In addition to delivering justice to victims of state crimes, Transitional Justice processes seek to reestablish state legitimacy after a traumatic breach of confidence. However, by emphasizing reconciliation, the political project of “Transition” is often counter-revolutionary in nature, shutting down social movements before they can overturn structural oppressions. When Tunisian President Ben Ali was deposed in the 2011 Dignity Revolution, many of his family members, top bureaucrats, and business associates followed him into exile rather than face down allegations of corruption. Today, in the context of transitional justice, many of these figures are now seeking to launder their public image and return to positions of power and influence. This paper considers the ethical refusal of forgiveness by examining the independent Tunisian youth movement “Manich Musamah.” Meaning “I do not forgive” in Tunisian Arabic, Manich Musamah declares itself against a culture of impunity in which old regime figures can be rehabilitated without paying the price for their crimes. Using street protests and digital media, they ensure that the names of crony capitalists who profited from dictatorship under Presidents Bourguiba and Ben Ali remain associated with their crimes in the public eye. The movement coalesced in August 2015 in response to the Project Law on Economic and Financial Reconciliation, legislation proposed by current President Beji Caid Essebsi. Touted as a way to jumpstart a national economy mired in crisis, the Project Law proposed that crimes of corruption be adjudicated by a closed commission overseen by the executive branch. Stripping the Truth and Dignity Commission of its jurisdiction over crimes of corruption, the law would enable crony capitalists to be rehabilitated without disclosing their crimes to the public. Manich Musamah’s eponymous slogan has its origins in a Tunisian playground rhyme: “forgiveness is in the courthouse.” This captures the headstrong and ludic sensibility of the movement and its media tactics, which approaches protest as a form of earnest, subversive play. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Tunis in 2015 and 2016, this paper explores how the movement’s creative use of digital tools incites street level participation and facilitates its viral spread throughout the national territory. Without endorsing rightly debunked theories of Tunisia’s “Facebook Revolution,” I argue that Manich Musamah creatively expands the repertoire of digital tactics for which the 2011 Revolution was so justly celebrated.

Transitional justice in Tunisia and the mediated publicness: towards a memorial consensus? This paper addresses a major gap in the post-Arab spring literature by examining the re-reading of the history in Tunisia through the conceptualization and establishment of transitional justice, as it is constructed by media. Transitional justice raises important questions about how a nation recognizes the wrongdoings inflicted on its people. It is both an exceptional mechanism mobilizing a number of legal actions and a collective and political attempt to reframe a social functioning considered unjust, degrading and affecting the whole collectivity. Transitional justice is also a projection and a mode of representation of the future. Unlike its Algerian neighbor, Tunisia has chosen to make auditions 'public'. It is this “mediated publicness’ that interests this paper. We argue that by exposing victims and debates about transitional justice, media shapes knowledge about transitional justice; namely the retention of certain historical information, the dissemination of others, or the distinction between the types of victims. Additionally, the media effort is not strictly focused on the legacy of human rights violations, the past, but rather on the future of the identity of the post-Ben Ali Tunisia. A strictly functional approach to transitional justice confines it to the sphere of law and runs the risk of missing the profound identity, memory and political stakes that underlie it. Do the international standards used by Tunisian transitional justice make it possible to embrace the aspiration to recognition that animates people who have suffered from the wrongdoings of the repressive regime? Is speaking to an audience, which is transmitted by the media, comparable to pecuniary compensation and what value does it have? Is publicizing the loss of the integrity of a person or a group restoring their dignity (a term incidentally taken from the popular uprisings of 2011)? And, finally, what does law lose in its dramatization, if it loses somethings and does not gain others? This paper presents an in-depth analysis of media participation in the construction of the meaning given to transitional justice in Tunisia. Our analysis is based on a corpus of private Tunisian television productions that have covered the activities of the Truth and Dignity Commission through debates and talk shows and productions of private radio stations. We hope to show that the notions of truth and human value are cleaved and are based on differentiated conceptions of history and the public sphere in question.

Building on the growing body of literature on diplomatic practices the paper engages with the international recognition of the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Libya in the context of the uprisings in the Arab world in 2011. It traces the response of the International Community and focuses in particular on the diverging efforts by regional (MENA and Gulf) states as well as by leading European and Western countries. Through process-tracing and in-depth interviews it is established how and why different governments sought to provide legitimacy to different opposition groups at varying points in time, which factors drove their respective actions and how exactly they demonstrated their support both on a discursive as well as behavioural level. Building on these novel empirical insights, the paper argues that diplomatic recognition must be understood as a powerful, yet insufficiently considered tool of intervention and requires both more scholarly attention and critical assessment.