This paper examines the impact of citizen participation in the Tunisian 2012-2014 constitutional reform process on public support for the constitution and its democratic institutions. Public support for the constitution is a major challenge for transitional states in the Middle East and North Africa where a long history of authoritarianism and repression has created a state-society relationship based on mistrust and constant abuses of individual and social rights and liberties by the state. Struggling to create a constituency of citizens who supports and defends the new political institutions and the constitution, many transitional states including Tunisia find the solution in public participation in the constitution-making process. Despite this universal promotion of participatory constitutions, the empirical evidence linking citizen participation to constitutional legitimacy is very limited (Wing 2008). Using an original public opinion survey conducted in Tunisia four months after the constitution promulgation in 2014, this paper evaluates whether participation in constitution-making activities increases public support for the constitution and its democratic institutions. The results show that participants are more likely to support the constitution and its institutions than non-participants. These findings speak directly to the democratic theory’s participatory and deliberative models and propose that a democratic and legitimate constitutional design should encompass both public participation at the front and back-end of constitution-making and public deliberation at the moment of writing the constitution.

In the early 1990s, the Tunisian regime jailed several thousand members of the Islamist movement Ennahda, sentencing them to long prison terms in which they faced routine brutality and isolation. The movement was thought to be at an end. Yet the paradox of Tunisian Islamism is that not only did Ennahda emerge from two decades of repression as the strongest political force in the country, but also that the movement had gone through a long, private process of ideological revision that prefigured its accommodationist stance in the post-2011 transition. I ask what was the effect of the repression of prison on the movement’s development? This paper excavates the experience of Ennahda prisoners in Ben Ali’s jails to explain practices of coercion, the nature of discussions over the movement’s actions in the clash with the regime, and the gradual emergence of acts of resistance to the prison authorities and the reclaiming of individual dignity despite the weight of repression. This draws on a year of ethnographic fieldwork among Ennahda members in Tunisia as part of a broader project about the movement’s evolution. Scholars have shown how integration in the political process can in some situations ‘moderate’ Islamist movements to adopt a more tolerant ideology, through the boundary-shifting effect of political action (Schwedler 2006). Conversely, others argue that repression too can sometimes ‘force’ Islamist parties to moderate their policies (Hamid 2014). I argue in this paper that there is evidence in the case of Ennahda of lasting ideological and strategic revision that occurred during a period of intense repression. However, there is also evidence here of profound and as yet unresolved disagreements between ordinary members and the movement’s leadership, particularly those who escaped into exile abroad who sought to defend their record. In Tunisia’s democratic transition since 2011 the Islamist movement Ennahda has adopted a cautious approach, compromising its religious ambitions and reaching agreements with political rivals in the name of consensus. Some have suggested Ennahda has acted out of fear of repeating the mistakes of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. I argue in this paper, however, that the legacy of the prison-era evaluations inside Tunisia best explains the strategies Ennahda has adopted since the uprising of 2011, as well as explaining the movement’s resilience during two decades of repression.

This paper seeks to explore the concept of "tribalism" through a comparative analysis of popular conceptions of tribal identity and citizenship in Sidi Bouzid and Metlaoui, two towns in Tunisia's long-neglected interior region that have populations constituted from descendants of the same nomadic pastoral tribe. "Tribalism" is among the most contested, problematic concepts in the study of the contemporary Arab World. On the one hand Ibn Khaldun's seminal writings on tribal history, pastoral nomadism and 'asabiyya have formed the basis for a deep tradition of Arab intellectual engagement with the concept. On the other hand, the presence of a problematic colonial discourse that seeks to justify the political subjugation of communities by arguing that they are tribal and anti-modern has caused many contemporary scholars to shun "tribalism" as an analytical concept. This paper argues by contrast, and on the basis of 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tunisia, that tribalism can frequently manifest as a discourse of empowerment and political agency in the face of an authoritarian, aggressively modernizing state. In Metlaoui, a phosphate mining town, political grievances are centered around youth unemployment and perceived abuses by the state-owned phosphate company. Accordingly, people use their tribal identities and alleged 100 year-old promises of employment in the phosphate sector to assert their right to work. In Sidi Bouzid, an agricultural community, residents mythologized the honor and group solidarity that prevailed during the nomadic era as a language of protest against the Ben Ali regime's excesses during the 2011 revolution. In light of this comparison, this paper argues that the symbols of tribalism ought to be taken more seriously by contemporary scholars, given its demonstrative importance in inspiring real political change.

This study examines the effects of a homeland security dilemma on democratization and post-authoritarian justice efforts in Tunisia. The example of Tunisia is often held up as the emblematic case of a success story of the Arab Spring. Yet, Tunisia's transition has been far from the straightforward metamorphosis from authoritarianism to democracy. Increasing extremism and terrorist threats, insecure borders with Libya and a sluggish economy have slowed the initial democratic consolidation phase, reinforcing the legitimacy of the Tunisian state to employ extraordinary measures in the name of security. This process, also referred to as securitization, consists of state authorities transforming subjects into matters of security. The increasing securitization in Tunisia’s democratic transition process, calls for a close examination of the role of different social actors to maintain peace and stability and deal with past human rights violations. Using a framework based on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field and habitus, it maps attempts to create a new Tunisian civil society and exposes points where bottom-up initiatives and state authority conflict. The authors not only analyze offline interactions and public debates, but also expand the notion of field to emerging online spaces of deliberation. The conceptual underpinnings of habitus are discussed against the backdrop of traditional state authorities and other social actors, such as youth movements, whose role has surfaced and gained more importance over the past few years. In fact, the protest movement that blossomed during the Jasmine Revolution mobilized Tunisian youth into a vector for change. Unfortunately, like in the Egyptian case, the protest movement has been immobilized by entrenched interests, leaving Tunisia's transition in the hands of an established elite.This paper employs semi-structured interviews conducted in Tunis, archival sources, as well as media and scholarly accounts to examine the fissures that exist in Tunisia today and that pit mobilized human rights activists against the Tunisian transitional government. The authors argue that while the state has expanded repressive practices justified due to the rise of global terrorism, advocacy networks and civil society have developed daily forms of resistance to face these challenges during the democratization process. Human rights activists have also created alternative spaces of accountability and collective memory that parallel stalled government efforts of transitional justice.