On the 11th anniversary of the September 11, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt and U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya were attacked amidst protests over a trailer for a purported film entitled Innocence of Muslims.
Posts Tagged ‘Tunisia’
June 19th, 2012
Tunisian modernities
posted by Wei ZhuOver at the University of Notre Dame’s Contending Modernities blog, Michael Driessen takes lessons from the secular-Islamist negotiation happening in Tunisia.
June 15th, 2012
“Twin tolerations” today: An interview with Alfred Stepan
posted by Joseph Blankholm
Alfred Stepan is Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion. He has written extensively on democratic transitions, military regimes, and the relationship between religion and democracy in countries throughout the world. His theory of the “twin tolerations,” which argues that healthy democracies require religious leaders to grant authority to elected officials, and that state authorities must not only guarantee freedom of private religious worship but allow democratic participation in civil and political society, has influenced political theorists, heads of state, and grassroots activists.
May 14th, 2012
Tunisian Jews and the Arab Spring
posted by Candice ScharfIn a recent article, Lin Noueihed and Terek Amara discuss the racism and fear of harassment Tunisian Jews have experienced since the overthrow of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
May 11th, 2012
The season of revolution
posted by John D. BoyThe online journal Interface: A Forum for and about Social Movements dedicates much of its most recent issue to the “Arab Spring.”
April 30th, 2012
Nahda’s return to history
posted by Nadia Marzouki
The Tunisian uprisings of December 2010 are often depicted in negative terms, as lacking leadership, ideology, and political organization. Nahda (the Tunisian Islamist movement that, after decades of exile and repression, won 40 percent of the seats in the elections of October 2011) members are now accused of working to turn Tunisia into a “sharia state,” in which religious freedom, women’s rights, and freedom of expression would cease to exist. While the fears of individuals and groups who disagree with Islamists have to be taken seriously, discussion of current changes needs to be based on a real engagement, not on caricature.
April 12th, 2012
On the secularist-Islamist divide
posted by David SloaneAt Al Jazeera English, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd gives an abridged history of the past half-century of Tunisian politics, and relays the Enahddan notion that the revolution in Tunisia is neither unambiguously Islamist nor secularist.
April 11th, 2012
The year of the Islamist
posted by David SloaneDavid Rohde, in Reuters’ Analysis and Opinion blog, designates 2012 as the year of the Islamist and discusses the likelihood that Islamists will remain in power in Tunisia and Egypt.
December 17th, 2011
Tunisia’s election: counter-revolution or democratic transition?
posted by Alfred StepanToday marks the first anniversary of the self-immolation of a young street seller in Tunisia that sparked the Arab Spring. How is Tunisia doing one year on?
According to Jean Daniel, the French commentator and founder of Novel Observateur, in his “Islamism’s New Clothes” article in the December 22, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books, the answer is: very badly. In his view, the recent elections in Tunisia amount to a “counter-revolution.” It would appear from what he says that the elections could only count as a revolution if they had followed the script of a French model of 1905 laïcité –the most religiously “unfriendly” form of secularism of any West European democracy. Such a model, in a more extreme form, was imposed by the state in the authoritarian secularism under Habib Bourguiba and Ben Ali, who ruled Tunisia without free elections from Independence in 1956 until the Arab Spring.
Having witnessed, and written about, over fifteen efforts at democratic transitions and having visited Tunisia three times since the start of the Arab Spring, I would argue the opposite: A much more appropriate description of the political situation in Tunisia is to call it the Arab Spring’s first completed democratic transition.
April 21st, 2011
Contrasting progress on democracy in Tunisia and Egypt
posted by Alfred Stepan
What are the chances of successful democratic transitions in Tunisia and Egypt? I have just returned from both countries where many democratic activists shared notes with me about their situation, comparing it with the more than twenty successful and failed democratic transition attempts that I have observed throughout the world and written about.
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