Tunisian 'Exceptionalism'? Situating the 2011 Revolution and its Aftermath in the Context of North African Regional Reform
Panel 128, sponsored byAmerican Institute for Maghrib Studies, 2012 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 19 at 2:30 pm
Panel Description
More than a year after overthrowing its authoritarian regime, Tunisia continues to soldier on in rebuilding its political system and transforming public life inside the country. Tunisia successfully held elections in October 2011 for a Constituent Assembly, a vote which led to the establishment of a coalition government between the Islamist An-Nahda movement and secular political parties. These developments have been largely linked to Tunisia's 'exceptionalism'-the country's historic outstanding features of political stability, social homogeneity, religious moderation, women's rights, and a strong tradition of public association. These factors have been cited as the reasons for Tunisia's relative success in an otherwise troubled North African region, and were invoked again following the revolution in an effort to explain recent developments.
As time goes on, however, the question of Tunisia's exceptionalism is increasingly debated. Tunisia was not the only North African country which experienced political changes in 2011. Morocco, which did not witness a revolution, initiated a process of political reform, conducted in a top down manner. Some of its results can be compared to Tunisian developments: constitutional reforms intended to strengthen political parties, elections which led to an Islamist victory, and expectations of impending social reforms. Some aspects of Libya's revolution and ideological positions associated with the revolution in Egypt also warrant attention. A comparative look at these developments offers new insights on recent events in the region.
This panel offers a new look at recent changes the Maghreb, questioning the notion of Tunisian 'exceptionalism', and situating these changes in the context of regional reform. The panel's comparative emphasis offers a more encompassing framework for contextualizing these events, which may assist researchers studying other countries and societies across the Middle East.
Papers in this panel provide a historical background to elections in Morocco and Tunisia, analyze political party trends, and highlight the discourse on women's rights throughout North Africa. The papers, tied together, present an alternative trajectory to analyzing Tunisian events, combining historical and social science methodologies. This approach expands the analytical frameworks that have underpinned studies of these events until now. Using an array of sources, including personal interviews, publications of various movements, media sources and secondary literature, this panel enriches our understanding of recent events in North Africa, providing an alternative reading of Tunisia's post-revolutionary developments.
In the fall of 2011, Tunisia and Morocco experienced elections that were seen as important milestones on the path to political reform in each country. The Tunisian vote for a Constituent Assembly was an immediate outcome of the country's revolution in early 2011 against the authoritarian regime of Zayn al-Abidin Ben Ali. These were the first open, free elections in Tunisia's history, and were recognized at home and abroad as a historic development. The assembly was entrusted with framing a new constitution for Tunisia and essentially rebuilding the country's political system in the revolution's aftermath. Morocco's parliamentary election was less "historic" but no less important in being part of the country's political reform process and constitutional reform, initiated in a top-down manner by the Moroccan monarchy in 2011. This process, aimed at strengthening the Moroccan political party system was a response to protests (inspired in part by the Tunisian revolution) against the existing political system in Morocco.
The elections in both countries were preceded by an important preparation period in which parties organized their ranks and finalized the political platforms to be presented to voters, leading up to the campaign period and finally to the voting day itself. This paper offers an in-depth overview of the election events in Tunisia and Morocco, and an analysis of the vote in the context of political reform in North Africa. It argues that as dramatic as the Tunisian and Moroccan elections were, more attention should be given to political and social factors that have underscored developments in each country. In Tunisia's case, these include the country's historic outstanding features of political stability, social homogeneity, religious moderation, and a strong tradition of public association. In Morocco, the monarchy's role in politics and the traditional weak stature of political parties have over the years affected the outcome of electoral contests. Many of these features played an important role in the 2011 elections, and warrant greater attention.
Sources for this study include publications of various political parties and social movements, media sources and secondary literature. The result is a more nuanced analysis of these elections. This paper presents a more comprehensive framework for contextualizing these events, which may assist researchers studying electoral processes carried out in the aftermath of political upheavals in other Middle Eastern and North African countries.
Though the coming to power of the Islamist An-Nahda party in the aftermath of the revolution in Tunisia and the PJD in elections in Morocco follow quite a different trajectory, women’s rights issues have been at the forefront of political discourse and national identity throughout the Maghreb. Hence, it is useful to examine the issues on which Islamist positions intersect across countries. By the same token, we explore the network of secular women’s rights groups across the region. Secular women’s rights groups have collaborated across borders for years whereas Islamists in those three countries have remained more isolated within their borders. Though generally discussions on women’s rights often focus on the Personal Status Code, this paper offers a broader discussion as to how to approach gender rights issues within this new political reality. This includes gay rights and rights of single mothers. As the Tunisian revolution was aptly named ‘karama’ or dignity revolution, the question imposes itself if Islamists will consider according ‘dignity’ to minority populations.
Apart from reiterating its support for the existing PSC, An-Nahda and the PJD have not formulated a coherent policy on women’s rights issues. In Morocco certainly the extra-parliamentary, yet largest Islamist movement, Al Adl wa Ihsane, contributes to public discourse on gender issues. Because Tunisia’s An-Nahda has operated underground - if at all - and its leaders were scattered across Europe or languished in jail, there could been no internal debate concerning their policies and stance on specific issues. This decade-long lack communication within the movement manifests itself today in the articulation of divergent positions. In Morocco, Adlistes still today operate outside the political system and divergent forces within the movement shape its gender discourse. In Algeria, women’s rights groups face a different set of challenges owing to the absence of genuine recent political reform.
The paper will look at emerging trends within three central Maghreb countries that try to bridge the gap between traditional Islamist and secular positions and develop a third way that at once is religiously and culturally authentic, yet takes into account global moves towards gender equality.
The paper is primarily based on personal interviews with leading Islamist and secular women’s rights activists and members of human rights organizations in three Maghreb countries.
The victory of the An-Nahda party in elections to Tunisia’s Constituent Assembly in October 2011 confirmed not only the domination by the Islamist party of the Tunisian political landscape in the aftermath of the revolution of January that year but also presaged a wave of Islamist victories in elections in states across the North African littoral in the months that followed. This paper aims to place An-Nahda’s political advances in a regional context, examining the extent to which its experience is exceptional when compared to those of other states. Particular attention will be paid to comparison with the case of Morocco where the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) similarly won a clear plurality of the vote in national elections a matter of weeks after the victory of An-Nahda in Tunisia and, like An-Nahda, assumed senior government ministries as the dominant party in a multiparty coalition government. The paper will look not only at developments since 2011 but will also compare the experiences of An-Nahda with the PJD and other regional Islamist parties in a more long term perspective over recent decades. It will address the issue of the extent to which An-Nahda has influenced or been influenced by the experiences of other Islamist parties over recent years which will help answer the question of whether the party is a trendsetter or merely part of a broader regional movement and trend. It will argue that whilst An-Nahda’s experience is clearly unique in some respects it is not at all isolated from other movements in the region and has both learned from and also influenced the experiences and behaviour of other Islamist movements.
The paper will draw on a range of sources including interviews with senior figures in An-Nahda and other Islamist movements in North Africa both before and since the Tunisian revolution, publications by the movements, media sources and existing secondary literature.
Simply put, Islamist women have taken center stage in Tunisian politics. Of the 49 women who won seats in last year’s constituent assembly elections, a remarkable 42 of them belong to the center-right Islamist party Hizb An-Nahdha. How will these women govern? How did they become involved with the party? Where do they stand on women’s rights, and why are so many young, highly educated women joining the Islamists?
Sadly, few researchers and journalists have bothered to ask. In a polarized ideological narrative pitting secular feminist activists against regressive, bearded Islamists, Islamist women are rarely seen as actors. This paper analyzes the history and implications of Islamist women’s involvement in Tunisian politics through an ethnographic lens. Interviews conducted with fifty-one An-Nahdha women activists—rural and urban, married and unmarried, students and working professionals—form the bulk of this paper.
Special emphasis is placed on ethnographic work conducted with young women in university contexts, who— despite nearly four decades of activism in the Tunisian Islamist movement— have been written off as irrelevant anomalies by the vast majority of observers. This paper sheds important light on their participation and recruitment strategies, arguing that the ongoing presence of educated and vocal young Islamist women has posed a central challenge to ‘secularist’ notions of state-imposed modernity in Tunisia.
After tracing the nature of women’s involvement in An-Nahdha, I turn my focus towards Tunisian Islamism and women’s rights developments in a comparative context. Why haven’t Tunisia’s egalitarian “lessons” (such as quotas for women on party lists) diffused to Libya and Egypt? How have state-imposed secularism and the top-down instrumentalization of women’s rights shaped Islamist women’s participation across the three countries? This section of my paper pulls from first-hand field interviews conducted with rank and file women and Islamist party leaders in Libya and Egypt. I focus mainly on three centrist Islamist groups: Tunisia’s An-Nahdha Party, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. Interviews with Salafi women in Tunisia and Egypt will be discussed for comparative purposes as well.
By engaging Islamist women as actors, this paper challenges the assertion that Islamist women somehow lack political agency. It argues that Tunisia, while seemingly an irrelevant outlier, is actually a critical case study for developments concerning Islamist mobilization and women’s political participation throughout the MENA region.
