Hind Ahmed Zaki, University of Connecticut
It was a rainy day in Tunis in January 2014. Iit had been pouring for hours as I made my way to the office of Bouchra Bel Haj Hamida, a civil rights lawyer, and high-profile Tunisian feminist figure. A founding member of Tunisia’s two leading women’s rights organization: AFTD (The Tunisian Association of Democratic Women), and AFTURD (The Tunisian Women’s Association for Research and Development), Boshra had undergone a serious political metamorphosis in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011, joining Tunisia’s secular majority party Nidaa Tounes and later winning a seat the in Tunisia’s 2014 legislative elections. Over the course of a lively three-hour interview, Boshra suggested that politics and feminism in Tunisia are not only intertwined but inseparable because of the historical legacies of state feminism in Tunisia.
Feminist scholarly literature on Tunisia has demonstrated various contradictions inherent in top-down state-sponsored feminist projects, such as their effects on women’s rights movements, and on ordinary women alike (Marzouki 1993; Brand 1998). The centrality of the 1956 personal status code (PSC) in the legal and constitutional history of post-colonial Tunisia points to the close links between women’s rights and the legitimacy of the political regime, a fact that made it much easier for feminists to exploit the historical legacy of state feminism when they sought more rights following the 2011 Jasmine Revolution. Tunisia’s historical project of state feminism was, in Bouchra’s opinion, a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provided feminists with a state-backed nationalist framework that enabled them to make use of the symbolic and legal resources generated by Tunisia’s post-colonial state project. On the other, veteran feminists like Bouchra were deeply aware that state-sponsored feminism over the long durée became implicated in producing local notions and practices of state sovereignty.
While a law-centered approach to gender justice enabled feminists to achieve significant formal gains for women, it also resulted in them playing a central, albeit unintended, role in reconsolidating state authority in a repressive police state under Ben Ali, where police and security agents enjoyed high levels of impunity in crimes against citizens, including torture and sexual violence. Juxtaposing the dilemma of state feminism and authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Bouchra stated that women-friendly laws are ineffective under political repression, and that unless Tunisian feminists organized themselves politically to defend both women rights and democracy, their gains would be always under threat. Feminists could no longer depend on top-down state feminism within the framework of an autocratic state.[1]
A few years later, Bouchra’s assessment would be vindicated by the success of the largest two feminist mobilization efforts in Tunisia, the political coalition that resulted in the constitutional electoral parity clause in 2014, and the Feminist Coalition to End Violence Against Women (CEVAW), whose efforts produced Law 58/2017, against gender-based violence. Those campaigns highlighted the limitations of state feminism in Tunisia, as feminist attachments and identification with state-sponsored legal feminist projects and the centrality of state laws to feminist claims contributed to the strengthening of the state’s sovereign power, despite popular demands for security reforms and accountability. While feminist legal campaigns for rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia achieved substantial legal gains for women, they also, unintentionally, reconfigured state sovereignty by perpetuating the Tunisian state’s prerogative powers over its citizens through appealing to the logic of a protective, punitive, and interventionist state.
The successful campaigns to promote women’s political participation and to combat gender-based violence put them in direct collision with boarder civil society attempts to reform the police state and curb its punitive and carceral power. Feminists’ demands for justice for women against gender violence and the application of the 2017 law combatting all forms of violence against women in practice required more state, and police intervention. Moreover, the law did not protect against individual security and police officers who had been involved in human rights violations, including systematic state-sanctioned sexual violence against women political prisoners, and everyday police harassments against Tunisian citizens (Ahmed Zaki 2018). Ultimately, attempts to hold the state accountable led to the political targeting and voluntary exile of key feminist figures, including Bouchra and Sanna’s Ben Achour, a prominent constitutional legal scholar and activist, following the 2021 constitutional coup by Kais Said. Feminist activists, like many other members of the political opposition to Said, are currently facing charges of “terrorism” and “conspiring against the state.” (Boukhayatia 2024).
In the following sections of this paper, I trace this central dilemma of feminist activism in Tunisia, by looking at the inherent contradictions of Tunisian state feminism and what such contradictions can teach us about the relationship between democratic backsliding and gender justice, the political role played by Tunisian feminists starting from 2011 and up till the constitutional coup of July 2021, and the future of feminist mobilization under Kais Said’s authoritarian rule.
Gendering the study of the Democratic Backsliding in the MENA region
Employing a gender lens help us understand democratic backsliding in the MENA region differently by theoretically rethinking the nature of state power and sovereignty in gendered terms. This requires careful process tracing through a historical analysis of the often-overlooked ways in which contestations around gender contribute to the reconfiguration of state domestic sovereignty and authority, in ways that in turn, leads to democratic backsliding or the persistence of authoritarianism. This, in turn, requires investigating how contestations around gender relations reinforcethe state’s domestic power – in ways that were taken advantage of by authoritarian regimes to consolidate their rule. Tunisia represents a good case to explore these dynamics. It is the only state that emerged as a functioning democracy following the Arab spring and then lost that democracy to Kais Said’s constitutional coup of 2021. That makes it an ideal case to empirically investigate democratic backsliding. It also a state where state-sponsored feminism and feminist social movements continued to play a major political role, making it a good case for observing the complexities of feminist engagement in democratic transitions.
The question of the relationship between democratic backsliding and gender equality is far from straightforward. Important scholarly work by feminist political scientists who work on the MENA region have demonstrated how gender relations were politicized, whether as part of broader nationalist projects of state modernization (Charrad 2000; Brand 1998); or as part of autocratic regimes’ bid to seek domestic legitimacy, weaken their Islamic opponents, and increase their international legitimacy (Tripp 2019; Bush 2011). Yet democracy and gender equality do not necessary always go hand in hand. Dictators wishing to appear democratic often adopt cosmetic gender-equality measures, with little intention of actually expanding women’s rights. But such top-down policies can be utilized by active women’s rights movements to push states to adopt more rights (Tripp 2019). Internal political contestation between incumbent authoritarian regimes and their opponents during democratic transitions can sometimes result in the opening of political spaces for organized action on women’s rights. This happened in the case of Tunisia during the political transition between 2011 and 2017, where an active women’s rights movements successfully managed to recast pre-transition legacies of state feminism in two feminist campaigns that culminated in a constitutional gender parity clause in the 2014 constitution, and a comprehensive legal code to combat all forms of violence against women in 2017 (Charrad and Zarrugh 2013).
Feminists As Key Actors During Tunisia’s Long Transition
During this uncertain and highly polarized political transition, feminist activists in Tunisia were undergoing amassive transformation of their own. Two primary factors motivated the decision of a substantive number of Tunisia’s women’s rights activists to enter the political arena. Many feared that Tunisia’s women’s rights were under attack, followingthe rise of the Islamist party Ennahda. At the same time, others were motivated by a conviction that women’s rights were an inherently political issue. The decision to politicize the movement and to become an integral part of Tunisia’s decade of democracy (2011-2021) meant that feminists played a major role not just in pushing for more legal rights for Tunisian women, but in also preserving existing rights. Tunisia’s 1956 personal status code (PSC), for instance, became the subject of a heated political battle between the Islamist and secular camps throughout 2012 and 2013 (Marks 2013). Throughout Tunisia’s democratic decade (2011-2021), feminists served a unique role as political mediators. Women’s rights became a point of political contention because the dictatorship had built its legitimacy and consolidated its power in a large part on the historical legacies of state feminism, creating complex connections between the legacy of the old autocratic regime and the demands of the new democratic public.
The feminists involved in the campaign for political parity in 2012/2013 as part of the CEVAW became central figures in Tunisia’s democratic transition, and one of the main protagonists of its major dilemma: how to enact reform without further aggrandizing state overreach in the private lives of its citizens, and how to curb the police state. Those challenges game to a head with the Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC), whose work was halted after documenting the testimonies of thousands of survivors of state sanctioned violence and holding public hearings in 2016-2017. The transitional justice process became a stage for controversies over the police state, at a time when many feminist coalitions including CEVAW were lobbying for more state interventions to prevent everyday gender-based violence at home, work, and in the streets. By bringing in the state as a protector, feminists extended the already draconian reach of the state, and increased women’s reliance on its coercive apparatus. This was especially the case when it comes to Law 58 (Violence Against Women Act), which was passed in 2017 against debates about what the revolution and democracy meant, and to the role of law and legal reform in building state legitimacy and sovereignty over its citizens.
The tension between calling both for a strong interventionist state and for curbing arbitrary and paternalistic forms of power that threatened the rights and dignity of all citizens meant that feminists found themselves at the crossroad of several key debates on the limits of state power and authority, police immunity, and the logics of the carceral states. For example, consider cases that involved sexual violence committed by police officers, like the case of Meriam, a young woman raped by three police officers while in a car ride with her fiancée in Tunis in 2012. Meriam filed a complaint against the officers only to be charged with “intentional indecent behavior” based on the testimony of the rapists (Dhaouadi 2012). The feminist movement rallied for justice for Meriam, succeeding in securing a court victory against the police officers in this one case in 2014 (Merminod and Baster 2014). Such a victory is rare though, since Tunisia’s police and security apparatus continue to enjoy political and legal impunity in violations against citizens.
The success of legal feminism in Tunisia highlights the importance of taking into consideration the nature of the state and its gendered politics. While the feminist movement succeeded in introducing important reforms for women, these reforms enhanced and depended on a state structure that relied on punitive justice, and authoritarian overreach into the private lives of its citizens. The historical construction of law and its functions as tied to the state-building project in Tunisia since the early years of the newly independent state in the late 1950s and early 1960s, meant that law could also be weaponized as a tool of political repression. The post-independence state became an example of a modernizing dictatorship that sought to bring the nation into the modernized world, economically and socially, but severely curtailed any political opposition (Camau 1987). The state’s efforts to strengthen all political and legal institutions and its ability to penetrate the society depended, among other things, on the establishment of a strong national judiciary system and police force (Charrad 2001; Camau 1987). Later this police state apparatus was strengthened and developed under Ben Ali and was never truly reformed after the January 14 revolution.[2]
Research that highlights women’s personal histories of the state and their experiences with its carceral, punitive, and legitimate prerogative of violence belied the list of legal rights that women enjoyed in Tunisia. But the juxtaposition of women’s everyday experiences with state-sanctioned violence, and their proclaimed right-based status in Tunisia’s official legal and political history, did not just expose the historical contradictions of Tunisia’s historical claim to state feminism. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrated the key role that gender as a social and political construct plays in the everyday consolidation of the state’s domestic sovereignty and authority. Throughout the history of postcolonial Tunisia, women’s claims to citizenship served as an important function that produces sovereign claims and relations. Serving as the ideal subject of political attachment, gendered citizenship forms a constitutive part of the Tunisian state’s everyday claim to power and authority.[3] The centrality of such nationalist gendered claims, often based on the state’s prerogative of protection of both its women citizens and the public order, constitute what Wilson (2021) refers as social life of state sovereignty.[4] I argue that such social/relational forms of sovereignty, many of which are gendered, became highly relevant in times of political crisis and uncertainty, such as during the Arab uprisings and their aftermath. As mediators of such gendered forms of sovereignty, Tunisian feminists became key political actors during Tunisia’s long decade of democratic transition. Consequently, they also became targets of political repression after the constitutional coup of 2021.
The case of Tunisia demonstrates the salience of such statist and gendered understandings of domestic sovereignty, and how they complicate our understanding of feminist movements and their role in post-transition politics. Despite the success of the two above-mentioned feminist campaigns that resulted in a constitutional electoral parity clause in 2014 and a comprehensive law against gender-based violence law in 2017, feminist identification with state-sponsored legal feminist projects and the centrality of law to feminist’s claims contributed to the strengthening of the state’s sovereign power, despite popular demands for security reforms and accountability; mostly by perpetuating the Tunisian state’s prerogative powers over its citizens. This type of feminist analysis of state domestic sovereignty could help shed light on democratic backsliding in new inductive ways. It can also demonstrate how gender relations and women’s rights could serve a shifting locus for consolidating state sovereignty in the aftermath of political transitions.
References
Ahmed Zaki. 2018. “Resisting and Redefining State Violence: The Gendered Politics of Transitional Justice” Journal of Middle East and Africa 9(4): 359-377.
Brand. Laurie. 1998. Women, The State, And Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bush, Sarah. 2011. “International Politics and the Spread of Quotas for Women in Legislatures.” International Organization 65(1): 103-137.
Camu, Michel et al. 1987. Tunisie_ au_ _present_:_ _U_n_e_ _m_o_d_e_r_n_i_t_e_’ _a_u_ _d_e_s_s_o_u_s_ _d_e_ _t_o_u_t_ _s_o_u_p_c_o_n_?_ _Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
Charrad, Mounira, and Zarrugh, Amina. 2013. “The Arab Spring and Women’s Rights in Tunisia.” E-International Relations, September 4. http://www.e-ir.info/2013/09/04/the-arab-spring-and-womens-rights-in-tunisia/. (Accessed March 11, 2026).
Charrad, Mounira. 2001. States and Women Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dhaouadi, Meriem. 2012. “Tunisia: A Reality Check on Women’s Rights in an Abusive State” Open Democracy, 8 October 2012 at https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/tunisia-reality-check-on-womens-rights-in-abusive-state/ ( Accessed on March 26, 2026).
Marks. Monica. 2013. “Women Rights Before and After the Revolution” In The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects, Nouri Gana (Eds), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Marzouki, Ilhem.1993. Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie au XXeme siecle: Feminisme Et Politique, Tunis: Cérès Production.
Merminod, Isabelle, and Baster, Tim. 2014. “Tunisia’s Landmark Victory in the Struggle Against Violence Against Women” Open Democracy, December 19, 2014 at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/tunisias-landmark-victory-in-struggle-against-violence-/ (Accessed on March 26, 2026).
Tripp. Aili. 2019. Seeking Legitimacy: Why Arab Autocrats Adopt Women’s Rights. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Welsh. Alex. 2019. “Restarting Police Reform in Tunisia: The Importance of Doing Everyday Security”, Middle East Institute, March 26, 2019 at: https://mei.edu/publication/restarting-police-reform-tunisia-importance-talking-about-everyday-security/ (Accessed on February 12, 2026).
[1] Personal Interview with Boshra Bel Haj Hamida, January 2014.
[2] For an excellent account of attempts for police reform in Tunisia from 2011 to 2011, see: Alex Welsh, Restarting Police Reform in Tunisia: The Importance of Doing Everyday Security, Middle East Institute, March 26, 2019 at: https://mei.edu/publication/restarting-police-reform-tunisia-importance-talking-about-everyday-security/
[3] In thinking of how the state’s domestic authority and power is gendered in Tunisia, I am particularly indebted to Tunisian feminist scholars, many of whom had long interrogated gendered citizenship and its relation to state-building, governance, and the organization of political authority in Tunisa. In particular, I am indebted to the late Ilhem Marzouki and her book, Le Mouvement des Femmes en Tunisie au xxe siècle: Féminisme et Politique, Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1994. The book is a tour de force that investigates the varied and complex ways in which gender and sexuality in Tunisia forms a bedrock of statehood, political legitimacy, and sovereignty in Tunisia, and the effects that had on the feminist movement over the long durée. I am also indebted to Mounira Charrad’s States and Women Rights (2000) a now classic text of feminist political sociology.
[4] In writing about the Western Sahara’s liberation movement and the making of sovereignty, Alice Wilson (2021) defines the social life of sovereignty as “social relations that play out between people‚ governing authorities and governed constituencies‚ as such sovereignty consists of relationships between people playing out in relation to resources, whether territorial or mobile”. Wilson’s definition point to both the materiality and relational aspects of sovereignty. I apply this concept here to Tunisia as a gendered form of sovereignty that manifests in feminist politics.