the repertoire of the powerful. More than the issue of disbanding the secret police, however, many Tunisian key actors, from public officials to NGOs to voters, want to bring the security system and the archives under civilian control as a mechanism of preserving collective memory and permitting informed public debate about the repressive past. The public dimension of personal, group and collective identities rests on the codification, institutionalization and symbolization of events that strongly mark individuals and communities. Social memories, to be effective, must be celebrated and commemorated. A crucial role is partaken by memory mediators, by memory entrepreneurs, that, in a continuous way, try to reiterate certainties and roots, to fixate and crystalize traditions, against the challenging effect of the improbable and the unforeseeable. By their own work, the identity mediators try to impede the thinking of alternatives, by closing the celebratory field. But, alongside official memories and identities, strive performative identities, activated and consolidated in the quotidian, in many practices of de-objectification and resistance. By neglecting to critically engage the past, the rhetoric of “how to move forward” can sometimes turn into a system where the crimes of the past are simply repacked but allowed to slowly creep back into the repertoire of the powerful. My paper closes the gap on the research on what constitutes, consolidates, and even eclipses public authority in the Tunisian case as it makes the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy.