Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia

This book offers a novel and interdisciplinary exploration of revolution as situated protest in Tunisia. Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh present extensive local evidence to demonstrate that popular resistance has been a mainstay of modern Tunisia before, during, and after colonialism. Protest makes peoplehood, and peoplehood makes protest: neither is self-contained. The book explores the rich history and diversity of insurrectionary politics in Tunisia from the onset of protests in the 1960s up to the 2011 Arab Spring revolution and beyond, exploring bottom-up activism (hirak) and revolution (thawrah). The six protestscapes presented in the volume (unions, student activists, the phosphate uprising, the 2010-11 revolution, Kamour, and football ultras) offer a novel way of examining partial ’moving snapshots’ that are crucial to understanding revolution. They counter the prevailing narrative of revolution as leaderless, a spontaneous surprise with no historical pedigree or inherited learning, and depict instead an active citizenry whose collective memories are stamped by trials of anti-colonial and anti-dictatorial rebellion.

Larbi Sadiki, Senior Fellow, Middle East Council on Global Affairs, Doha, Layla Saleh, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Research, Demos-Tunisia Democratic Sustainability Forum

Larbi Sadiki is Senior Fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs (Doha) and incoming Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, based at Chiba University, Tokyo. He is the author of numerous academic articles and books, including Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy (OUP, 2009), and the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics: Interdisciplinary Inscriptions (2020). He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Protest, and has taught at Australian National University and at the Universities of Exeter, Westminster, and Qatar.

Layla Saleh is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Research at Demos-Tunisia (Democratic Sustainability Forum) and has taught Political Science at Qatar University and Marquette University, Wisconsin. Her publications include the book US Hard Power in the Arab World: Resistance, the Syrian Uprising and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2017), and she is Associate Editor of the journal Protest.

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh are co-editors of COVID-19 and Risk Society Across the MENA Region (Bloomsbury, 2022).