The integration of Ennahdha (Tunisia) and the Justice and Development Party (Morocco) in the established political game has given rise to various internal tensions (McCarthy 2018, Desrues 2015; 2018). In the case of Ennahdha, the cause of these conflicts was political (concerning the alliance with Nidaa Tunes in 2014 and Qalb Tunes in 2019), but also of ideological nature (concerning its “specialization” in view of becoming a civil party). These strategies generated a loss among Ennahdha’s electors and did not reach an agreement among the activists. Indeed, some activists left the party and ran for office, competing therefore with Ennahdha’s candidates. This paper will analyze the process of fragmentation and the currents existing within Ennahdha in a comparative perspective with the Moroccan PJD, in order to emphasize on the circulation of different models (models of political integration and organization, model of political strategy, models of internal management). In fact, as well as in Ennnahdha’s case, in Morocco, the strategy of integration into the political field was not followed by all the activists. Some of the latter left the original movement (The Islamic youth) in the 1980s to create their own groups, thus pluralizing the Islamic offer in Morocco (Desrues 2016, p 13). In addition, the sources of tension within the PJD are political: cohabitation with the monarchy (Desrues, 2018, p 2), the cooperation with certain parties (Desrues 2015, p 1-2; Desrues 2018, p 3), but also related to the internal management (control of the Movement for Unicity and Reform (Desrues 2015, p 12-13) and rivalry around leadership (Desrues 2015, p 12; 18). Firstly, the paper analyzes the Islamists movements’ process of internal fragmentation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with Ennahdha and the PJD between 2014 and 2020, it identifies several sources of internal tension related to ideology, political strategies, decision-making and the "specialization". It answers the questions: What are the internal currents inside Ennahdha and the PJD? Who are their leaders? Is it possible to envisage a third term for the current Ennahdha leader? What do we learn from the debate concerning Abdelilah Benkirane's third term? Secondly, we argue that the gradual opening of political systems in their respective countries pushed Islamists to reconsider their political discourse and strategies. We demonstrate that confronted with political competitors with whom they share some objectives and ideological references, Ennahdha and the PJD reform their discourse and renegotiate their political positions.

The opening of the public space after Ben Ali has made it possible to gain visibility a plurality of lifestyles and practices. With the Tunisian revolution of 2011, public and political space is indeed opening up to the diversity of cultural orientations and models of norms and practices. The (new) protagonists try to orient, to define the dominant social norms post Ben Ali. Public space becomes a ‘battlefield’ in which conflicts and confrontations highlight competing models of society – Islamic and secular – in the manifestation of a plural Islam and a plurality of secularisms. Absent from the revolutionary snapshot, Islam made its entry in the public space with the Momentbild of the return of Rached Ghannouchi in January 2011, the leader of the Ennahdha party. Since, the religious problem will gradually occupy the Tunisian public and political scene to the detriment of the social problems linked to regional, economic and social inequalities, corruption, police repression and the deficit of individual and collective freedoms which had occupied the public attention during the revolutionary snapshot. From the controversies around art, feminism and practices issued from the Islamic economy, I propose to analyze the Islamic and secular divide in Tunisia after 2011.

This paper aims at investigating the social cleavages structuring the secular camp in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. While the Islamist/Secular cleavage is a common characteristic of these four political party systems, the internal structuring of the Secular camp differs from one country to another. For instance, the regional/national cleavage is virtually non-existent in the Egyptian and Tunisian political fields, but fundamental in Algeria and important in Morocco, due to the politicization of the Amazigh identity in both countries. The socialist/liberal cleavage is highly structuring in Tunisia and Morocco, less in Algeria, and almost non-relevant in Egypt, where one can find both socialist and liberal parties in different competing electoral coalitions. Due to recent regime changes and the disbanding of their once hegemonic political parties, Tunisia an Egypt witness the existence of a cleavage opposing the old regime and the revolution, but this cleavage proved itself more determining in Egypt than in Tunisia, at least in 2011. Exploring the social forces acting within the secular camp of each of the four countries under study, this paper try to identify the factors explaining these differences: the politicization of the regional, linguistic or religious identities, the political role of the army and its relation with other dominant social forces, and the integration of the subaltern classes (workers and peasants) by the post-independence regimes.

This presentation analyses projects carried out in the name of police reform and democratization in post-revolution Tunisia. The period following the departure of Ben Ali saw a series of readjustments within the security forces, notably following an opening to new sources of influence, emanating from security professionals organized in the form of unions or associations, or international players. Programs labelled “Good Governance of the Security Sector” or “Security Sector Reform” (SSR) supported by multilateral security organizations, mostly the EU and UNDP, increased exponentially over the 2012-2015 period. The UNDP for instance launched a community policing program in 2014, aiming to enhance citizens role in local security and police population cooperation. Another aim of the project pushed by the UNDP, is the promotion of accountability of the security forces through the adoption of a code of conduct and the creation of a deontological commission. Unsurprisingly, this second part of the project is the most problematic. We analyze the community policing project carried out by the UNDP and the Ministry of the Interior, as well as the security unions. Based on semi-directive interviews with police agents, UNPD local and international employees and collaborators, the purpose of the presentation is to show that, without profoundly modifying the structures and standards governing the police, the enhancement of relations between police and citizen carried out in the name of the reform excludes the subaltern. Newly formed police unions further reduce the specter of political change by doing lobbying work to exclude police control and accountability from SSR. Drawing on policy process studies and critical security studies, we will show how police unions emerged as major stakeholders in Tunisian SSR (Kartas, 2015). They manage, by taking over the discourses of the Security Sector Reform, to legitimize and strengthen their position as representatives of the police forces. The aim of the presentation is to analyze a process of change at work without presuming its outcome, by reinscribing it in its political temporality and the lines of tension around the definition of the terms of change within the police.

Since 2011 and the democratisation processes, the diversification of mobilisations has called into question the logic of access to regional and local resources, and calls for a fairer redistribution model for the inhabitants of these territories. This contributes to the emergence of a debate on the redefinition of agricultural development and resource management models. It is in this context that the mobilizations in connection with the negotiations around the FTAA (Comprehensive and Deepened Free Trade Agreement), the EU-Tunisia partnership concerning the agricultural sector, which emerged in Tunisia in 2019, have served as a reminder of the strategic nature and political dimension of a sector under pressure. In this paper, we will analyze these mobilizations as a tool for observing the evolution of power relations and competition between different types of actors in the definition of free trade policies for the agricultural sector, and allows to analyse the agricultural sector as a political resource for a diversity of actors. Thus, conflicts related to taxation, the agricultural map, and the issue of food and national sovereignty highlight the role of agricultural markets as a mode of economic and social regulation. Based on interviews with different types of mobilized actors, -associations, unions, institutional actors, farmers-, this paper highlights the role of different actors in building a movement that brings together different strong groups that go well beyond the agricultural sector base and rather converge to groups usually engaged in criticizing the liberal model and the organization of international free trade. A diversity of actors intervene and contribute to imposing the issue of FTAA as a political issue at the time of elections: politicization of the debate by the classic trade union organizations (UTAP, UGTT); fiscal issues and the representativeness of farmers' interests by associative groups; links between crises in intensive sectors and political crises by agro-industrial actors involved in the valorization of local agricultural resources (tomatoes, peppers, cereals). Beyond strictly partisan issues, this question then appears to be closely linked to major issues as state power, and raises the question of "food sovereignty". This refers in particular to the difficulty for public authorities to regulate prices for both producers and consumers and to the political dimension of the confrontation of economic models.

In April of 2019, protest movements in Sudan and Algeria prompted the departure of Presidents al-Bashir and Bouteflika—centerpiece moments of a “second wave” of 21st-century contentious politics in the region since 2018. This trend undermines “Arab Winter” narratives that have focused on the robustness of counterrevolutions and authoritarian adaptability in Northern Africa post-2013. In contrast to 2011-2013, these recent uprisings are defined by movements that hold a deep skepticism of transitional military authority, robust linkages among networks of contentious actors, and an unprecedented level of “stamina” that has seen mobilizational strength persist for nearly a year after the departures of both Presidents. Why have these oppositional movements resisted the cooptation of the Egyptian case or the conflict of the Libyan case? Why did two heads of state that navigated the 2011 uprisings and its aftermath through a combination of feigned reform, rents, and institutional arrangements lose the loyalty of the security apparatus so quickly less than a decade later? This paper addresses these questions by beginning with how these cases complicate existing frameworks of authoritarian resilience in the region, and then draws on concepts from contentious politics to explain outcome convergence in Algeria and Sudan. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and primary source documents in Arabic, French, and English, I use process tracing to illustrate how both cases confirm elements of Eva Bellin’s (2004; 2012) thesis while complicating the nexus between professionalization and military defection. In Algeria, Bouteflika’s ouster aligns with existing paradigms of professionalized militaries jettisoning regime loyalty in the face of mass protests. In contrast, the fact that the fractured and patrimonial Sudanese security forces acted, at least briefly, in coordination to side with protestors over al-Bashir confounds resilience paradigms and existing analyses of civil-military relations in Sudan. My causal process observations then turn to an analysis of contentious politics to reveal how similar outcomes in both cases reflect a mobilizational mechanism I call “iterative resilience.” I use this concept to describe how the contentious repertoires and networks of 2011-2013 in both countries, only partially subdued with more cooptation and less repression than regional counterparts, reemerged with enhanced capacities in 2018 due to shifts in political opportunity structures. Situated at the border between civil-military relations and collective action studies, this work provides a preliminary framework to assess the role of shifting social pacts and resource distribution and their impact on contentious politics in Northern Africa post-2013.