Lessons from a Small Place: The Dignity Revolutions in Tunisia, North Africa, and the Globe

This chapter proposes a longue durée approach to the Tunisian Dignity Revolutions. It employs the plural because evidence suggests that complex short-and long-term social movements converged to produce uprisings, resulting in radical transformation. Three interrelated clusters of problems are examined: first, institutions and traditions of collective action or protest; second, Islam, women, and education; and finally, food security, the agrarian sector and interior, and the environment. The chapter investigates the democratic movements in relationship to traditions of militant action directed against different kinds of states, stretching back not only to the collapse of France’s North African Empire, 1956-1962, but also to the colonial and precolonial periods. A national coalition known as the “Quartet, " composed of al-Nahda and other party leaders and representatives of the Union Generale Tunisienne du Travail; the Tunisian Union of Industry, Commerce, and Handicrafts; the Bar Association; and the Human Rights League, convened to hammer out a “consensual road map.”.